How he documents rage into rhyme

As one of the chief architects of gangsta rap, the most violent and defiantly obscene chapter in American pop, Ice Cube adopted a scowl in ‘90s album cover photos as menacing as his music. But he can’t help smiling now when tracing his earliest influences.

“Dr. Seuss,” says the man born O’Shea Jackson, sitting in his office at Cube Vision in Santa Monica on a cheerful weekday morning.

“My love of words and wordplay goes all the way back to things like ‘Cat in the Hat’ and Muhammad Ali’s ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.’ I loved synonyms, antonyms, all that. Rhyming was a way to create something from nothing, and it was free.”

When the first rap hit, the Sugarhill Gang’s playful “Rapper’s Delight,” came along in the late ‘70s, filled with more words than some New Yorker short stories, it thrilled him. Cube was 10 then, but he still delights in quoting passages from the record.

Three years later, a second record had an even greater impact.

“The Message,” by New York-based Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, examined inner-city life and tensions so vividly (“Rats in the front room, roaches in the back/Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat”) it was widely hailed by pop critics as the single of the year.

The song’s haunting chorus:

It’s like a jungle sometimes,

It makes me wonder

How I keep from going under

“That record made me nervous because it was talking about all the dangerous things in the neighborhood that you wanted to block out,” says Cube, who grew up along the South L.A./Inglewood border, and now lives in Encino with Kimberly, his wife of 13 years, and their four children.

“But it also inspired me because rap wasn’t just writing poetry or lyrics. It was something new. You could only fit so many words into a song, but raps can go anywhere. A song is like mixing up something by hand. A rap is like using a blender.”

The work he spun together with the seminal gangsta rap group N.W.A, and later on his own, melded clear-eyed observation, macho bravado, self-deprecating humor and deeply rooted rage in confrontational tales that, at their best, set listeners down in a complex world of young black men as vivid as a novel -- or reality.

“F--- tha Police,” the centerpiece of N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” album, was so explosive when it hit the streets in the late ‘80s that an FBI agent warned it could encourage violence against law enforcement officers.

Just cuz I’m from the C-P-T [Compton], punk police are afraid of me

A young nigga on a warpath

And when I finish, it’s gonna be a bloodbath

Of cops dyin’ in L.A.

While Cube sees that and other incendiary works as a reflection of a disenfranchised minority, some observers, including a number of critics who had earlier supported rap, denounced them as irresponsible and hateful. In the days after the L.A. riots that followed the acquittal in the Rodney King beating trial in 1992, however, his music had an eerie ring of prophecy, and the media sought him out for insight into what had happened.

“People outside the ghetto thought we were making things up just for the sake of controversy, but we were just trying to reflect the neighborhoods we came from,” he says.

On the streets where he lived, police were the enemy.

“A police car always put you on the alert because you heard so many horror stories about the police just wanting anybody who matched a description,” Cube says. “You could get caught up just because you looked like the suspect and you could be put in jail for the rest of your life.”

The songs were disturbing, but so was life, he says.

“We were just writing about what we knew. To me, ‘F--- tha Police’ was a line that needed to be said -- something that everybody always said privately, but no one ever put into a song. I never thought of us as shock rappers. I thought of us as reality rappers.”

Part social textbook, part comic book, part gangsta scenario, Cube’s raps stand today as an absorbing picture of a community and a way of life that barely registered on the mainstream’s radar.

The best of his raps are almost mini-dramas, as Cube, whose other love is movies, chooses his words and images with a dramatist’s care. It was as if he so fell in love with such screen characters as Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” that he created his own character: Ice Cube, the youthful, renegade voice of the street.

Other rappers, including KRS-One and Public Enemy’s Chuck D, had previously explored his themes. But Ice Cube injected them with an urgency that served as a blueprint for future generations of rappers, including hard-core chroniclers Tupac Shakur, Eminem and 50 Cent.

He thrilled young listeners who identified with his message and threatened adults who feared it. Clearly aware of his role, Cube even taunted the outside world in the title of one of his raps, “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.”

At the same time, fans and discerning listeners found much compassion and liberating commentary in his work.

“If you think of hard-core rap as the pizza,” Cube once said, quite accurately, of N.W.A’s influence, “we’d be the dough.”

The roots of respect

Given the lighthearted, almost sweet portrayal of working-class African American life in his “Friday” and “Barbershop” films, it must be hard for many to reconcile that image with the man whose work created such hostility in (and toward) rap. But Cube feels both streams of his creative output came from the same source: growing up in a neighborhood he described as basically “nice.”

Cube, who graduated from Taft High School in Woodland Hills (where he was bused daily) and attended architecture classes at the Phoenix Institute of Technology in Arizona for a year, came from a loving, working-class home and stayed clear of gangbanging. His mom and dad worked in maintenance and gardening respectively at UCLA.

Even during the stormy N.W.A days, Cube was among the most articulate, courteous and thoughtful figures in pop music. When a fight broke out in the audience after N.W.A played two of its most provocative numbers, “Gangsta, Gangsta” and “F--- tha Police,” at a 1989 concert, he regained control by cutting the music and shouting at the crowd, “You didn’t come here to see a fight, you came to see a concert.” He was 19 years old.

As he lounges in an office lined with posters advertising his various films, Cube remains as grounded as he was all those years ago. The kid in him resurfaces as he enthusiastically recalls the first time he heard “Rapper’s Delight.”

Most pop fans found it little more than a novelty, but Cube was so enthralled he played it hundreds of times, marveling at the words.

Have you ever went over to a friend’s house to eat and the food just ain’t no good?

I mean the macaroni’s soggy, the peas are mushed, and the chicken tastes like wood.

“As a little kid, I loved that,” he says, flashing a disarming smile. “It was real. I’d go to myself, ‘Yeah, I know what he’s saying,’ because I had been over to my friend’s house and the food was like that.”

By the ninth grade, he was writing his own raps, eager to try them out on anyone he could get to listen. There were no rules when he started rapping. No guidebooks on rap, no classes.

He thought his early raps were as dazzling as anything he heard on a record. So he was shocked when a neighborhood DJ named Sir Jinx put some beats to his fledgling rhymes.

“I saw I really wasn’t rapping at all,” he says. “I was just saying words. I didn’t know how to make the rhymes hit the beat. Jinx started telling me what I needed to do and what I needed to listen to in a record to make the words and the beats flow.”

Swapping underground rap tapes with his buddies like other kids traded baseball cards, Ice Cube learned the basics about merging his words with musical beats.

Since a record contract and radio airplay seemed beyond his reach, he didn’t feel any need to remain in the normally polite boundaries of commercial pop. During his early teens, he made street life, rebellion and risque humor his currency.

He recited his raps to anyone, anywhere -- neighborhood porches, the schoolyard, local parks, shopping malls. Often, people just rolled their eyes and told him to beat it. But Cube was serious, and he eventually hooked up with other kids who were obsessed with the new sound. Among them, Andre Young, who as Dr. Dre would be in N.W.A and later become rap’s most honored producer.

It was a heady time and Cube was looking everywhere for images and words that would help him catch the listener’s ear. Dre suggested he do parodies of well-known rap songs, so Cube turned Run-DMC’s “My Adidas” into “My Penis.”

He saw the crowd liked the edginess of the parodies, something that they couldn’t find on records, so he kept leaning toward images that were outside conventional boundaries.

Over the years, he hasn’t always had the most dazzling rhymes or even delivered them with the authority and speed of some of his peers, but he recognized the importance of building the raps around themes drawn from everyday life. He also kept the emphasis on building drama, one of the factors that separates rap from traditional pop songs.

“Rap is the art of language, so we definitely have to heighten everything -- the drama, the comedy,” he says. “It’s all alter-ego stuff. For the most part, I rap about what I’ve seen, heard or done.”

From the stark imagery of his raps, it’s easy to see how his vision was shaped in part by the gangster lifestyle showcased in such films as “Scarface” and “The Godfather.” Yet he says the humor of Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx records was equally influential.

“As kids, we were attracted to things like those albums, which you would listen to when your parents were out of the house,” Cube says. “Not only was it funny, but it was also forbidden. If you really look at N.W.A, we kind of played with the same dynamics.

“People outside of the community may not have seen the humor in some of the stuff we did, but we found a lot of N.W.A real funny because humor is one way to help pull you through some bad times. I think humor is what the ghetto uses to medicate itself.”

Though it was the “bloodbath” line in “F--- tha Police” that everyone remembers, the track opened with a playful courtroom scene in which the members of N.W.A were sworn in as witnesses.

While he is still fond of his old neighborhood, he felt there was a constant tension in the streets he called home -- along Van Ness Avenue from 108th Street to Imperial Highway.

“You always had to look over your shoulder and watch the cars that drove down the street,” he says. “As a kid, I would always run home from my friends’ houses when it was dark because I didn’t want a car coming by and shooting me.”

There was no comfort in the sight of a police car, either -- just more fear.

Once he heard records like “The Message” and the more sweeping social commentary that came later in albums by New York-based Public Enemy, he had a use for the fear and anger. He’d put it into his art, along with some larger ambitions.

The elements of rap

The first challenge in writing raps, Cube believes, is finding the right cadence, knowing when to stretch a line and when to race through it so the words fit the flow of the beat.

“If I just say, ‘the cat in the hat, the man with the bat,’ with no rhythm, it’ll just sound like words crammed together,” he says. “The best thing you can do is actually write to a beat because when you hear the music over and over, you get a rhythm in your head [that helps you] speak the lines and shows you how to put together the right phrasing.

“What you’ll be doing in your head is, ‘I need a one-syllable word here, a two-syllable word there,’ and then you try to find fresh words so that you’re not just saying the same ones over and over. You’ll reach for the craziest rhyme you can imagine.”

You’ll find all sorts of unlikely, left-field rhymes in Cube’s work, from the merely playful (green and si-reen, no hoes and No-Doz) to the inspired (chronic and Panasonic, spook and David Duke).

Though he starts working on the raps only when he’s ready to record an album, Cube is always gathering ideas. He figures he has filled 1,000 binders with phrases and sample raps.

“For me, the trick is to find the perfect title or concept for a record,” Cube says. “Once I have the concept, the lyrics will come. So, the starting point in writing a rap is deciding exactly what it is you want to say.

“I guess you could throw a beat on and start writing and let it take you wherever it goes, and I know some people work like that. They like to be spontaneous in the studio. But I like to plan it out more.”

Rather than trying to construct the beats himself, Cube generally relies on a network of associates to come up with them. When he’s preparing for the album, he goes into his home studio, “the dungeon,” and puts on a CD with sample beats and plays it over and over.

“Sometimes things come instantly, sometimes they take days, sometimes they never get finished,” he says.

“It’s important to know when to stick with something and when to just move on” -- keeping the audience in mind. “You don’t want to be the artist who is off in his own world with no one listening to him.”

Cube tends to edit a lot. For every four lines he puts into a rap, he’ll end up throwing out one. Another key step is knowing when to end a rap. It’s easy to fall in love with your words and go on endlessly. There’s a limit, however, to a listener’s attention span, he says.

“You can always feel it when someone goes over 16 bars, 20 bars, 24 bars,” he says. “It just feels too long for a record and you start losing impact. To me, 16 bars is usually perfect for a rap.”

A cry for justice

Even after 15 years, Cube’s raps in “Straight Outta Compton” are unsettling. One can understand how an FBI official could feel threatened by “F--- tha Police.”

Cube, however, says he thinks his fans understood the message of the rap.

“We weren’t encouraging violence, we were fantasizing violence and kids know the difference,” he says. “They also know the difference between right and wrong. Most kids learn that at a very early age.

“What I was really trying to do in doing this song was scream out for the young black teenager. I was saying just because I may look a certain way to you, don’t treat me like a criminal and don’t lump us all together.”

Though it attracted less attention at the time, “Dopeman,” another track on “Straight Outta Compton,” seems even more disturbing today. In the rap, women are called “bitches” and “hoes,” and they’ll do everything from tolerating being beaten up by the dope dealer to performing sex to get crack.

“That was kind of a collage of everything that was going on in the neighborhood around 1981 and 1982 when cocaine crack started saturating the neighborhood and everyone and their mama was either on crack or sold crack. And, again, there is some humor in ‘Dopeman’ that we all understood. When we use the word ‘bitches’ we’re only talking about certain women, not all.”

Cube admits he was a lot angrier when he was younger, but doesn’t regret anything he wrote, including the “hoes” and “bitches” lines that were called misogynistic and the use of the N-word that many African Americans find offensive in any context.

“There’s no words I’d take out of my vocabulary,” he says. “It’s all part of expressing yourself. Profanity is punctuation to me.... The word ‘nigga’ in some ways describes our plight here in America, what we went through and what we continue to go through as Americans.

“Plus, the more you use a word, the more it takes out the sting of what the word really means to the rest of the world. It defuses it. It still might hurt if someone else uses it against us, but it takes some of the sting out of it if we over-saturate the word throughout the community.”

For all his impact with N.W.A, (whose lineup included the late Eazy-E., MC Ren and Yella), Cube was only one voice.

After a dispute over finances, Cube went solo in the early ‘90s and, working with a coalition of rappers and producers he called Da Lench Mob, he sharpened his art and expanded his thematic canvas.

The raps on his first two solo albums, “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” and “Death Certificate,” were so brutal in their imagery and so politically incorrect that even liberal rap enthusiasts sometimes shuddered.

In the opening track on “Most Wanted,” Cube extended the commentary and anger of the N.W.A album.

On “Tales From the Dark Side” he wrote:

Since I’m young, they consider me the enemy

They kill 10 of me to get the job correct

To serve, protect, and break a nigga’s neck

Like some of the N.W.A material, “Black Korea,” a song from 1991’s “Death Certificate” album, was widely attacked in the media as being racist, but Cube sees it as another defense of young African Americans.

Speaking about some Korean merchants in ghetto communities, he raps:

Thinkin’ every brother in the world’s out to take

So they watch every damn move that I make

They hope I don’t pull out a gat and try to rob

They funky little store, but bitch, I got a job

“To me, it’s for all the people who give in to stereotypes,” Cube says. “For all the bad people they think are in the so-called ghetto, it’s a small percentage. Most of the people are good people. Most of the kids do what they are supposed to do. It’s just a few who go across the line.”

Countless rappers who were influenced by Cube and N.W.A saw the commercial potential in anger and outrage, and their music focused on those elements so much that gangsta since the early ‘90s has often been one-dimensional and ugly.

What made Cube’s music so valuable was the humor and the occasional softer side.

One of his most influential raps in the ‘90s was a surprisingly tender number from his 1992 album, “The Predator.”

“It Was a Good Day” was a reflection of sorts about 24 hours in the ‘hood where everything goes right -- he even scores a prized triple-double in a basketball pickup game. But the real blessing is conveyed in these lines:

Nobody I know got killed in South-Central L.A.

Today was a good day

It was a daring step because the tenderness could have been seen as weakness in the hard-core rap world. But teens responded so strongly that the tune became a national Top 20 hit, sending a signal to rappers that you could share tender emotions without losing street credibility -- as Tupac did years later with “Dear Mama.”

About the song, Cube says, “That was about me being totally real to my life. I don’t want to just portray all the bad things without even speaking about the good times and the good days that are in the neighborhood. The neighborhood ain’t all bad, all despair, all sad. The good times, the good days, outweigh the bad where I’m from.”

Cube addresses those good days more consistently in his films, which connect more strongly with audiences these days than do his recent albums.

The latter, including last year’s “Gangsta Nation” with Westside Connection, are still chart forces, yet his sales aren’t nearly as impressive as his impact on rap. One reason is the music doesn’t seem as compelling, a sign he may be putting more of his energy into movies.

Still, there is hope in the rap world that Cube will set aside the films long enough to finally make that long-awaited reunion album with Dr. Dre.

Cube is generous when praising other rappers, from his early hero Chuck D through such contemporary rivals as Jay-Z and Eminem.

Cube also thinks his own role in pop culture is better understood now than in his early years.

“When we were making records like ‘Death Certificate,’ a lot of people looked at it as straight venom,” he says. “They didn’t really look at it as one man trying to deal with what he has learned about himself and the past, and also trying to look into the future.

“In some ways, I think that’s a sort of lost art in rap -- using the music to spread knowledge and information. To me, it has gotten back to the bragging mode, where you spend your time talking about who you are and what you got. But everything comes in stages, and I’d like to think rappers will get back to telling people what’s really going on.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Five essential albums

Ice Cube continues to do valuable work, but the heart of his vision is in his first five CDs. N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” is on Ruthless/Priority Records, the solo albums are on Priority.

1.”Straight Outta Compton” 1988. The radical sound and renegade attitude shook up hip-hop sensibilities the way the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks ... “ rattled punk a decade earlier.

2.”AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” 1990. Stepping out on his own, Cube not only lived up to the promise of his work in N.W.A, but extended it. He took listeners on a tour of the projects that was so filled with anger and rage that many outsiders recoiled.

3.”Kill at Will” 1990. Cube was so on fire creatively that he released this EP while “Most Wanted” was still on the charts. The highlight: “Dead Homiez,” a reflection on gang violence that is one of rap’s most tender works.

4.”Death Certificate” 1991. This contains some of Cube’s most stinging and controversial tracks (tales of gang warfare, sexual degradation and blind macho posturing), but also some of his most thoughtful and funny.

5.”The Predator” 1992. Released just months after the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittals in the Rodney King case, “The Predator” continued, in its best moments, to probe social and racial conditions in the city and the country in a bold and revealing manner.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Five songs for the ages

Written when rap wasn’t accepted by most pop fans (especially anyone over 25) as an art form, these five Ice Cube songs, in order of preference, helped win a begrudging respect for the genre as well as lay down a blueprint for storytelling that influenced everyone from Tupac Shakur to Eminem.

1.”It Was a Good Day” 1992. This fantasy about 24 hours when everything in the ‘hood goes right was so eloquent and affecting that it didn’t lose Cube any street credibility, even though it made the Top 20 on the pop charts.

2.”Straight Outta Compton” 1988. Co-written by MC Ren, this song launched a movement in rap. A lot of the gangsta rap that has followed has been cliched and exploitive, but the best (by Cube and others) explored a raw social nerve.

3.”Black Korea” 1991. There were charges of racism leveled at Cube after this tirade against some Korean merchants in the African American community, but the rap was social commentary and observation at its rawest.

4.”Dead Homiez” 1990. Even before “It Was a Good Day,” Cube was showing a poignant side. Here, he looks at the senselessness of gang violence.

5.”Who Got the Camera?” 1992. This demonstrates Cube’s skills as an entertainer and commentator. He gets beaten up, Rodney King-style, by police and hopes someone with a camera will come to the rescue.

Next in this series: Lucinda Williams.

Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn can be reached at Robert.hilburn@latimes.com