8:15 p.m.

• Every Mother’s Day the in-laws take the family out to lunch/dinner at some restaurant. Every year, the mother-in-law gets pissed off with the service and/or food and we will “never” go there again, so each year it’s something different. This year it was some crappy local Italian restaurant, and it doesn’t take much for me to be happy at an eatery but today wasn’t one of those times. Good God was this food shit. Oh well, it wasn’t my money. Oh, and the crack whore sister-in-law and her out-of-control daughter were here, and the niece almost fell asleep at the table. I just thank Christ I was on the other side of the four tables that were arranged to accommodate us.

• Last night Lesson in Machismo and I were talking about some old-school rap. Well, I shouldn’t say old-school, because one person’s “old-school” is another’s “hey I grew up listening to that shit? You want ‘old school,’ listen to *insert name of group that was prominent 10 years prior.*” I remember one night back in the late 1990s while watching Rap City’s “Old School Wednesday,” they played Del the Funky Homosapien’s “Catch a Bad One.” Uh, that song was released back in ’93 and it’s classified “Old School”? This was 1997 (or ’98) – four years is “old”? Oy. Anyway, it was a pleasant trip down memory lane, especially when this was brought up. Oh hell yeah.

And while I’m on this topic. WTF?

Practically every aspect of “Jackin’ For Beats” – the deceptively nihilist “fuck all y’all” attitude built into the narrative, the oceanic ego that emerges out of the hype generated by this unprecedented publicity stunt, the excoriation of modern minstrelsy- announces the work as one of enduring significance. In spite of its brevity and precociousness, “Jackin’ For Beats” can be read as a sophisticated if self-serving critique of the complacency and hyper-conformity that Cube sensed was rapidly infecting the rap genre. Surely, the young, brash Ice Cube did not consider himself to be above the pursuit of infamy or an indulgence in shameless showbiz self-aggrandization. However, ample evidence in the form of much of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Kill At Will, and Death Certificate suggests that Ice Cube once took his role as an unabashed populist provocateur very seriously. On his early records, Cube is proficient at pushing boundaries and buttons for the procurement of moral high ground, street credibility, and publicity. He patterns his interrelated self-marketing and expository poetic strategies after the tried and true tactics of Public Enemy, and he is young enough and loud enough to pull it off. Like P.E., Ice Cube refashions the gun as a symbol of black militancy but more importantly, of black ingenuity. In Cube’s hands, the destructive power of a gun also serves as metaphor for the transformative power of poetic language, something other than a killing device but still a threat to mainstream American values and institutions.

 

After Chuck D told the world on “Bring the Noise” that he never really toted a one-ton Uzi, rappers were positioned to provoke reactionary ire by kickin’ their ballistics, awaiting public censure, and then slyly justifying their trigger-happy rhetoric by pleading poetic license by way of the First Amendment. As befits his personality, the youthful Cube takes culture war brinksmanship one step further. He insists on creating a public image based partly on the most reductive racist depictions of black youth as wildly confrontational underclass criminals. In doing so he assumes the identity of the theoretical construct “Public Enemy #1” and reinvents himself as a younger version of Chuck D’s perpetually persecuted and misquoted rap artist/ race man. It is fitting that Cube finds an ally in the Bomb Squad. After all, the P.E. camp treats metaphorical violence and the threatening noise of break-beat heavy polyrhythmic funk as complementary artistic statements. Ice Cube’s volatile voice sounds right at home over the Shocklee brothers’ anti-tonal timebomb compositions. On “The Bomb,” the concluding track of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Cube proclaims “I make the beats, I make the breaks” as if to say that musical rupture is made more powerful by a confident but principled representative voice. In Cube’s estimation, there is no funk without righteous rage, and there is no creative process without an explicit and deliberate critique of the status quo. If confronting political or social realities directly is too risky, then robbing the music industry is an option. This line of thought runs through “Jackin’ For Beats,” where Cube conflates the Brooklyn stick-up kid and the Watts gangbanger with the very act of armed robbery itself, and births an aggressive, ethically ambiguous, possibly unintentional culture critic.

 

At the time that Cube drops “Jackin’ For Beats” the scene is inundated with socially oblivious hit records that sample significant portions of older, largely apolitical club tracks. It is apparent that Cube considers the state of hip hop music to be an appropriate meter for assessing the state of Black America. On“Jackin’ For Beats” Ice Cube figuratively hijacks the very practice of beat jackin’ which was previously represented in rap by interpolation, sampling, and a communal reuse of instrumentals. In doing so, Cube takes a daring and profitable stand against the frustrating frivolity of the current scene, while turning a powerful yet co-opted concept on its head and reclaiming it for his own ideological purposes. It is not insignificant that the tracks he lifts – D-Nice’s “Call Me D-Nice,” EPMD’s “So Whatcha Sayin’,” Public Enemy’s “Welcome To the Terrordome,” L.L. Cool J’s “Big Ole BUTT,” and X-Clan’s “Heed the Word Of The Brother” – are all spectacular examples of free and unapologetic beatjackin’ in and of themselves. When these tracks are assembled, along with the open breaks that Sir Jinx and Chilly Chill scratch in between the jacked rap beats, the listener is treated to a dynamic showcase of rhythms, many of which were sampled indiscreetly from the James Brown and Parliament catalogues. Cube’s appropriation is different from that of the next rapper because he insists on showing and proving his poetic prowess. He does everything differently over these beats, thus making the beats themselves new and different under his lordship. Peep game:

 

Verse One

Give me that beat fool, it’s a full time jack move

Chilly Chill, yo homie, make the track move

And I’ll jack any Tom, Dick and Hank

That’s the name of the SUCKERS I done ganked

 

The song is essentially a catch-all dis record and the act of jackin’ a beat is intended to be at least partly a hurtful criticism. Yet Cube does not have any real beef with the artists that he jacks, as evidenced by their sequential shout-outs at on the “I Gotta Say What Up!!!” track that closes the Kill At Will EP. This does not mean that Cube is entirely reverential. He tends to engage in complex and multivalent criticism in his rhymes. However, if Cube is inclined to loathe certain characteristics even as they are displayed by his compatriots, the true targets of his dis are the hordes of shallow style biters. These “Tom, Dick, and Hank” rappers might get lucky and jack a proper beat, but they do little to energize the beat with additional creative or rhetorical force.These hacks besmirch the fine art of jackin’ even if they are doing it correctly in a technical sense. I suspect that Cube targets particular songs because he understands that a beat jack, however disrespectful in its intention, ultimately constitutes a kind of homage. He respects the beatjacks of artists like EPMD and considers their loops to be a solid foundation to build upon, and is positively angered that these artists have been shamelessly aped by scores of lesser rappers and producers.

 

I get away from a copper

Drop a dime, I’ll break you off somethin proper

 

Years before DJ Premier identified break-beat compilers as “violators” of a sacred trust, Ice Cube uses his extended crime metaphor to serve as a warning to anyone who might be inclined to legally undermine the artistic viability of the beat jack, which is after all a big part of his paradoxical entertainment industry meal ticket. This is his first and most dramatic use of the word “break” in this song. I do not suspect that the motive behind choosing “Call Me D-Nice” as the first jacked beat is any deeper than the beat’s extreme dopeness, but it should be noted that Boogie Down Productions are alleged to have carried out one of the greatest subversive beat jackin’ feats of all time by stealing “The Bridge Is Over” from Marley Marl.

 

With the L-E-N-C-H-M-O-B

T-Bone and that’s J.D.

And here’s how we’ll greet ya

Lest we delve too deeply into the cultural significance of this track, Ice Cube reminds us that bills need to be paid and homies need to be put on.

Stop fool, come off that beat ya

Feel dumb cause you’re caught in the dark

(Ya lil nuttin-ass mark)

Raise up, cause you can’t have it back

You said – “I ain’t never got gaffled like that”

Off the end of the gat you choke

Short Dog’s in the house – “Whattup loc?”

Nuttin but a come up

Gimme that bass, and don’t try to run up

Cause you’ll get banked somethin sweet

Ice Cube and the Lench Mob, is jackin for beats

 

After the command to release the beat is barked, the tellingly titled “So What’cha Sayin’” is dropped and Ice Cube proceeds to demean the lesser emcees who dare to compete in his arena and extract the vital substance of music – in this instance the bass – for his personal use. If anything, Ice Cube and the brothers of EPMD share an inner-ring suburbanite obsession with shaping and defining urban street culture without actually participating in it, and both artists seem to enjoy writing highly confrontational lyrics aimed at nameless wack emcees. It is interesting that Too Short pops up on this track, because a few years later, on his “In the Trunk” single, he criticizes East Coast emcees that utilize James Brown’s catalogue without financially compensating the man . Somehow I doubt that Brown saw any money off of “Jackin’ For Beats,” and anyway “In The Trunk” sounded infinitely better when the sample-happy, JB-revering DJ Premier remixed it.

 

Verse Two:

Huh, and even if you’re down with my crew

*Yo Chuck man, I don’t understand this man

You got to slow down*

I jack them too

And then we’ll freak it

Kick that bass, and look what we did

Fade the grade, played, and made a few mil

and I keep stealin’

Ice Cube’ll make it funky

 

As “Welcome to the Terrordome” (Chuck D’s narrative of psychodrama, inter-crew dispute and mass media crucifixion) kicks in, Cube makes a target out of Public Enemy while making a targeted public enemy out of his own stage persona. By constructing himself as a man bold enough to step to the crew that first embraced him as a breakout soloist, he does a lot to valorize the interrelated artistic missions and self-aggrandizing marketing schemes of both Public Enemy and himself. Note how he cleverly mimics Chuck’s internal rhyme style in a show of camaraderie and competition. These lines comprise an excellent glimpse into Ice Cube’s capricious and complex personality, as well as his underrated, highly skillful writing style. Once again it is Ice Cube who makes the beats funky, and not the other way around.

 

But right about now – let’s get over the hump

But I don’t party and shake my BUTT

I leave that to the brothers with the funny haircuts

And it’ll drive you nuts

Steal your beat, and give it that gangsta touch

Like jackin’ at night

Say hi to the three fifty-seven I’m packin

And it sounds so sweet

Ice Cube and the Lench Mob, is jackin for beats

 

Verse Three:

Ice Cube, will take a funky beat and reshape it

Locate a dope break, and then I break it

And give it that gangsta lean

Dead in your face as I turn up the bass

I make punk suckers run and duck because

I don’t try to hide cause you know that I love to

Jack a fool for his beat and then I’m Audi

So when I come to your town don’t crowd me

Cause I know, you’re gonna wanna kick it with me

But I know, none of y’all can get with me

 

The music from LL’s vapid but infectious ode to phatty girls is sandwiched between funky breaks dropped into the mix at key intervals. Ice Cube expresses utter disdain for rapping minstrels whose gaudy musical and fashion sense are unacceptable distractions in highly charged times. Cube responds in kind by flashing a shiny gun in the public’s face and daring America to look the other way. While he does not delve into any direct social commentary on this record, elsewhere Cube defends his rabble-rousing as a form of enlightenment, a useful tool to help “open the eyes of each.” The “gangsta touch” and “gangsta lean” refers to more than his confrontational styling and profiling. Ever the theorist, Cube thought of the music itself as being gangster, at least while he was the conductor. The incorporation of additional high-pitched funk breaks that squeal when dropped seems to anticipate Dr. Dre’s later reshaping of EPMD’s muddled funk loops into crystal clear, Impala-friendly, interpolated signature West Coast sounds on The Chronic. This is not to say that “Jackin’ For Beats” constitutes the first G-Funk record, but the pioneering spirit of that movement can be located amidst all of these increasingly standard James Brown samples. When Cube breaks a funky break, the identity of the previous song matters only so much as it contributes to the subject matter that Cube chooses to rap about, and any superfluous elements just dissipate into the ether.

 

So you think you’re protected

Well you are til you put a funky beat on a record

Then I have to show and prove and use your groove

Cause suckers can’t fade the Cube

And if I jack you and you keep comin

I’ll have you marks a 100 Miles and Running!

 

As X-Clan’s “Heed The Word of the Brother” finally drops, Cube warns us once again that neither copyright law nor any amount of shit talking offer adequate protection from a surgical beat jack. The future is here, and George Clinton will figure prominently, even if mystic Afronaut costumes and bugged cosmologies must give way to a gangster’s paradise of highly orchestrated and slickly produced nihilism. Gender conscious critics might find fault in Cube’s extremely subtle rape analogy in threatening to “use your groove” but this is a standard trope in his dis records (see “No Vaseline” for a far less justifiable example). And this is ultimately a dis record, as the final shot at his former crew demonstrates, even if it is unspecific and nuanced.

 

Conclusion: Ice Cube is either full of himself or acutely aware that his audience is prone to conflate an aggressively advertised aesthetic sensibility with an adversarial ideological stance. Perhaps he is both. He is never reluctant to exploit the image that Public Enemy helps him to construct, yet at the same time he does appear to be genuinely annoyed, if not incensed, by his milieu’s excess and frivolity. Of course, without a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” strain running through black music forms, including rap, both P.E. and Cube might find themselves hard-pressed to establish relevant niches. There is a certain forgivable adolescent duplicity discernible in Cube’s lyricism that echoes through rap to this day. He knows that the game is flawed and can even point directly to the perpetrators but can only suggest his own ascension in the game as a solution. Similarly, he knows that the mass media actively defames blacks for profit but is perfectly willing to play along with such defamation so long as he can benefit by selling records to suburban teens that fear and embrace angry black representations. In his defense, these gestures are by definition subversive, but they are still problematic. In any event, “Jackin’ For Beats” is a bold and highly creative statement that continues to inspire smart curmudgeonry in a music industry that is more often characterized by sycophantic buffoonery.

Some folks have WAY too much time on their hands, and that’s coming from me of all people. You want my kkkommentary on this song? Here it is:

1) I love how the Cube’s vehicle is chasing the bootleggers through the fog, but the atmosphere is clear and the sky is blue when there’s a close up of O’Shea Jackson (OMG REAL NAME/BREAKING KEYFABE~!) driving.

2) My favorite image in this whole video (besides the tunnel beatdown at the 2:00 mark) is at the 2:28 mark when some huge guy to the far right in Cube’s gang is running after the bootleggers and turns his head to the side. It might be hard to see on a computer scree, but when seen on TV it's more obvious.

3) Right after Mr. Beefy’s head turn is one of the funniest pseudo-beat downs I’ve ever seen. Honorable mentions goes to some guy in the right side of the screen at the 2:27 mark and some guy hitting another over the head with a record cover at the 2:35 mark. But my favorite is the same guy from the 2:27 mark looking at the camera while “pummeling” his victim at the 2:32 mark.

What a great song. What a great video.

But I don’t party and shake my BUTT

I leave that to the brothers with the funny haircuts

And it’ll drive you nuts

Steal your beat, and give it that gangsta touch.