ICE CUBE: “Lethal Injection” (4th & Broadway)

IT’S A long, hazardous journey, the journey a downtrodden culture must take to achieve a sense of integrity, respect and pride. Blacks came to America as slaves and have been treated as such – in one way or another – from that day on. A good slave is a happy slave, and a happy slave is a slave who looks up to its master and down on him or her self.

We Irish are very familiar with the slave mentality because many of us still have it. I know, I certainly grew up with it. Both of my parents worked in crap jobs in England, and both of them taught me that everything English was great, superior. They never stated it in a matter-of-fact way, but they made clear to me over the years that the best thing I could do in life was to become Anglicised, or, let’s say, West Briticised.

I believed them, as any child will believe their parents. I saw my accent as being all wrong, that the English I spoke was that of a thick Paddy, and needed to be cleaned up. It took a long time to free myself from the slave mentality, but one day I said to myself, Fuck that! I don’t need that!

That’s why I relate to the rap of Public Enemy, KRS One, Ice T and Ice Cube. Because I see the journey they are on as the journey I am still on.

Ice Cube is hard. He’s a warrior, on the front-line. There’s no room for soft emotions in his work. It’s all very in-the-face, coming at you from the mouth of an Uzi. It’s ghetto talk, survival talk. But Ice Cube is doing more than surviving. He’s laying plans for the next move. He’s already moving up the ladder and he wants his music to bring his community on up with him.

He looks back and he gets hell angry. And then he teams up with his forerunner, George Clinton, on ‘Bop Gun (One Nation)’, and together they tell their people that it’s “One nation under a groove” and that if they all stick together, then their numbers mean strength. Because you’ve got to be strong in the ghetto, steel strong. You’ve got to know the enemy, get the enemy in your sights, plan the next move so that you can stop them moving all over you.

That’s why this album begins with ‘The Shot’ for Mr White. That’s why, on ‘Cave Bitch’, Ice Cube exhorts his brothers to break from their centuries-old fascination with and slave belief that to be seen with a white woman is to be seen to be civilised and up with it. Ice Cube makes it brutally clear that he’s not down with that, although he does add: “Don’t think that I hate you/’Cause I won’t date you/Bitch, I gotta stay true/You can be a fan/But don’t expand/And try to get my dick in your hand.”

Ice Cube has a hell of a lot of targets for his anger. The false promises of religion come under the hammer with ‘When I Get To Heaven’. Martin Luther King’s dream of White and Black children holding hands together is discussed on ‘Enemy’. Questions are posed: “Is that where it’s at now? Are you going to walk with the enemy before you walk with yourselves? How sick can you be?”

Lethal Injection takes out its hip oil and rolls all over you with moody, casual funk beats. But Ice Cube’s words waste no time as they grip at the disease and yank it out. It’s his agenda, of course. And it’s hard, hard, no time for love.

No time for love when they come in the morning . . .

• Gerry McGovern