Look Back In Anger

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

PERFORMER: ICE CUBE

ALBUM: THE PREDATOR

LABEL: PRIORITY

THE BOTTOM LINE: A first-rate rap album explains -- and embodies -- the anger and confusion of the L.A. riots.

In America pop culture has always glorified criminals, real and fictional. Michael Corleone. Bonnie and Clyde. John Gotti. The current "gangsta" genre in rap is no exception, reveling in crimes and misdemeanors, drive-bys and lootings. And for one of its leading practitioners, Ice Cube, 23, crime certainly pays. His new album, The Predator, entered Billboard's pop as well as its R.-and-B. chart at No. 1 -- the first time a performer has pulled off that double feat since Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life in 1976.

The album is pure testosterone, straight up, no chaser. For Ice Cube, protecting and asserting his manhood is an important political act. His ancestors came over in the bottom of the boat, the generation before him rode in the back of the bus, and he sure isn't going to go out handcuffed in the rear of a police car. The first song, When Will They Shoot?, is a blast of fear and loathing to a thumping metallic beat. "Will they do me like Malcolm?" Ice Cube asks. "Uncle Sam is Hitler without an oven . . . The KKK has got three-piece suits."

Sound a little paranoid? Cube acknowledges that ("My mind's playing tricks on me too") while simultaneously justifying his high anxiety. A native of South Central Los Angeles, he wears that city's riots like a crown of thorns, invoking them again and again as proof of his worst fears about America. On Now I Gotta Wet 'Cha, he goes after the white cops in the Rodney King episode: "Those devils can beat up a motorist/ And get nothing but a slap on the wrist/ Gorillas, gorillas/ Report to the mist."

Some of rap is about acting, role playing. That's probably one reason why so many rappers are going into movies. Cube made an impressive debut as a sympathetic, beer-drinking thug in the 1991 Boyz N the Hood, and in Trespass, coming out this week, he is a gun-toting gangster. Although he may play a criminal in movies and in his music, it's a front. Not that he doesn't have an ugly, heavy-metal misogynistic side that he really ought to jettison. But he does show indications of an underlying humanism. On his first solo album in 1990, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, he brought in female rapper Yo-Yo to counterbalance his sexist views. On one track on The Predator, he says, "I do want the white community to understand." On another he fantasizes about a perfect day during which "nobody I know got killed in South Central L.A."

Unlike other anti-heroes America has mythologized, from Billy the Kid to Bugsy Siegel, Cube's gangsta persona has a moral compass. But apparently he hasn't found magnetic north yet: The Predator ends with the shooting of a corrupt cop as he reaches for a doughnut.