Word: cubes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
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...
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...
...pick a single object that epitomized the difference between Hesse's work and other images of the Minimalist movement, it would be Accession II, 1969. Quick first glimpse: a gray metal-mesh cube, 30 inches on a side, sitting on the museum floor like the rest of the industrially fabricated boxes -- Donald Judd's, for instance -- that typify Minimal sculpture. But a few seconds later, how differently it reads! Every pair of holes in the mesh has a strand of gray plastic tubing threaded through it, the ends pointing inward. The whole inside of the cube is lined with these...