Black Korea

by

Ice Cube

Album: Death Certificate      Released: 1991

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Music writer and historian Alexander Baron writes of this song:
This is an unpleasant, angry rap song by a man who should know better; it has an equally unpleasant genesis. In March 1991, a motorist was stopped by Los Angeles Police in circumstances that would lead to outrage and mass murder. Rodney King was a convicted felon, powerfully built and high on drugs, and he did resist arrest after a fashion, but the gratuitous beating that was meted out to an essentially defenseless man by a group of uniformed thugs shocked the world. He was struck no less than 56 times in 81 seconds. If the incident hadn't been videotaped by a passerby, the police would undoubtedly have concocted a cock and ball story to explain away his injuries, but in view of the tape and public outrage the authorities had no alternative but to file charges against his assailants. To make matters worse, King was black, and the police were not.

The acquittal of all 4 officers in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence of guilt provoked not just outrage but days of rioting which left dozens dead, hundreds injured and thousands arrested. Outrage aside, the rioters, who were predominantly black, were motivated less by concern for the brutalization of a fellow human being than by greed and other even baser instincts. Any white person who ventured onto the streets risked injury or even death, but it wasn't just whites who were targeted; Los Angeles had a large Korean population, most of them apparently working in small retail stores mirroring the "Asian corner shop" which has become a cliché in the UK. For some reason, Korean stores were singled out for pillage, and in the first instance the police appear to have offered their owners little in the way of protection.

Taking his cue from the LA riots, Ice Cube rails against these people who can't speak English properly. He is resentful of their apparently suspicious attitude towards him and his fellow blacks - if he'd been in LA during the riots he might have understood why.

He ends the song with the charming threat of burning down their stores if they try to turn the "ghetto" into "Black Korea." If this song had been pressed in the UK it would have been banned by the BBC and undoubtedly fallen foul of the admittedly Draconian Race Relations Act. In the UK, whites have been thrown into jail for using far less vitriolic language against blacks, and black organizations have welcomed such prosecutions with open arms.

Having said all that, Ice Cube's rant is a monument to his ignorance of economics, far more so than of race. Malcolm X expressed similar sentiments in his autobiography when he claimed Jewish businessmen who owned the major businesses in the ghetto took that money out of the ghetto every night and kept its residents poor. It is clear that many blacks in Los Angeles saw the same parasitic traits in Korean shopkeepers, but this begs the question, if the Koreans take all the money out of the ghetto, how does it get into the ghetto in the first place? The answer is of course that money does not go from black to white, black to Korean, etc., it goes round and round. There may have been numerous Korean shopkeepers in LA at that time, but how many Korean rap singers were there? And how many were as wealthy as Ice Cube, who even in 1990 by his own account regarded a $75,000 contract as an insult?

The black contribution to music has been less enormous than phenomenal; it is no exaggeration to say that without black songwriters, composers and performers, contemporary music as we know it would hardly exist. It is equally true to say that on this performance it would have been not one whit poorer if Ice Cube had graduated from the Phoenix Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture instead of opting for a career in music.

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Comments:

Once again Ice-Cube has recorded a racist song.
- Hugh, Liverpool, United Kingdom

I have to diagree with Mr. Baron on many points. The riots following the Rodney King assailant trial were inevitable well before the cops' eventual acquittal. Police brutality was/is a fact of life in Los Angeles, and much of Ice Cube's body of work deals with that issue. "Black Korea" gives voice to the daily frustration that some blacks experienced in the 1990s when they spend what little money they have in poor neighborhoods in shops where the owners treat you like a criminal as soon as you walk in the door. When even law abiding black citizens are wary of the wrath of white cops and Asian disdain daily - it becomes even harder to avoid looking at life through a racial prism. As for the $75K contract... had Ice Cube accepted it, he would have had to forfeit any rights to the songs he performed or wrote with NWA. Jerry Heller, who wrote the contract, figured some teenagers from the hood would never turn down that kind of money. Of course, Ice Cube saw that situation through a racial prism as well that he discussed in "No Vaseline" on the same album.
- Matthew, Atlanta, GA

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