But at the same time, “You Can't Fade Me” offers insight into Cube's greatest gift: storytelling. It's a macabre look into the mind of a young man with fucked-up priorities, but Cube lays it out with the condensed detail of Slick Rick or Ice-T. Cube's earlier ability to evoke the Black suburban experience that served as the cosmic backdrop for gangsta fantasy is still somewhat underrated, and “Once Upon a Time In the Projects” displays the youthful, creative attitude that would produce Friday five years later. As the story opens, Cube finds himself in the family living room of a young woman he hopes to bond with—naturally, the suburban chaos reminds him of Good moments and Robin Harris' standup routine “Bebe's Children.” But like an amateur version of a Richard Pryor track, the scene quickly turns weird when, at the end of the first verse, Cube realizes he's sitting in the front room of a croft. When the cops show up, they mistake the word “drugs” on his T-shirt and throw him and the girl into a police cruiser. Of course, there's a moral: “Now the story you heard has a little object/Don't fuck a bitch out of the works.”
On the surface, Cube's politics continue AmeriKKKa it appears to be a mere reactivation of the Panthers' push for Black liberation in the shadow of Reaganism, but signs of a deeper conservatism are everywhere. Not only in his firmly stated belief that women were nothing more than sexual objects to be used and discarded, but in “Who's the Mack?” when he immediately assumes that black people asking for spare change are up to something bad, or in “Projects,” when he says that the woman's gang-connected younger brother “needs to pull his pants up.”
It was not a Bill Cosby-style integrationist conservatism to which Cube aspired, but, by 1990 Rolling rock the interview revealed, the worldview espoused by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam—whom the reporter observed Cube watching with interest in one episode The Phil Donahue Show. In the previous decade, Farrakhan had pulled the Nation of Islam from near-irrelevance to television and hip-hop lyrics, selling out Madison Square Garden with an ideology rooted in economic and social separatism. The “projects,” for Cube and Farrakhan, were not the symbolic origin of future Black success as they soon would be for Nas and Jay-Z, but an embarrassment to the Black community that, in the main, depended on Black the community itself to fix.
Cube will explore his unique approach to Farrakhanism in depth on the double album Death certificate, but it was still a year away. In 1990, Cube and AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted served as a bombastic introduction to what would later be called “the decade of the tabloids,” an amalgamation of Reagan's law and order and television's turn to raucous entertainment emanating from the supermarket checkout line—otherwise known as the first wave of “reality” entertainment. Especially for hip-hop, it was AmeriKKKa so as Nation of millions and Straight Outta Compton that set the stage for hip-hop's brief and dramatic evolution into an expansive truth-telling spectacle.
