Dead Homiez

Five years after everyone else, I've discovered the magic of YouTube, and the fact that you can find old videos there. So I hunted down the video for one of my favorite songs ever, "Dead Homiez."



There's some context you have to appreciate when watching this video. When it came out, Ice Cube had released "Amerikkka's Most Wanted," and was scaring white parents and delighting white suburban kids as the "Nigga You Love to Hate." The mainstream media was painting him as Public Enemy #1 for his hateful, angry lyrics (including the infamous line about kicking a pregnant lady "in the tummy." So what did Cube do? He released "Kill at Will," an EP that included "Dead Homiez." "Dead Homiez" is the flipside of the gangsta rap that Cube had helped pioneer as a founding member of NWA. While his cohorts in NWA were still stuck in ultraviolence mode, Cube described the aftermath, and asked some hard questions, like why a funeral is the only time Black folks get to ride in a limo. The song also contains one of my favorite song lyrics ever:

"Another homie got murdered on a shakedown
His mother is at the funeral, having a nervous breakdown
Two shots hit him in the face when they blasted
A framed picture
And a closed casket."

This was also around the time that Cube did his turn as Doughboy in John Singleton's brilliant "Boyz In the Hood." And just when we white liberals were proclaiming Ice Cube the poet laureate of the hood, he went and released "Death Certificate," which contrasts his intelligent, biting rhymes with some of the most offensive, ignorant shit ever cut to wax, including attacks on blacks, whites, women, Koreans, and homosexuals. I love "Death Cerificate," even though (or perhaps because) it offends the hell out of me. A perfect example is the closer, "No Vaseline," a funky, homophobic tirade against his former NWA band members, implying that they are all homosexuals (and including gems like "you let a Jew break up our crew"). The whole idea of him dissing his bandmates by implying they like anal sex is wrong, and yet he does it in such a clever and funky way that I buy it.

So Ice Cube. There you go. The Supersuckers did a cover of this that is pretty awesome.