Ice Cube - Death Certificate

Death Certificate is Ice Cube at his most furious and focused, a 1991 album that holds up a mirror to Los Angeles and refuses to look away.

Released a year after AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, his second solo album is split into two halves: the Death Side, a portrait of where things stood, and the Life Side, a vision of where they needed to go. Working with Sir Jinx and the Boogiemen, Cube built dense, funk-heavy beats around storytelling as provocative as anything in rap at the time, and the album remains one of the genre's most debated landmarks.

"Steady Mobbin'" rides a loping groove with laid-back menace, while "Alive on Arrival" and "A Bird in the Hand" offer bleak, vivid snapshots of a broken system, from a crowded emergency room to a dead-end job. "True to the Game" calls out those who abandon their roots once success arrives, and the closing "No Vaseline" remains one of the most infamous diss tracks ever recorded, aimed squarely at his former N.W.A bandmates.

Confrontational and still painfully relevant, Death Certificate is essential listening for anyone tracing the line from West Coast gangsta rap to modern political hip-hop. Few records from the era hit this hard.