L.A. Story -- Ice Cube Tells It Like It Is Whether You Like It Or Not

His face must hurt.

If you had only the ever-present scowl across Ice Cube's young, round visage to judge by, you'd surmise he's in a world of psychic, spiritual and even physical pain.

His posture is tense, tight and balled-up. In his videos and live onstage - he will be at the Paramount Theatre with The Geto Boys, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien (Cube's cousin) and Scarface next Thursday night - he maintains an offensive yet deflective stance and strut. Curled tight, guarded, expecting the hit but ready to strike. One who's been hurt, and who has hurt back.

His staccato steamroller rhymes only reinforce those conclusions. The 22-year-old rapper from South-Central Los Angeles has spray-painted a blocks-long mural of guns, dope, violence and despair across the faded pink cinderblock walls that section his hometown turf. These aren't the cold, damp canyons of Gotham where the characters of Cube's musical scenarios play out their too-often hollow existence; this is Compton and Inglewood and South Gate, where the game board is a flat, endless stretch lined with little pastel boxes, tiny boarded-up fortresses under a callous blue sky and the tired arches of soot-covered palm trees. The Promised Land offered, then reneged on.

If Steven Speilberg nailed the veneer of white, middle-class San Fernando Valley in "E.T." and "Poltergeist," certainly director John Singleton nailed South-Central L.A. in "Boyz N the Hood." It was more than just setting up a camera on a particular corner; it was the squeal and grind, the parched back-alley graveyards, the omnipresent roar of the L.A.P.D.'s black-and-white pterodactyls.

But Singleton also convincingly conveyed that Ice Cube - as Doughboy - was more than a two-dimensional character in a grim cartoon world of cops and gangbangers, that even these black-and-white characters had shading, areas of gray, sides unseen. For a lot of new listeners and watchers - mostly white, middle-class and uninitiated - it made Cube accessible, revealing a flawed integrity. Not just a glorified rebel, but a kid without options and suffering from the realization.

Ice Cube - O'Shea Jackson - was born in 1970 to Hosea Jackson, a UCLA groundskeeper, and "Moms" Doris Jackson, a hospital clerk at the university. He was raised with a fairly firm hand near Inglewood, the western and better-maintained section of South-Central L.A., where comfortable homes are surrounded by well-watered dichondra. Sure, windows are barred - but compared to Compton, this is the California dream come true.

Cube went to Hawthorne Christian School for three years but left because he didn't care for the uniform. In junior high he was bused to an all-white school in the Valley. He flirted around gangs as a youngster, but never joined. He didn't think there was any money in it. He saw money in music, his music. He wrote his first rhyme at 14, later joining with Ed "Easy-E" Wright around 1987 to form the Compton-based N.W.A. as a writer and singer. His career was sidetracked for a year when his mother sent him to the Phoenix Institute of Technology for a course in drafting - she wanted to be sure he had some solid education. But when he returned to L.A. he picked up right where he left off. By 1989, N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" was a hit.

Cube's songs made a lot of money, especially for the band's manager, Jerry Heller. When Cube decided he wasn't getting his fair share, he left N.W.A. , suing Heller on the way out. The move created a rift between the former friends that is growing to this day. Cube went solo, enlisting the aid of rap kingpin Chuck D of Public Enemy and D's production crew, The Bomb Squad, in support of the young rapper's own Lench Mob.

The result was the 1990 "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted." Without the support of radio, MTV or other mainstream marketing assists, the recording went platinum - through word-of-mouth and on the strength of its brutal, incendiary, street-straight tracks. The language was raw, the message often bleak, but on target. Dense, complex rhythms and Cube's word play formed a more-than-frank depiction of the stucco suburban jungle, the drive-by shootings, the welfare trap, cheap drugs and the even cheaper value put on life. Death was shrugged off on the tar-veined asphalt of the South Side; rage rose like the heat vapors off those same streets. Cube captured that.

The follow-up record - "Kill at Will," a collection of originals and remixes - did well enough, but the recently released "Death Certificate" has stirred more than massive sales. In the song "Black Korea," Asian-American shop owners are targeted with boycott or worse if blacks aren't shown the proper respect. In "No Vasoline," he attacks former manager Heller along with N.W.A., taking what many consider an anti-Semitic stance. Cube's recent conversion to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam only fueled the view that Cube is a separatist. The man himself shrugs it off. He says he's being misinterpreted. He says the songs aren't him, just stories.

"Death Certificate" is a two-sided coin: death on one side, life on the other. Cube says the recording is about more than the life cycle of one person, but the cycle of his race. He sees the death side as an image of where his people are today - in a state of emergency - and the life side as an image of where he feels they need to go.

The argument over what Ice Cube does or doesn't mean has been going on since his first hit was released. It continues today. The only thing that seems certain is that this powerful young rap star means to stir things up with his music. How much he'll stir up at the Paramount next Thursday night remains to be seen.