AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted

Ice Cube's first solo album after leaving N.W.A put him at the centre of its cover, photographed by Mario Castellanos with art direction by Kevin Hosmann for Priority Records. The record was made far from Los Angeles, at Greene Street Studios in New York with Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad, and the packaging reflects that mix of West Coast attitude and East Coast politics.

The words do as much work as the picture. The title is a play on America's Most Wanted, the true-crime television show hosted by John Walsh that asked viewers to help catch fugitives. Spelling America with three Ks turns the country itself into the Klan, and casts Ice Cube as the fugitive the nation is hunting. The sleeve frames him as a wanted man in a country he accuses of being the real criminal. The back cover kept up the confrontation in its own way: on one track title the words "Dick" and "Bitch" were blacked out, while the inner sleeve printed them in full.

The cover sold the idea of Ice Cube as public enemy number one only a month after Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, and the album went on to become a landmark of political gangsta rap. Its triple-K spelling became a template for protest titles in rap and beyond. The album was released on 16 May 1990.