AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted

After leaving N.W.A, Cube wanted Dr. Dre to make his first record, but Ruthless vetoed it. In Manhattan he and Sir Jinx worked with the Bomb Squad at Greene Street. Cube said the Bomb Squad's first lesson was to send him off with two milk crates of records and tell him to fill them with what he wanted to do, which took ten days. Back at Greene Street, Eric Sadler asked for every sample and where it fell in the record to be written down. Shocklee said he wanted to produce the whole album so it would not be a collection of singles, and picked funk records so it would not feel as if it had been made in New York. Cube said he wanted skits and songs flowing into each other like the old mixtapes, and that Chuck D taught him how to sequence a record.

Cube said Jinx produced tracks including Once Upon a Time in the Projects, The Bomb, What They Hittin' Foe? and It's a Man's World, and put the skits together with him. Cube named the title song, The Nigga Ya Love to Hate, Once Upon a Time in the Projects, Endangered Species (Tales from the Darkside) and A Gangsta's Fairytale as his favorites. The title song was the first official single, and Who's the Mack? had a video directed by Alex Winter. The album debuted at 19 on the Billboard 200, was certified gold two weeks after release and went platinum in 1990.

David Mills of the Washington Post wrote that Cube had proved he was N.W.A's crucial element, while Rolling Stone's Alan Light called it a disappointment. Robert Christgau gave it a B minus but found it, musically, as original as A Tribe Called Quest. Pitchfork's Eric Harvey called it groundbreaking and wrote that it, as much as Nation of Millions and Straight Outta Compton, laid the groundwork for hip-hop as a truth-telling media spectacle.