The surprising box-office success of Barbershop and the Friday franchise has made Ice Cube a hip-hop film star. That achievement speaks not only to hip-hop’s growth in pop culture but also to just how long it’s been since Cube was considered one of hip-hop’s pre-eminent rappers. To many of those 840,000 kids who snapped up 50 Cent’s debut album in its first four days of release, Cube might as well be Jackie Chan.

Priority Records’ recent reissues of Cube’s first four albums (plus the Kill at Will EP) captures the period of his career when he ruled the hip-hop roost — from his sudden departure from N.W.A to his commercial peak in 1993 with Lethal Injection. Ice Cube was N.W.A’s best writer, and their 1988 Straight Outta Compton turned on the strength of his words. He enabled them to deliver vivid, assailing depictions of violence and hopeless gang-ridden life in Compton set against a soundtrack of gunfire minimalism and saucy funk. Straight Outta Compton sold three-million-plus copies and earned the ire of the FBI and the CIA.

Cube left all that behind when, in 1990, he went solo with Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. Thirteen years after its initial release, the album sounds as powerful as ever. N.W.A shocked people with their brutally honest portrayals of America’s forgotten neighborhoods, but it was the cavalier indifference of their dispatches that was truly demoralizing. On Most Wanted, Cube is more than just a reporter, he’s a visceral columnist. He metabolizes all that he sees into biting, self-aware commentaries that confront institutionalized racism and social inequity with sharp metaphor and an angry tongue. He’s electrocuted on the opening skit, " Better Off Dead " ; the mindset of the ghetto, he’s saying, is that you’re already dead. His subsequent rhymes run from tempestuous to playful; his punch lines resonate with acute indignation. On " The Nigga You Love To Hate, " he warns about the greater social injustice of the inner city: " Just think if niggas decide to retaliate. "

The Bomb Squad production team added fuel to Cube’s fire on Most Wanted, the Kill at Will EP (now featured as extra tracks on the remastered Most Wanted), and the 1991 follow-up, Death Certificate. The Bomb Squad were best known for densely layering samples into a digital wall of sound, a technique that shaped Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions and Fear of a Black Planet into classics. On the three Cube reissues, they mirror his style. Their sampled noise is as loud as his verbal bombast, and they too provide smart, sarcastic quips in the form of sound bites. At the end of Most Wanted’s " What They Hittin’ Foe, " a faux Tom Brokaw anchorman’s voice can be heard speaking about the violence erupting in South Central: " Few cared about the violence because it didn’t affect them. "

Death Certificate didn’t shock like its predecessor, but it’s still potent, particularly when Cube aims songs like " A Bird in the Hand " and " I Wanna Kill Sam " at the government. As Jeff Chang would write in the liner notes to Cube’s 1998 War & Peace, Death Certificate " spoke to what it meant to be a young black male in an increasingly pressured space, one strained by de-industrialization, drug economies, state repression, police brutality and immigration. " It wasn’t a pretty picture or particularly progressive — Cube’s frustrations with the dynamic of America’s ghettos caused him to abuse Korean shop owners on " Black Korea " — but it was honest. And prescient. Just months after the release of Death Certificate, the racial pressure cooker of Los Angeles would explode in the Rodney King uprising.

Cube’s subsequent Priority recordings, The Predator and Lethal Injection, wouldn’t resonate with anywhere near the same urgency and defiance. Once the Rodney King-related riots unveiled the dynamics of life in America’s inner cities, his bombast lost its import (and the absence of the Bomb Squad underscored that). At most, he became a symbol of anger, not its messenger — and most of the time he didn’t even pretend to be that. More-club-oriented songs show up on these later albums, like " Bop Gun " and " Down for Whatever " — tunes that trivialize the same subjects Cube had rapped about with conviction. No surprise that these later albums sold more than the early ones: a lack of real conflict may make for bad art, but the perception of conflict makes for good commerce. It’s an issue rappers have yet to resolve — how to conjure indignation when you’re sitting pretty in the mansion.