Complex item background

I am porting an app to iconic from foundation and so far I really like what I see… However I am having some trouble overriding some of the properties specially when using the angularjs directives. In this specific case, the .item-complex background that is generated with an ion-item. I was able to override it with scss like this ->
.item-complex { .item-content{ background:$base-background-color; } }

but not with the item-stable and the other built in “color moods”. This question is specific to the ion-list and ion-item, but in fact I am having trouble overriding styles on all of the directives.

What is the “right” and clean way to do this??? I feel like I am missing something.

thanks in advance