Ionic Sidemenu Content and Background Color Not Changing

I’m having trouble changing the background color of my Ionic sidemenu color (Ionic V1). I’ve successfully made the background black, but that only works if the item has an ng-click="" tag attached, as soon as I attach a href="…" to it, it reverts back to default colors. I’m not sure what to do here. I’ve attached a custom class to both the content tag inside the sidemenu, which did the trick again to only items with an ng-click, everything else with a href="" doesn’t work! I’m stuck here and it’s really bothering me and I don’t know what to do. Any help is sincerely appreciated.