by Ice-T
We hired Glen Friedman to shoot the cover. Glen was the photographer who shot all the album covers for Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and, a little later, Public Enemy. So my album had that same look as all the hot rappers, and it just fit into a slot.
But with one big difference in the album art: We intentionally wanted to have a palm tree, a car, and a girl—my girl Darlene—in a bikini. That was the intent. Glen said, “This has to look like California. New York cats aren’t driving red convertibles, they don’t have palm trees, and when they think Cali, what do they think of? They picture girls in bathing suits.”
That shot of Darlene was some of the first skin ever on a hip-hop album cover. Groups like the Ohio Players used to use a lot of sexy shots of girls, but that wasn’t being done in the rap game. It got more graphic when we did the album Power—we just hit them with her body and an even skimpier bathing suit—like bang.
Darlene was up front in my career; she did all my album covers. She wasn’t just my girl in real life; she was essential to my image. But understand: I was very much about not having anything fake. If it ain’t your girl, don’t put her in the video. She’s wearing my chain with the gun pendant on the album cover. That’s my car. Maybe I was naïve about this shit, but I didn’t know you could lie. I didn’t know you could fake. I really didn’t believe it was okay—especially with rap. I got a song where I say:
I don’t rhyme about guns I ain’t shot
Hoes I ain’t caught
Or shit I ain’t bought
The game to me is too fucking deep
If I did I honestly believe
I’d die in my sleep …
To me, coming from that hustler’s lifestyle, it was like: Why would you have a model? How fake is that? Why would you have girls in your video that you don’t even know? That’s fake, brother. Everybody in my videos was my friend. When we shot the “High Rollers” video, I said, “The gats in the promo shots ain’t props.” And they damn sure weren’t.
We all used real money—wasn’t no fake cash. It was real. Because I was rapping about real shit.
We weren’t trying to sound or look like any established hip-hop acts. We weren’t on a hip-hop label like Def Jam. Rhyme Pays came out, hit the streets, and with virtually no radio support at all, within the year, it went gold.
I WAS SIGNED to a major label, but it was definitely a rock and pop label. Madonna was the biggest artist Seymour had on his roster, but the bulk of Sire’s music was edgier rock like the Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, and the Cure. To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to have more than one record, with Seymour or anybody else. I honestly thought it was going to be one-and-done—but what a blast we had taking that ride, you know?
Coming from L.A., stepping into this relatively new forum called hip-hop, shit, to think that you could actually sell half-a-million records—and you weren’t getting any radio spins; and you weren’t from New York, and you didn’t sound like you were from New York—frankly, I didn’t think it was possible.
Through Afrika Islam, I met Afrika Bambaataa. Bambaataa was one of the trinity of pioneers—alongside Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash—known for having built this massive following around his parties at the Bronx River housing projects. What interested me most about Bambaataa was that he’d been a gangster, a member of the infamous Black Spades, who’d decided that hip-hop culture was an avenue to steer kids away from the crime, drugs, hopelessness, and negativity of gang life. Bambaataa and Islam taught me the Zulu Nation mantra, which is: we all going in the same direction, so why compete unless one of us is a bitch? Why act like crabs in a barrel? Let’s try to build together and help each other.
So that’s how Rhyme Syndicate solidified. The core of the Syndicate was Evil E, Hen Gee, DJ Unknown, DJ Aladdin, Everlast, Donald D, Toddy Tee, and Afrika Islam. By 1988 we’d decided to do a collective album—all the songs were aggressive, gangster, or socially conscious—called Rhyme Syndicate Comin’ Through. To me, the Rhyme Syndicate was about building unity with some of L.A.’s dopest rappers, DJs, and producers—our own attempt to do what Bambaataa had done with Zulu Nation and Soulsonic Force. It was also about letting the East Coast cats know that while we weren’t challenging them, weren’t questioning their originality, we definitely wanted them to know that the West brought something to the game. That’s why I said:
The East started breakin’
But the West started poppin’
But what does it matter
As long as it’s rockin’?
There was something in the ether in 1987. About the same time we put out Rhyme Pays, Eric B. and Rakim put out their debut record, Paid in Full. Now Paid in Full is a classic, but if you listen to the content, it’s not that gangsta—not in terms of the lyrics. But they repped that look, with the big gold chains, repping that hustler look. Rakim’s voice sounded so hard without even cursing or getting too graphic; I think the hardest thing Rakim ever said in any of his records was, “I used to roll up / This is a holdup / Ain’t nothin’ funny / Stop smilin’ / Be still, don’t nothin’ move but the money.” That was his little poetic window into being a stickup kid; he didn’t harp on it, he just made that little allusion.
But I was the polar opposite. I wasn’t alluding to shit. I harped on the criminal exploits. That’s where I came from in reality, and that’s what I expected my music and my performances to reflect.
But I was definitely pushing the envelope, especially for a major label like Sire.
I remember one day when Seymour Stein called me up, sounding kind of perturbed. He said he wanted to talk to me about one of my lyrics. I knew exactly what he was going to say. See, I had a song called “409” on Rhyme Pays with a lyric that went, “Guys grab a girl, girls grab a guy, if a guy wants a guy please take it outside.”
Seymour quoted that line to me. “Ice,” he said, “come on. What’s that?”
“Seymour,” I said. “Look, I’m straight. Now if I wanted to get on the record and say ‘Guys grab a guy,’ that would be okay? It would be cool to say I’m gay on a record, but I can’t say I’m straight? I’m not saying to go bash no one. I’m just saying, personally, I don’t want to see it.”
He kept giving me static, saying that journalists and critics would see it as an anti-gay statement. That I’d alienate some potential fans.
So I flipped the script on him.
“What do you think of the record?” I said.
“Well, to be honest, I’m feeling a lot of tension.”
“What does your daughter think of the record?”
“She loves it.”
“You know that tension you’re feeling, Seymour? That tension is probably money.”
And then we hung up. That was the deal with Seymour. He wasn’t going to edit nothing. That wasn’t his deal. He’d speak his mind. He’d show his concern. But he wouldn’t try to control me. We had records like Sex, and that song was superedgy back in the late eighties—hip-hop hadn’t got nearly as graphic and X-rated as it did ten years later.
IT WAS GREAT CHEMISTRY. Seymour supported us business-wise, but he didn’t meddle in the creative side of what we were doing. And we delivered the goods. We put out a string of albums for Warner Bros.: Rhyme Pays, then Power, Freedom of Speech, Original Gangster. All of them certified gold records.
I was like the king of the world over there at Warner Bros. Of the black artists, the only one who was selling more than me was Prince. As far as the hip-hop went, I was over there pretty much alone, and then Cold Chillin’ Records came over to the Warner umbrella. Cold Chillin’ had Big Daddy Kane and that’s when me and Kane started going out and doing promotional tours.
And eventually Uptown Records came over there as well. I hadn’t met Puffy yet—but just like the famous story goes, he was this young, hustling kid running around as a mail clerk for Andre Harrell back then. Benny Medina was my go-to guy at Warner. So Andre was the boss at Uptown and Puffy was working for him. And it was Benny who’d signed Andre to Warne
r. But a little later it all flipped: Puffy became the man and Benny transitioned into J. Lo’s manager. It was crazy but that’s the music industry for you. I’ve had years in the music biz to observe this: Don’t get too hung up on working with any one person, because it’s like a game of checkers where dudes are hopping over one another all the time, shouting, “King me, motherfucker!” It’s checkers, yo. But with a lot of money at stake.
WE HAD SOME CRAZY TIMES in those early days of my rap career. It was a glamorous time. Pretty much the first thing on my agenda was indulging my taste for expensive cars. I had one of the first Ferraris to hit the scene. It was a candy-apple-red Ferrari Mondial convertible. Just gorgeous. I was one of the first cats to drive that exotic shit. Motherfuckers were still low-riding in L.A.
Now I’ve got to explain something about Flavor Flav. By the time Public Enemy came out, Flav and I were tight. He’d come see me whenever he was on the West Coast and we’d hang out. I was like his surrogate Chuck D. He’d listen to Chuck D when he was in the East and he respected me like I was like a West Coast Chuck D.
This one afternoon Flav showed up at my house in Hollywood, out of control, with those fucking antlers on, honking his car horn. In L.A.
Flav is not an act. That nigga’s crazy! Hanging out with Flav is a wild adventure. He’ll be rolling, stop his car in the middle of an intersection, jump out and fix his pants and shit while a bunch of cars are honking. Every time he stops the car, there’s drama. I always say, “Flavor is a walking event.”
He dropped by my house and we decided to roll to Red Lobster. We took two cars: I was in my new Ferrari, Flav and Terminator X were following us in a rented Mustang.
I pulled into this parking structure. I could see in the rearview mirror that Flavor was screaming and waving his arm and doing what he always does, and then the fool smashed right into the back of my brand-new Ferrari.
We all heard the brake light shatter.
It got really quiet and then Terminator X said, “Oh shit, you just wrecked Ice’s ride.”
All he really did was bust the brake light, he didn’t do any structural damage, didn’t bend the car. Still, it looked bad.
Flavor gets out of the rental car and for one minute he’s transformed back into William Drayton—he’s no longer crazy-ass Flavor Flav. He’s talking to me like an attorney, in his real voice. “Ice, I am really sorry for this mishap.” None of that “Yeeaaaaaah, boyeeeee!” shit.
He took a little piece of the brake light and—word is bond!—he probably still has that shit in his wallet. He carried that brake light for years! Every time I’d see him, in L.A., New York, anywhere, he’d open his wallet and show it to me. And he’d tell everyone within ear shot: “That day was the closest I ever came to death. I really thought Ice was going to kill me for cracking his Ferrari.”
I HAD A SONG ON Rhyme Pays called “Squeeze the Trigger.” And when Dennis Hopper—rest in peace—was finishing up his film Colors, which he directed, I got word that they wanted to use “Squeeze the Trigger” in the movie. I said, “That’s cool. Can I see the movie first?” It was still a rough cut, no score or soundtrack yet, and the producers set up a screening for us. Dennis showed me the scene where Don Cheadle’s character, Rocket, is listening to music, which is where they wanted to put the song.
The movie was nearly finished and I asked, “Hey, do you have a title song yet?”
They said yes they had a song by Rick James called “Colors.” It was a funky beat, but it was Rick James wailing, “Look at all these colooooors,” sounding—well, exactly like superfreak Rick James. I knew if they used that Rick James song, it was going to sound corny as hell, especially in a film about gangbanging. They needed something hard. They needed a song that was authentic to the L.A. gangbanging world.
“Naw, man,” I said, “Let me hook up a new title song for this piece.”
So I went off to write “Colors.” Now, there was a song out by King Sun called “Mythological.” I thought the song was dope and decided I’d use it as a kind of format for “Colors.” Islam had this little bass line sample in his Roland machine. We used the beat from “Mythological,” and I did my own variation of King Sun’s flow:
I am a nightmare walking
Psychopath talking
King of the jungle
Just a gangster stalking
I rocked a gangster story to the cadence of “Mythological.” It was a first-person gangbanging story with a line most people remember—The gangs of L.A. will never die—just multiply …
A lot of hip-hop records are made that way: building on what other brothers are putting out there into the game. It’s not considered copying, unless you don’t acknowledge the other artist, but it is more about “influence.” A lot of cats will rhyme to the cadence of another artist’s song that really got under their skin for some reason. The funny thing about “Colors” is that the trademark sound, this trippy echo that sounds kind of like church bell on reverb, was something that came out of a machine by mistake. The engineer hit a wrong button in the echo machine and said, “Oh shit, let me wipe it clean.”
“No,” I said. “That’s so fucking dope! Put that in the record.”
It was random, like amp feedback in some old sixties rock records, but it was the sound that people remember most about that track. That weird ringing echoing sound—nothing planned, just a fuck-up that we left in the final mix.
The thing about that movie—I’ll be the first to say it—sure, it was fake. The story line had the Crips fighting the Mexicans. But to me that didn’t matter too much. A lot of people who get mad at the inauthenticity of Colors don’t know the backstory of how the movie got made. Dennis Hopper told me that he wanted to make a movie about gangs, and the movie studio told him he had to set and shoot it in Chicago. “Why Chicago?” Hopper said. “We have gangs in L.A.”
“We have gangs in L.A.?” an executive said.
Hopper told those studio suits that same year there’d been 367 kids killed—that’s how invisible the gang culture still was to even L.A. film executives. If you’re in Beverly Hills, you don’t know the first thing about what’s going on down in South Central and Compton.
Dennis convinced them to make it about gangs in L.A., but when they decided to go in—I guess they heard how real the banging was between the sets and got really, really afraid of portraying the gang world—they intentionally created something fictionalized, like Crips fighting Mexicans, because they didn’t dare show the Crips warring with Bloods. They sidestepped the issue, figuring the movie was toxic enough without them pissing off real sets of Crips and Bloods.
If you’re from out of town, and you don’t really know Watts or Compton, it’s not too far off base. Of course, gangbangers pick at that movie like they are picking lint out of fly shit. They’ll always say, “Naw, it wasn’t like that.”
But I’ve worked on enough film and TV sets to know this: It would be damn near impossible to make a movie play-by-play on how the gang situation was going down in L.A. What Colors did is make people around the country aware that there was a serious gang scene in L.A.
I wasn’t in the movie—a lot of people think I acted in it, but I just did the title song and the video. We were nominated for an MTV Award for that, too. I think that the song still holds up today. I just cared about keeping the song as real as I could from the gangbangers’ perspective. That’s all I cared about. The song was more real than the movie, to be honest.
CALL IT UNCOMPROMISING. Call it hardheaded. I thought it was all about “artistic integrity.” I decided that I wasn’t going to do any radio edits of my songs. I mean, I wasn’t getting any radio love anyway. My records never got played. So I figured, why should I clean up my lyrics for these suckers?
N.W.A. was raw as fuck—when they topped the Billboard album chart, they had to censor the band’s full name—but even they started making clean radio versions. I refused flat out. I was really on some rebel shit. I wouldn’t compromise my artistic p
rincipals. The fact that my records sold well—got RIAA-certified gold status—without any airplay and that I was able to earn an income meant, in a sense, that I could afford not to give a fuck. I was real hard. I didn’t like going up to radio stations and kissing their ass only to have them still not play my records. I even had a song called “Radio Suckas Never Play Me” with a hook I sampled from Chuck D.
I was making all my money pretty much selling records and touring. Hip-hop was still like that. You could do it on a street level back in the day. Acts like Master P and Geto Boys built these huge, loyal fan bases without radio play, just by doing regional shows and selling their shit on an indie label. Literally selling their tapes out of the trunks of cars and in mom-and-pop record shops. You could get a following out there—but you couldn’t be too pop. You had to have a really hard product.
Luke and 2 Live Crew were selling a million copies with each album—and they were selling pretty much all of them down in Florida! It could be done back then. There wasn’t an Internet, no file sharing or downloading to kill your store sales. Fans had to buy the record—not even CDs sometimes, it was still cassette tapes, and you had to physically own the product.
My base was always L.A. first and New York second, and Detroit was always my third, then Chicago, then Atlanta—but my stuff moved in all the American cities. Overseas, my stuff was always selling steadily, mostly in Germany—they buy the most records.
It’s funny—the more you aim to hit a hardcore ’hood audience, the more the white suburban kids seem to get into your music. They don’t especially want to hear pop bullshit, except maybe the really younger crowd and teenage girls. But as I was going out touring, I was seeing almost all-white crowds at my shows. Here’s how it breaks down in hip-hop: When you’re doing it in the garage and small clubs, it’s almost all black kids. But once you make it to arenas and bigger venues, it becomes almost all white kids. I learned real quickly to adjust my racial perspective, especially when I toured out of the country and saw lots of white kids who idolized me and dug my words. I’d see them dressed all in the Raiders gear that they saw in my videos. That made me step back as an artist and say, “Maybe I don’t know everything.”