by Ice-T
We got way more static from the white rock boys who didn’t necessarily believe that we were serious. And I could understand that: Whenever you’re deep with a whole culture, there is a fear of someone coming from outside, doing it just to make fun of it. When Eminem came into the rap game, we wanted to make sure that he really understood and had respect for the art of hip-hop. When Body Count hit the scene, the white rock crowd didn’t know if it was just a gimmick, if my band was just studio players, and if we could actually play live.
But once people stood in front of us at a show and felt the blast of Body Count, damn straight, that doubt was soon removed. After our first few shows, most of the naysayers were silenced.
Then again, as an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire. In a sense, that negativity is something that drives you.
After me, there was a big trend toward combining rock and hip-hop, with artists from Kid Rock to Limp Biskit expanding it to an entire genre. Earlier, Red Hot Chili Peppers was doing it. Anthony Kiedis was rapping. And the combination always worked; but if it doesn’t have the tag “rap-rock,” people don’t realize it. I don’t place Body Count in that category. I didn’t want to do a rap-rock hybrid. Body Count was deliberately intended not to be hip-hop. I did not rap any of the lyrics. I already had an established rap identity. So the demarcation line between Ice-T and Body Count was very important to me. The album had to be straight-up rock. I wanted to tour with Slayer. I wanted to go out with Rollins Band. I wanted to hold my own with the real rock cats.
We did that first tour and then we didn’t know what we were going to do with the band. Over at my label, Howie Klein got wind that I had a rock band. Seymour Stein was Howie’s boss at Sire, but Howie was more the day-to-day guy, the guy in the trenches. So Howie Klein called me up and said, “Ice, I’ll sign Body Count.” I didn’t even know that was possible, that I could have two separate deals at the same label, one for my hip-hop records and one for my metal band.
“Cool,” I said, “Let’s do this.”
We went into the studio, laid down the tracks for our first self-titled album. The record contained the song “Cop Killer,” and the cover art was that badass guy with the words Cop Killer tattooed on his chest. Everybody at Warner Bros. was happy with the album. Nobody had a problem with shit. Life was nearly perfect.
But, we’d later see a different side of everything—and everybody.
ON THE STRENGTH of that first record we hit the road. Pretty fast, Body Count picked up a following, especially internationally. Soon we were jetting all over the world. By 1993, we were touring Europe, even hitting Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
It was during our first gig in Italy that some real craziness popped. The thing about playing a rock gig in Italy—which I didn’t know at the time—was some of the fans were a bit behind the curve. Back in the day, the old punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash used to tour Europe, and the Italian punks, just like the English punks, used to spit on them. Freaky as that sounds, unloading a big gob of spit on your heroes was a sign of respect. Punk turned everything upside down that way. That was back in the mid-seventies, before AIDS, before everyone was freaked out about bodily fluids. These punks in Italy never got the memo that spitting was played out, and when we opened up our Italian tour these cats in the Milan arena were still on that trip.
In the middle of the stage, I grabbed the microphone and laid it down.
“Dig,” I said. “You can go ape shit, you can jump on the stage and wild out—I don’t give a fuck! But one rule: Don’t fucking spit!” Most places they understood it, but maybe the Italians didn’t understand my English. We soon found there were a few of these cats—soccer-hooligan-looking dudes—who were still into that spitting game.
We’re into our first song and these dudes in the front row are spitting at us. Now I’m getting offended. Because number one: I’m not the Dead Kennedys or Jello Biafra. And number two: This ain’t no 1977. Dog, spitting is fucking nasty—I don’t know what kind of diseases you got in your fucking mouth.
Actually, the spit hadn’t touched me yet. But from the first song, this one group of fans is steady spitting on Ernie. He’s playing guitar right near the edge of the stage and there’s this actual waterfall of saliva going over in his direction.
A few songs later, as we’re getting ready to go into “Cop Killer,” I walk over to Ernie. His guitar is drenched in spit. Ernie says, “It’s mostly that one motherfucker in black right there.”
I see this kid in a black T-shirt, stringy black hair. They’re not even punk rockers, just some young asshole Italian kids. I looked at the kid in the black. He responds by spitting right on me.
Okay, cool, I got this.
At that moment, I forgot I was Ice-T, forgot I was onstage, forgot every goddamn thing. I just had to fuck this kid up. I went out to the edge of the stage. The stage didn’t have a pit, it just had a gate, and I was able to get right out there to the edge above the kid in the black T-shirt.
“Yo!” I shouted. “Everybody put your hands in the air!”
And when they all put their hands in the air, I just leaned over and clocked the dude in his fucking nose. And I hit him hard! So hard he fell back into the audience. I was pissed off, pumped full of adrenaline and I just crashed him. I clocked him, and he fell back and I yelled “Cop Killer!” And then Ernie and the rest of the band launched into “Cop Killer.”
The kid I hit was still down on the ground, but as I turned, a couple of his friends grabbed my arm and tried to pull me down into the crowd. One Italian kid tried to sock me, so now I’m fighting with about four or five of them. They’re on the other side of the gate, and we’re fighting over the edge of the gate. I’ve got tunnel vision: All I see is the mic stand. I grabbed it and started swinging, beating down motherfuckers.
I’m cracking motherfuckers left and right. It was crazy, the song was halfway finished—I’m not singing, just swinging like a madman. The Italian crowd was getting heated, and I’m yelling “Yo! Yo! Yo!” hoping to keep things calm.
But then the crowd started to sing their soccer chants. Hundreds of them in unison doing these straight-up we’re-gonna-kill-you chants.
We had to break the fuck out—mid-song.
The band threw down their instruments. I dropped the microphone stand. We all ran backstage. The promoter had to shut the concert down immediately. Lights up. Security shoved the whole crowd outside.
We stayed in the dressing room for a long time, trying to wait out the mayhem, but the mob wasn’t calming down. If anything they were getting more heated.
The whole band sat backstage, not sure what to do. The venue had only one exit—right out the front. The back of the arena led to a cliff, so there was no other way out. We sat there, sweating, glancing at one another. After about thirty minutes, I sent one of our roadies to do recon. He came back looking even more scared.
“Ice, the tour bus is fucked up. I don’t know how we getting out of here.” They fucked up our tour bus, rocking it back and forth, slashing the tires, smashing the windows.
“There still a lot of people outside?”
“About two hundred.”
“Are they mad?”
“They’re not waiting on autographs.”
We sat there, trying to figure some way out, listening to the mob chanting. D-Roc had this brilliant plan to get us out the back of the venue, but because of the cliff, we ended up doing this long walk along the back of the venue, doubling right back to where we started. We didn’t do fuck-all except walk a big perilous circle.
Then I told the promoter to call us about six cabs, and when they showed up, I said, “Okay, please—can we get the fuck out of here?”
“We’ll run out fast—heads down,” the promoter said. “Ice-T, you go last.”
“Fuck that,” I said, “I’m going first. They want my fuckin’ head. They’re after me.”
We looked out front. Off to one side of
the building, the crowd had started a big bonfire, so we didn’t have much room to navigate. We knew they were going to shower us with bottles, rocks, bricks, anything they could hit us with. I started flashing back to my Rangers training.
“Yo,” I said, “we gotta handle this like an ambush. They’re trying to funnel us into the kill zone. That means the only thing we can do is attack the strongest position.”
Sean E. Sean, Beatmaster V, D-Roc, the Italian promoter—they were all staring at me like I was insane.
“No, listen. This is the only way. We’re going to run straight into the hurricane. If we get past the strong shit, we’ll be safe.”
We made our first direct assault. It was me, Sean E. Sean, Ernie, and the promoter. We dashed straight into the mob, and this brick came flying at us. Missed me by about five feet. Bottles are smashing; they’re all screaming, but we somehow made it to the cab, with mobs of pissed-off Italians in hot pursuit. We piled into the taxi, but the cabdriver was so freaked out, he jumped out and ran away!
The mob surrounded the cab, but now we had no driver. The promoter was in the passenger seat, me, Ernie, and Sean E. Sean were in the back. The promoter was too scared to take the wheel, but I reached forward and smacked him in the head two times.
“Drive the car, muthafucka!”
The promoter slid over to the wheel. “But where—?”
“Just floor it!” I said.
So we stole that cab. Drove straight into the crowd. People were slamming their hands on the windows, dudes were bouncing off the hood. We didn’t have a plan, just bashed our way out of the danger zone.
We wound through the dark streets of Milan, until we were about a mile away from the venue. Then I realized that in addition to possible assault and inciting a riot charges, we were not doing ourselves any favors by driving around in a stolen taxicab. We jumped out in the middle of the street. I ordered the promoter to take the cab back to the venue before we found ourselves looking at grand theft auto—or whatever was the Italian legal equivalent.
We walked along these medieval Italian streets, almost deserted now. It’s pitch-black outside, and we were all wearing our black Body Count coats. Suddenly, I realized that we must look like one of the marauding gangs in The Warriors.
“Oh shit! We’ve got our colors on. Take them shits off, man! The whole city’s fucking after us!”
We flagged down another cab, and as soon as we got in, the idiot smiled from ear to ear.
“Oh! You Americans? Let me take you to this very cool concert happening right now. Ice-T!”
He tried to pull a U-turn to take us back to the venue until we started screaming for him to drive us to the fucking hotel.
We made it back to the hotel and bunkered down for the night. All night the Italian radio and TV kept blaring a news flash: “Rapper Ice-T beats his fans up!”
After a few hours without any sleep, we slipped out of the hotel. We had to catch a train to Rome. We walked through the city all huddled up, wearing ball caps and hoodies, and got on the train. A few hours later we finally arrived in Rome, went straight from the train station to meet up with the country’s number one rock DJ. We were told he was the most popular and most influential radio personality in Italy.
In the few hours of our traveling, the media had blown the episode up even further. The press was making it like I was disrespecting all of Italy.
We went into the studio. The DJ and I shook hands and he went right on the air live. Talking lightning-fast in Italian. All I could catch were a few syllables … “Ice-T” … “Body Count” … “Milano …”
Then he flipped into English and asked me what happened.
“Man, we were having a great show. Then guys in the front row were spitting on us. I asked them several times to stop spitting on us. Long story short, I ended up punching a guy in the face.”
I didn’t know how this DJ was going to react. But he flipped the script. I later found out what he told his audience in that staccato Italian:
Look, Italy, we love Ice-T. What did we expect him to do? This is why we love Ice-T. ’Cause he’s a gangster. Because if you disrespect him, yes, he will punch you in the face!
Some clowns tried to ruin his concert. We should be angry at them. Ice-T is a guest in our country, we invited him to do all these sold-out shows, and we love him!
So he flipped the whole shit on the assholes who’d been spitting. We’d escaped the Milan mayhem and we needed him to squash the situation for the next shows we had to do. There was a real risk the rest of our European tour would go up in smoke. But due to him being the man, he was able to flip it 180 degrees. Instead of the line playing in the media that Ice-T had disrespected Italy, he made it clear that a handful of idiots had disrespected Ice-T.
We drove through the narrow Roman streets, winding over to the next arena. Sound check was no drama, and all the cats at the venue were shaking their heads, saying they were embarrassed by the behavior of those fans in Milan.
One thing I learned about Italians. They’re hot-blooded. Proud as hell. Easy to rile up. But they also respect the fact that you’ll stand up for yourself. By the rest of the shows in Italy, the whole story had reversed and all the Italians I met told me, “Look, Ice, we apologize for Milan.”
We loved the rest of our European gigs. Of course—it goes without saying—we haven’t been back to Milan since!
11.
WHEN I WROTE “Cop Killer,” I thought it was just another rock song. Call me naïve, but I believed, as an artist, that every subject was fair game. I’m one of those people who thought that when they said “America is the land of free speech,” they were sincere. I thought free speech meant I could say whatever I wanted to say.
So I just spit it out. I didn’t give it too much afterthought.
The record had been out for a whole year; it was on Body Count’s debut album. But we’d performed “Cop Killer” a full year before that on the Lollapalooza Tour. That made the song—if not the record—about two years old. The album came out, was selling well, and all of a sudden this organization called CLEAT (Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas) started calling for people to boycott Time Warner and get “Cop Killer” removed from stores. Other police groups soon joined them, railing about the record.
I’ll never forget the moment. I was at home playing a video game called Tecmo-Bowl with four of my boys when Sean E. Sean called me.
“Yo! Check the TV! The President is on the news, talking about ‘Cop Killer.’ ”
We flipped the channel to CNN and it wasn’t President Bush, actually. It was Vice President Dan Quayle, talking about me, looking pissed, saying the name “Ice-T” like he had shit on his tongue, calling my record “obscene.”
As soon as Quayle said, “Ice-T,” there was a collective groan around my living room.
Ah shit.
I knew the band and I were in for some drama.
But at first, it just seemed stupid to me. Petty and ridiculous. Why were they tripping? First off, it wasn’t like “Cop Killer” was a novel concept. There’d already been a group called Millions of Dead Cops. There’d been a movie out called Cop Killer, a book called Cop Killer, and Black Flag had been doing superaggressive songs like this long before Body Count.
I thought I was in a fairly safe zone of self-expression. I thought—especially within the world of rock and roll—that I was free to write what I wanted. I was actually listening to one of Seymour Stein’s favorite rock bands, the Talking Heads, and had their song “Psycho Killer” on my mind and one day I just said, “Fuck it, I’ll make a song called ‘Cop Killer.’ ” I wanted to blend the sound of speed metal with a topic that was real to Body Count’s lives.
As the controversy continued to build, our jaws stayed dropped. I kept saying, “What the fuck? It’s a song. It’s an old song. It’s a protest record. It’s a song about a guy who lost his mind over brutal cops.”
I told a group of reporters: “I’m singing in the first person
as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it. If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.”
It was an election year, and the political powers started to use “Cop Killer” in this nationwide campaign for “family values” and against violent lyrics in rap music. That in itself was bogus because it was a rock record, a Body Count song, and had nothing to do with gangsta rap. Second, the lyrics were coming out of the head of the character I’d created. It was a scenario. It wasn’t my personal view. I wasn’t calling on cops to be killed. The character was saying, “Fuck police brutality. Cops have been brutal to me, so tonight I’m going to kill some.”
But at the time, cops were under siege. This is pre–Rodney King—before the acquittal of the officers who had been caught on tape severely beating a black motorist, but not too long before—and there was a lot of media attention on the subject of police brutality. And because it was a Presidential election year somebody thought this was a good issue to exploit politically. It made great fodder for the Republican stump speeches. Let’s attack Warner Bros. Because after the initial criticism broke, the hostility wasn’t directed so much at me. A greater anger was directed at Time Warner for allowing the song to be put out. Ice-T—they could write me off as just another pissed-off black man from the ’hood. But Time Warner? You’re a Fortune 500 company. You’ve got a big gleaming office tower in midtown Manhattan. You’re supposed to be one of us. You’re supposed to part of the system—why are you putting this “Cop Killer” shit on the market?
We all kept thinking it would go away.
But it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Then Charlton Heston and the NRA got involved. President Bush publicly denounced Time Warner and any company that would release a record like “Cop Killer.” The former president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, Dennis Martin, actually—and ludicrously—claimed that the song had encouraged violence against police: “The ‘Cop Killer’ song has been implicated in at least two shooting incidents and has inflamed racial tensions in cities across the country.… It is an affront to the officers—one hundred forty-four in 1992 alone—who have been killed in the line of duty while upholding the laws of our society and protecting all its citizens.”