Ice

by Ice-T

  At a campaign fundraising luncheon, Dan Quayle kept ratcheting up his rhetoric. “I am outraged at the fact that Time Warner, a major corporation, is making money off a record called ‘Cop Killer’ that suggests it is okay to kill cops.”

  It got to the point that people actually sent death threats to Warner Bros.—it was some real shit.

  Now, looking back on it, this is what I learned: Yes, you have the right to say whatever you want in America, but you have to be prepared for the ramifications of what you say. When I yelled “Cop Killer,” I did not prepare for the fallout. I’d been dissing rappers for years; they didn’t do shit. Then I dissed the cops—and they came after me like no gang I’ve ever encountered. Then Charlton Heston, Tipper Gore, and the President of the United States himself came after me.

  I TELL PEOPLE TODAY that you don’t know what heat is until you’ve had the President of the United States say your name in anger. Because the minute he does—boom—the deepest security check of your life immediately goes into action. The FBI, the Secret Service, the IRS, everybody gets into the game. Because he’s the President of the United States. The next question from the President to his chief of staff will be, “What do we know about this man?”

  Soon as the President says your name they do a four-bureau check. They dig up every speck of dirt they can find. They had my military records, and I’m sure they knew about my criminal background. But I don’t think they gave a damn that I’d been involved in all kinds of robberies and mayhem back in the day. The truth is, they were really trying to find out if I was some Black Panther–type of rabble-rouser, if I was the kind of person who’s trying to start a real social revolution, trying to sound a call to arms like Huey P. Newton. Was the record meant to be me standing on a soapbox? Me telling the youth of America that they should literally go out and kill the cops?

  These are some intelligent guys in the FBI and Secret Service: I’m sure that when they checked out “Cop Killer,” they knew it was just a song. A point-of-view song—okay, a little more intense, but not too far removed from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.”

  But the investigation was done. It had to be done. That’s not because Ice-T is anyone important, it’s just a rule of fact: the President shouldn’t be saying your fucking name in anger. If he’s mad at you, his boys in the Secret Service, FBI, and National Security are going to find out who the fuck you are. That’s just how they get down.

  But here’s what’s funny. It wasn’t like it was hard to find out shit about me. I’m an open book. At the end of the day, I said, “Yo, if I was really on some political platform, and this is what I wanted, well, then, fuck it, I’ll take the political heat.” But that wasn’t what I was out to do.

  And if they’d been able to find anything from my criminal past they could use, come on, they’d have had me in shackles on the nightly news. They would have locked me under the jail. But the only dirt they could find on me was shit that I’d already claimed. What are they going to do? Give a press conference with Dan Quayle or Charlton Heston: “This man Ice-T is an ex-criminal.” Come on! Who the fuck doesn’t know that?

  Here’s something I never admitted before: One of the reasons I got into the record business and came clean about all the dirt I did was because I knew that fame doesn’t allow you to hide much. You better just ’fess up. Fame is a fierce spotlight, but it’s also a way to clean out your closet. You have to remember that in early hip-hop, telling the truth about your criminal life was not in vogue. When I came out, dudes were still saying, “Oh, I learned to sing in church.” You didn’t come out and say, “Yo, I’m an ex-thief” Or, “I’m a hustler from the streets of South Central.” That didn’t sell records. Now it does. Now everyone claims to have been a shot caller, bank-robber, gunslinger, murderer. But that’s really my blueprint.

  It would have been a waste of time for me to pretend to be someone I’m not. So I chose to use it like Iceberg Slim did: as a source for my material.

  When that national security search happens, you feel it from the other side—things like tax audits, covert surveillance; they even snatched my daughter out of school and asked her if I was a member of any paramilitary organizations! Funny part about it was, they never came to me directly. But I felt a certain level of scrutiny and surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Things you can’t rationally explain are happening all around you. It’s like you have an ice cream truck parked outside your house in the middle of the winter.

  WHEN PEOPLE TALK TO ME about “Cop Killer” today, they often assume I’m bitter about the controversy. I only get angry when people overstep their boundaries. But with “Cop Killer” everybody at Time Warner was doing what they thought was correct, at least from a business standpoint. People needed to do what they thought had to be done. Everybody was doing their job. I look at it this way: When a cop busts you for selling coke, don’t get pissed at the cop. The law was there. You knew it, you broke it; the cop did his job. So how can you get mad? How can you hold a grudge?

  To be real—even in the hottest days of that media frenzy—I felt bad for Time Warner. I felt awful for them. To me Time Warner wasn’t some massive, faceless corporate entity. I had good personal relationships with Seymour Stein, Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker—even the chief executive of Time Warner, Gerald Levin.

  In fact, right before the shit hit the fan, I’d just been up at the Time Warner world headquarters in this massive boardroom, speaking to Gerald Levin and all the top-dog executives. That was a pretty big deal; they didn’t have every artist on Warner Bros. up in their board meetings. They had guys like former president Nixon speak to them about economic and political issues. I was there with Quincy Jones, talking to the executives and board members, because we’d just won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for “Back on the Block.” We were their golden boys.

  When the “Cop Killer” storm hit, the Time Warner executives understood the stakes.

  “Ice, this is a bad day,” Seymour Stein told me, “because once we allow them to tell us what we can and can’t do, what we can and can’t release, this whole division of music is pretty much through.”

  Warner Bros. was the home of the edgiest artists of the time: Prince, Madonna, Slayer, Sam Kinnison, Andrew Dice Clay, the Geto Boys, and me. Almost everybody considered raw and edgy signed to a major at the time was under the Warner Bros. umbrella.

  People often make the mistake of thinking that Time Warner put pressure on me. They never put an ounce of pressure on me. I made the move on my own. When we were kids, if you were my buddy and I threw a rock and busted a school window and we both got in trouble—I’m going to tell them it was just me. I’m going to take that weight. You had nothing to do with the shit.

  Same with “Cop Killer,” I decided. I wrote the song. I’ll take the weight.

  I said to Warner Bros., “Know what? All I got in life is my integrity. If you want, we can pull the song off the album.”

  Critics were already saying I did the song for the money. Just to be scandalous. But I didn’t give a fuck. The Body Count album was going to sell without that song on it. So Warner re-pressed the record, sold the Body Count album, and gave the “Cop Killer” single away for free.

  But even with that concession, the climate just got too intense. It wasn’t so much the political pressure as the financial stakes. When this shit happened, when Charlton Heston went into that shareholders meeting, thirty million dollars went into the balance. Charlton Heston, as the head of the National Rifle Association, impacted the Warner Bros. bottom line. He stood there in the meeting reading my lyrics like it was a page from the Planet of the Apes script.

  I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF

  I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF

  I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF

  I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF …

  He didn’t even know what he was talking about. “These are the lyrics to ‘Killer Cop,’ ” he said. “Oops, I mean ‘Cop Killer.’ ” He’s so outra
ged, yet he doesn’t even know the name of the record? It was some crazy, hypocritical bullshit.

  Charlton Heston railing at that meeting sent the Time Warner stock into a tailspin. In life, forget principles, forget egos—most people are all about money. Time Warner realized it was costing them big money to keep me around. They brought in a crisis specialist to look at my next set of recordings. I already had the Home Invasion album in the can, and I knew that some of the lyrics were going to raise eyebrows.

  Don’t give a fuck about a cop or a G-man

  They all talk shit, breath smellin’ like semen

  I take ’em in the alley all alone

  Put ’em in the prone

  Pop-pop-pop to the dome.

  So yes—I was still killing cops in my music.

  And no—that wasn’t going to make me any more popular at the label.

  “Dig,” I said, “All right, fine. Just give me a release from my contract. No harm no foul.”

  I still owed Warner two albums. I know Seymour Stein and Mo Ostin felt bad letting me out of my contract. But they understood I had to do what I had to do. I knew that if they put out any more Body Count or Ice-T albums, shit was going to be too hectic.

  The reality to me was this: I knew they wouldn’t promote the record anyway. Even if they released it, they would try to let it slip quietly under the radar. So I took my album over to Bryan Turner at Priority Records. And that was the end of my Warner Bros. adventure.

  A lot of folks get it twisted, but this is the deal: Time Warner was just looking out for itself. And I respected that. I still respect that. They never treated me like shit, never got mad or yelled at me. All those theories you still hear today—Time Warner sold Ice down the river—hell naw. They didn’t! It was just a gang of political and financial pressure.

  People think controversy helps your bottom line, but I disagree. There is a big tradeoff: Yes, you sell some records, but with all the static—the cancellation of concerts, the hike in insurance for the shows you do get—there are way more costs that come along with controversy than benefits. I would never advise people that controversy is the way to blow up. You’ll become known but will it translate into money? Probably not.

  I always felt like I was the cat who was on the firing line. I was out there on that thin horizon, right at the edge of shit. If you fast-forward a few years, Ted Turner pushed Death Row Records off Interscope over similar issues. It was a trickle-down effect. And because of that trickle-down, I caught a lot of flack from different rap groups: Ice-T, you caved. You gave in to the Man. Side-bettors were out there, throwing in their opinions, trying to hurt my name. It’s funny that the rap community ended up coming down on me harder than anyone in the mainstream. The Source magazine went in on me. Over and over. An editor at The Source, Reginald Dennis, came at me with one particularly hard editorial: “When he voluntarily removed ‘Cop Killer’ from the Body Count album,” he wrote, “Ice-T allowed a devastating precedent to be set, opening the door for widespread censorship of rap.”

  As far as the hip-hop world was concerned, I went from being a guy who was standing up for freedom of expression to being some weak-kneed motherfucker who wouldn’t speak truth to power.

  But to me, the key to winning the game is: Don’t worry about everyone. Find out who’s really on your team and then roll with them.

  My man Chuck D put it best. “If you ain’t in the battles,” Chuck said, “you shouldn’t comment on the war.”

  Chuck knew what I was dealing with. He’d had his own media battles with Public Enemy. So I always had the dudes I respected in hip-hop, cats like Chuck, telling the haters and side-bettors to shut the fuck up.

  Walk in my shoes for a day. That was some stressful, hectic shit. That was heat coming from the government of the United States. I was in quicksand for months. There was no safe ground to stand on.

  PART FIVE

  NINETY-NINE PROBLEMS

  “THE MOST DANGEROUS THING ON EARTH

  ISN’T A GUN, KNIFE OR BOMB.

  IT’S EGO.”

  —ICE-T’S DAILY GAME

  12.

  MY CAREER AS A TELEVISION ACTOR all started with Fab 5 Freddy. In addition to being a hip-hop “personality,” the host of Yo! MTV Raps, Fab’s also a respected visual artist—Fred Brathwaite—and he used to show his work in some of the swanky L.A. galleries where Darlene worked for a while. We have been friends forever. We’re pimp buddies—we sit back and talk a lot of fantastic shit!

  Fred was chilling at my house. At that time I had a couple of screen credits; I’d done New Jack City, I’d done Trespass. We were just chopping it up when Andre Harrell called. Freddy put me on the phone and Andre, who’d branched from his music executive career into TV production, asked me to do New York Undercover, a drama starring Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo as police detectives.

  Andre was getting at me about coming on the show. I was playing it cold.

  “Man, listen, I’m in the movies. I don’t do that TV shit.”

  “Come on, Ice.”

  “Plus, let me tell you. Y’all ripped off New Jack City!”

  “Oh, you’re too big now, huh?” Andre said. He pulled that “black solidarity” card on me. “You can’t help out a brother, huh?”

  I said, “Okay, give me a bad-guy character and I’ll play it.”

  The character was named Danny Up, some eccentric kind of criminal who was supposed to be running an early meth lab.

  It sounded pretty out there so I said, “Cool.”

  I FLEW TO NEW YORK to do the show, and it was a great experience. It was shot just like a movie. They respected the shit out of me, and I had a great time.

  It was a one-off, but at the end of my shoot, they got the dailies, liked what they saw, and I got another call.

  “Ice, would you stay around? We don’t want to kill you at the end of the episode.”

  I told them no way.

  When you do television, there’s a salary cap for guest stars. Back then it was only about $7,000. Networks and production companies do that so that guest stars have no leverage to negotiate. If I did a guest spot on New York Undercover, I got the same money as Henry Winkler. Seven grand wasn’t really cutting it for me. After taxes and expenses—I had to put Sean E. Sean up in a hotel—and partying in New York, I walked away with a grand.

  They asked me to stay but I said, “Naw, I gotta get back to L.A.”

  The producers said, “We can’t pay you more, but we can sweeten the deal. We can get you more perks, put you in a better hotel.” They put us in a better hotel and covered Sean’s bills.

  So I said, “Fuck it,” and I ended up doing two more shows. I got to be in the cliffhanger—the season’s final episode—and I got to kill Malik Yoba’s baby. I was cutting fingers off. I was a beast. Doing some crazy-ass sinister shit—I had a great time!

  Dick Wolf was the executive producer of New York Undercover, but I didn’t know anything about him. Honestly, I’d never watched an episode of Law & Order. After my experience on New York Undercover, the Dick Wolf “machine” knew my style—they liked me.

  A few months later, I had an idea for this show called Players, which was a story about guys who go to prison and get turned around and come out and create a vigilante army. I decided I’d pitch the show directly to Dick Wolf, so I called his office up and said I want to have a meeting.

  Dick Wolf is a big ominous character. To be honest, he looks more like an old-school mobster than a big television executive. He looks exactly like the guy that would be sitting at the head of the table in any big Mob organization.

  By the time of our first meeting, of course, I’d learned Dick Wolf’s history. Dick started off as a writer, he wrote for television back in the days of Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. He knew his shit backward and forward.

  I came into his office and pitched him my idea for Players and he just stared at me, with a real cold expression.

  “Every single actor has an idea for his own
show.”

  I’m a bit taken aback, but I don’t try to argue; I’m still waiting for him to give me a bit of feedback. “Kind of sounds like The A-Team.” Shit. He thinks I’m biting Mr. T?

  There’s a long pause. I don’t say anything. Finally, Dick Wolf says, “A-Team saved ABC.” I stood there nodding.

  “Do you mind if I mess around with it?” he says.

  “Naw, go ahead.”

  I leave the meeting. I ask my manager, Jorge, “What the fuck just happened in there?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Jorge says. “Nobody really knows what Dick Wolf is thinking.”

  Weeks went by. No word. I assumed my idea was dead in the water.

  It was at least a month later that I got a phone call. It was Dick.

  “Hey Ice-T, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m sitting on a plane with Warren Littlefield.” Warren was the head of NBC Universal at the time.

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  “You have a television show,” Dick said.

  Dick pitched the show to him as they sat right next to each other in first class, and he got the green light right there on the plane. “Well, what does that mean?”

  “It means we’re good to go,” he said. “We’ll be getting back to you.”

  They got back at me. They had a writer named Reggie Rock Bythewood who used to be on staff at New York Undercover. They brought him in and twisted the show a little bit. They turned us into federal criminals out on work-release to help the cops. It was done as a pseudo-comedy, wasn’t real heavy or dark or hardcore.