Ice-T Solo Records Ranked

“In order to get big sponsorships from these companies, you have to buy into the American way,” Ice stated in his 1994 book The Ice Opinion. “It’s not important enough to me that I would change my beliefs.” Looking at Ice-T’s thriving, prolific career today as a national treasure, one sees an America that bought into him, a pioneer rap entrepreneur whose stardom crosses over to music, film, TV, video games, literature, advertising, social media and beyond. But don’t forget—what earned him that status is his music.

Call him a businessman and he’ll agree, once stating, “I think I'm a musician first. More of like a writer, whether I'm writing books or writing rap, or just a lyricist and a writer, first. But bottom line, hustler.” But those business skills include quality control, and to deny his talent and innovations as a rapper would be like pretending Ice’s former LA club scenester pal Madonna is all business and no bangers. In honor of his recently announced upcoming album Criminal Migraine, here’s the good, the bad, and the O.G. of one of hip-hop’s greatest creators.

8. Gangsta Rap (2006)

None of Ice-T's last three studio albums get mentioned in his excellent autobiography Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption, and it’s not hard to hear why. Ice's last rap studio album to date, his first in seven years, sounds like the work of a man who had moved most of his hustle into acting, with cover art that tries too hard and music that doesn't try hard enough. “Walking in the Rain” is an enjoyably romantic spin from the man most of us didn’t know would turn into such a wife guy, but the album’s weighed down by forgettable guests and boasts Ice could have delivered in his sleep.

7. The Seventh Deadly Sin (1999)

In his 2000 episode of VH1's Behind the Music, Ice stated that he was more interested in making money than making music. Previous comments contradict this, so maybe he was joking or being defensive, but on The Seventh Deadly Sin, released one year earlier, he sounds disinterested in music, running through second-rate production and rap themes that he's stated better elsewhere. Released on Ice’s own digital record label Coroner Records (“The old-school major labels are going to die, only the coroner will continue to have a job.”) and less memorable than the home studio video interview the same year, in which he predicts the future of music and movies online: “Anybody who's ever seen it actually work cannot honestly believe CDs got a chance in hell in the next five-10 years….Right now, I can go get Lauryn Hill’s album from the Tower Records, rip it and email it to everybody in the world if that’s why I choose to do. There’s nothing you can do to stop that, right?”

6. Ice-T VI: Return of the Real (1996)

“I didn’t really mind doing little low-budget films because I never looked at myself as a movie star.” Ice remembered in his stellar 2022 book Split Decision. “But the drop-off in my music sales—yeah, at first that was a real fucking ego blow.” Much as one roots for Ice, it’d be hard to imagine any listener preferring VI: Return of the Real to Ice’s golden era rap masterpieces. The beats adapt for the post-G-Funk and Wu-Tang soundscapes, and Ice delivers the charm and wit, which are almost enough to carry storytelling that occasional hints at Ice’s peak game over 21 songs. The moving "I Must Stand" and the rapidfire "The Lane” are on 2000's Greatest Hits: The Evidence, the best place to hear both of those songs, where at least you can also get his soundtrack hit “Colors,” too.

5. Rhyme Pays (1987)

If not for some dated production and some touches of homophobia (which Ice was quick to frequently renounce in interviews), Rhyme Pays would be a notch or two higher. As it stands, Ice’s full-length debut starts one of the greatest five-album runs in rap history and the breakthrough of one of its most formidable artists. Starting with The Exorcist and Black Sabbath samples, as well as live drums by future Body Count drummer Beatmaster V, Ice established himself as a rapper of astonishing skill and range. The violence of the genre-inventing “6 ‘N the Morning” is still chilling, and the life of luxury exaggerations on "Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy)" are as funny as peak Weird Al. Ice proves himself as deft at throwing a party (“Make It Funky,” “409”) as he does laying down the facts (“Pain,” “Squeeze the Trigger.”) On the latter song, Ice closes the album by attacking both the law enforcement (“Cops hate kids, kids hate cops/Cops kill kids with warning shots”) and the government (“We buy weapons to keep us strong/Reagan sends guns where they don't belong”)  that would eventually try to shut him down over the Body Count song “Cop Killer.”

4. Home Invasion (1993)

At 77 minutes, Home Invasion could stand to be cut to a single LP. But at the height of his infamy Ice had a lot to say, and despite being the first Ice-T album to not improve on the previous one, Home Invasion features some of Ice’s most effective music, thumbing his nose at officials who complained about his influence on young white listeners by baiting would-be censors with his cover art and lyrics. For his Priority Records debut, Home Invasion delivers unadulterated Ice, with heated tracks like “Addicted to Danger” and “Race War,” and forgoes Ice’s usual humor to lean on Ice’s age and experience, one of his defining MC traits, on the autobiographical “That’s How I’m Livin’” the LA truce retelling “Gotta Lotta Love” and best of all on the edgy first single “I Ain’t New Ta This,” though these days the album’s best-known song is a deep cut that never received a single or music video release, teaming up with 2 Live Crew’s Brother Marquis on “99 Problems.” Without major label support, and many retailers still hesitant to stock his albums after the “Cop Killer” scandal, Home Invasion’s chart presence was short-lived, but 30 years later it holds up as a powerful, literary slice of gangsta rap game, and Ice’s most underrated record. Be sure to spin the bonus disc The Last Temptation of Ice for the fantastic “Ricochet,” a soundtrack hit to Ice’s 1991 film with Denzel Washington and John Lithgow.

3. Power (1988)

Duff McKagan called it "the soundtrack to my life in ‘88.” Kirk Hammett credits "Personal" as the inspiration for his "Enter Sandman'' solo. According to Bob Dylan's autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan was listening to Ice-T during the making of 1989's Oh Mercy, meaning he was likely enjoying this album and songs like "Girls L.G.B.N.A.F." Even fans of Rhyme Pays must have been struck by Power’s versatility, with Ice reinventing himself as a modernized version of the blaxploitation and crime novel heroes of his youth, even doing a spot on impression of his namesake Iceberg Slim’s spoken word Reflections in the homage “Soul on Ice.” The first hit “I’m Your Pusher'' built on a Curtis Mayfield sample to pioneer the rapped verses/sung hook format and show off Ice’s cinematic chops in the music video, described by author Greg Tate as “new jack’s first successful blaxploitation movie,” while applauding Ice as the “first gold rapper to emerge from a bona fide Black criminal enterprise, the gangs of Los Angeles.” Ice scored again with the crime drama hit “High Rollers,” but Power is Ice’s first front-to-back masterpiece, from the hard-edged title track to the slinky “Drama” to the entourage party in “The Syndicate.” Ice even transcended coastal rivalries to be the only West Coast act on 1988’s The Dope Jam Tour (Say No to Drugs), with Eric B & Rakim, Doug E. Fresh, Kool Moe Dee, Boogie Down Productions, Biz Markie. “I never thought I could out-rap any of the New York legends, but I was a bit more thought-provoking than the other rappers in the game.” Ice remembered.

2. The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech... Just Watch What You Say! (1989)

In most careers, this would be the definitive statement, but in an oeuvre as deep as Ice-T’s, this is just one of Ice’s classics. Darker, heavier and more political than his previous work, The Iceberg forgoes the rich and infamous lifestyle of his first two album covers (Ice chilling with his then-partner Darlene “the Syndicate Queen” Ortiz and DJ Evil E) for a harrowing sketch of a young Black man with three guns pointed at his head. The Black Sabbath and Jello Biafra-sampling opener “Shut Up, Be Happy” was heavy enough to serve as Megadeth’s entrance music for years. and the title track earned him spite from Tipper Gore and Oprah, who underestimated Ice’s intellect and debate skills when they tried to make an example of him on Oprah’s show. The Iceberg was both Ice-T’s edgiest and his biggest crossover move (it hit No. 1 on Harvard’s College Radio charts) to date, honing his storytelling into some of his wildest exploits (“Peel Their Caps Back,” “The Hunted Child”), dropping wisdom (“You Played Yourself,” “Freedom of Speech”), telling jokes (“My Word is Bond,” “Black ‘N’ Decker”) and rocking as hard as his punk and metal contemporaries (the hit “Lethal Weapon” and the hilarious “The Girl Tried to Kill Me,” featuring Body Count bandmates Ernie C and Beatmaster V), delivering banger after banger into a certifiable classic. Ice also touted his cinematic qualities with an self-designed MPAA-style sticker on the album: “'Rated X. Some material may be X-tra hype and inappropriate for squares and suckers.’” 

1. O.G. Original Gangster (1991)

The gangsta rap Exile on Main St. Something completely different. One of the greatest records ever, regardless of genre or era. 72 minutes of hip-hop brilliance that without a wasted second among its 24 tracks. The biggest hits were the soundtrack jam "New Jack Hustler (Nino's Theme)" and the American vernacular-reshaping title track, but the deep cuts are every bit as invigorating, from the brilliant "Mind Over Matter" through the unnerving, Black Sabbath-sampling “Midnight” and the closing "The Tower," infiltrated with drops of humor and wisdom like "Ya Shoulda Killed Me Last Year.” Listeners barely had a moment to catch their breath from all the curveballs by track 18, when Ice introduces his "Black hardcore band" Body Count and proceeds to out-thrash his contemporaries with a hard blast of punk and metal. As a  Musician profile noted, “Ice assembled a crew of four producers — D.J. Aladdin, DJ Su, Bilal Bashir and long-time associate Afrika Islam — and assigned them musical "missions," spurring creative competition in the old Motown tradition. The result is a fresh group of wildly contoured riffs and rhythms, from funk to speed metal to '70s rock, melded together in ways that render their origins unrecognizable while deftly complementing the moods of Ice-T's cinematic narratives.” Witty, catchy, groundbreaking and nearly always prescient (he does predict he'll never win a Grammy and that Nelson Mandela won't get a deserved Nobel Prize, because even someone as visionary as Ice-T didn’t know how ahead of its time this album was), O.G. Original Gangster reimagined gangsta rap as multifaceted music with novelistic lyrics, paving the way for 2-LP epics like All Eyez on Me, Life After Death and Wu-Tang Forever. The skits are funny and the interludes are catchy. Popular music would never be the same.

Bonus: Pimp to Eat (2000)

Two of horrorcore's greatest pioneers, Ice-T and Kool Keith, united for 2000's wild one-off Analog Brothers album Pimp to Eat, playing Ice Oscillator and Kool Korg respectively in a dizzying adventure packed with horror, sci-fi and sex. Our heroes, including Marc Moog (Marc Live,) Silver Synth (Black Silver) and Rex Roland JX3P (longtime Ice associate Pimpin' Rex) reimagine Marvel-style comics as an R-rated action movie, shifting between settings, languages and personas over avant-rap stories like “Analog Technics” and “More Freaks,” set in a futuristic 2005-6 but still sounding visionary in the 2020s. One could be forgiven for missing Pimp to Eat among Ice and Keith's workaholic creative turnout over the past 30+ years, but one would be remiss to skip over this gem of a record, the alternative rap equivalent of a collaboration between Charles Mingus and Sun Ra.

Howie Klein

My Howie Klein remembrance is up today at the site he founded, Down With Tyranny.

Fishbone

My Fishbone profile, including new interviews with Angelo Moore and Christopher Dowd, is up at The Aquarian.

A Late Encounter With the Bad Guy

I lose friends over politics. These days saying as much often looks like a brag, a woker-than-thou policy that you value urgent world affairs more than your personal relationships. But even in my liberal New York City bubble, I’ve found more ways and time to argue politics than the average citizen.

I can’t attribute this to one thing. It probably didn’t help to grow up with two lawyer parents, one of whom loved to argue at family gatherings (usually taking the conservative side against my mother’s family, and the liberal side against my father’s) and enjoyed making me defend any basic claim I made with enough arguments to sway a jury. I also spent my boyhood in swing state Northern Virginia, bordering America’s political capital Washington, D.C., where federal government discourse was practically second nature to anyone I came into contact with. When I left home for college, I was surprised to learn that not everyone liked to argue, or even cared about, American politics.

Still, I didn’t feel shy about questioning someone’s statement, or fact-checking their belief, or asking them to bolster their opinion with more evidence than they may have wanted to provide. My late grandfather, a former Kennedy administration official who held onto his memories of a time when the most-admired conservative in America was Dwight Eisenhower, had as much political wisdom as anyone I’ve met. Yet I wasn’t above clashing with him when he’d suggest that President Biden could unite the country by appointing Republicans to his cabinet, like a modern-day Team of Rivals.

It feels almost inevitable that I'd love the most combative, politically-confrontational rock band of my lifetime, Body Count. In high school I heard their first album, a revolutionary blend of punk and metal music, with hip-hop and horror movie-inspired lyrics, and thought I’d found the coolest band in the world. Their song “Cop Killer” set off a political maelstrom in 1992, which involved the United States president, congress, the FBI, and others in a campaign that eventually got the first Body Count album banned from stores. I heard. Years later, I’d see Body Count’s influence in the world’s increased conversation around white supremacy, police brutality, and great replacement theory, not to mention dozens of new artists inspired by Body Count’s sound and image. With a few years of journalism under my belt, I wanted to thank Body Count by writing the first-ever book about the band. I submitted a proposal to Bloomsbury Publishing, and set to work researching the book these innovative musical heroes deserved.

 

It wasn’t easy chasing down prominent musicians for interviews, and near-impossible to get any of the band’s vilifiers, which I needed for an even-handed account of the story. I could find plenty of ‘90s press about far-right anti-“Cop Killer” hatred, sometimes spilling over into racism and conspiracy theories. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was distorting conservative claims to make my case. Most of the conservatives I reached out to never got back to me. Dan Quayle’s representative dutifully took down my contact info before never responding to any more of my interview requests. Some of the most active law enforcement officials in the fight to get “Cop Killer” banned never replied to my emails or voicemail messages. But the most important one did.

Ron DeLord is described on his professional website as “Attorney at Law, Labor Consultant, Author.” As the co-founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), he’s spent decades as one of the most powerful police union bosses in America. A 2021 New York Times profile described him thusly:

“Ron DeLord, a fiery former Texas cop turned labor organizer, has long taught union leaders how to gain power and not let go. He has likened a police union going after an elected official to a cheetah devouring a wildebeest, and suggested that taking down just one would make others fall in line.

He helped write the playbook that police unions nationwide — seeking better pay, perks and protections from discipline — have followed for decades. Build a war chest. Support your friends. Smear your enemies. Even scare citizens with the threat of crime. One radio spot in El Paso warned residents to support their local police or face ‘the alternative,’ as the sound of gunshots rang out.

‘We took weak, underpaid organizations and built them into what everyone today says are powerful police unions,’ Mr. DeLord said in a recent interview. ‘You may say we went too far. I say you don’t know how far you’ve gone until you’re at the edge of the envelope.’”

If there is one villain in the Body Count story, it’s Ron DeLord. In 1992, DeLord was the most high-profile “Cop Killer” opponent not surnamed Bush, Quayle, North, Gingrich, or Heston. DeLord was certainly the most involved one, organizing press conferences, appearing on TV panels, mailing hundreds of information pamphlets, and spearheading a nationwide boycott of Time Warner, the media conglomerate whose subsidiaries included Body Count’s record label, Sire. In a black and white photo from a Time Warner shareholders meeting, DeLord holds a sign naming Time Warner magazines, movies, TV networks, and amusement parks to boycott. Body Count frontman Ice-T called DeLord “that particular cop down there in Texas who’s trying to show that he’s supercop” in Rolling Stone. Various Time Warner officials pleaded with DeLord for mercy, begging for their family products to be spared from the boycott. DeLord was implacable.

“We don't care if they sell a million more copies because of our protest,” DeLord told the Los Angeles Times. “You have to speak out against this sometime. If not now, when? How bad will the next album Time Warner produces be? We're not backing down one bit on this boycott. We're going to stay on them until the stench of this will make them decide it isn't worth it."

The movement to ban "Cop Killer'' eventually cost Time Warner an estimated $150 million, resulting in the company pulling the record, and dropping both Body Count and Ice-T from the label. To this day, it’s the most successful police boycott of a major corporation—DeLord points out that more recent US law enforcement furor over Beyoncé’s “Formation” or kneeling Colin Kaepernick did not get the police’s desired results.

I found DeLord’s email address on his website and sent him an interview request. I didn’t plan on confronting him about the issue, like a Michael Moore-style ambush. I’d rather coax enough of his opinions out of him and give him enough rope, as the saying goes, to emphasize DeLord’s place on the wrong side of history next to my interviews with Ice-T. DeLord responded promptly and professionally to my request, and we found a time to talk that week.

It sounded like he might be calling me on speakerphone from his car, perhaps confident he wasn’t going to need all of his attention and intelligence to handle me. I’d read that Ron spent his youth as an inner city cop in Beaumont, Texas, thrown into the job at age 21 with no weapons training or criminal code experience. He did not seem like the kind of guy who’d be concerned about something a New York liberal might say about him in a book.

Ron spoke with the Texas accent I knew from old news clips. He was genial, knowledgeable, funny, and remained steadfast in his belief that he’d been right about “Cop Killer.” He offered behind the scenes insights, articulating why it was important for the police to protest the Time Warner corporation and not Body Count or Ice-T. He revealed that he wanted to continue the boycott after the record had been pulled, and that the president of the Police Benevolent Association had to talk him out of it. (“He said ‘Ron, it’s over. We won, move on.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’”) Ron remembered names and positions with expertise, and expressed sympathy for Ice-T and nonwhite Americans as subjects of police brutality. He even praised Ice’s acting skills as a Law & Order policeman, a casting choice that has infuriated some conservatives and law enforcement officials. He expressed hope for more progressive police reforms. Ron made some points I disagreed with—it’s hard for me to hear “Cop Killer” as encouraging targeted violence, or equate the song with writing a composition called “Jew Killer” or “Gay Killer.” But I couldn’t argue with Ron when stated that corporations don’t have free speech rights. Ice-T could sing whatever he wanted, Ron asserted, but Time Warner did not have the same protections.

“I wanted the companies to understand, you have the right to do whatever you wish but it does not come without consequences if you're selling something to the public,” said Ron. “They just didn’t put a human face on the police side of this argument. Whether police officers should or shouldn’t have dealt with someone in a certain way is not the issue. There’s 800,000 police officers out there, and we can’t advocate killing them as some solution to social injustice.”

“You can be for social justice, you can be that police have mishandled cases, or you can accuse them of racism, or systemic racism in our own criminal justice system,” he elaborated. “The point was, you can’t be a corporation, particularly in the family entertainment business, who allows someone to target anyone . . . for violence or death.”

It’s almost too easy to say Ron reminded me of a John Wayne movie character, and it did feel at times like I was speaking with a remaining pillar of traditional American masculinity. But Ron was varied enough—he didn’t speak in one-liners, or offer any hints of violence—to make me think that real tough guys are pretty different from the ones in movies. I thanked him for his time and we ended the call. Later that day, Ron sent me a photocopied excerpt about the “Cop Killer” controversy from a book I’d been unable to find. He CC’d a photographer who’d been on the frontlines of the story and asked for photos. “If you need anything else please reach out to me,” Ron concluded.

People ask what it’s like to interview Henry Rollins or Jello Biafra or Chuck D. But the interview I’ve since reflected on the most was probably Ron DeLord’s. I wanted to include more of our interview and write more about him in the book, which I still needed to edit to make the word count. I read that Ron had joined the Texas police force when jails were still racially segregated and Black officers were not allowed to arrest white citizens. In Dan Charnas’ book The Big Payback, I learned that Ron worked with one of the only Black Texas state senators, Royce West, “to fight for legislation mandating statewide technical, cultural, and racial sensitivity training” for nearly sixty thousand Texas officers, laboring for years to get the bill eventually passed over the objections of major lawmakers and most of the state’s police chiefs. Reading up more on Ron, I was saddened to find out that Ron’s father Clyde, a blue collar union bricklayer, died the summer of the “Cop Killer” scandal, ten days before Ice-T’s press conference announcing the record’s removal. There was no mention of this from Ron or in any of the press I read about him. When I see my friends’ “ACAB” or “ABOLISH THE POLICE” social media posts, I sometimes think of Ron. My grandfather died in 2023, and the week of his funeral I had a dream that Ron had died. “You love Ron!” my wife remarked, upon hearing my umpteenth reflection on one of our conversations. 

When my publisher sent me the first copies of my book, Ron was the second person I mailed one to, after Body Count guitarist Ernie C. I was touched to receive a thank you message from him, and shocked to see the photograph Ron posted on his social media accounts, smiling, holding a copy of my book directly in front of the camera. I looked closer at the bookshelf behind him, taking note of his numerous American history books, and was almost unable to fathom that my book might share a space with such prestigious works. “I was interviewed by author Ben Apatoff for his new book Body Count 33-1/3 about Ice-T’s album in 1991. Cleat and I were involved in pushing back against the rap song Cop Killer.” wrote Ron.

Trying to form words to thank him, I looked at the comments from Ron’s friends, some with “likes” by Ron.

It was an unacceptable song that never should have aired.

We should focus on Jason Aldean and Small Town! 😎

I remember him shooting the finger.

ironic that he was allowed to play a cop on Tv.

I thanked Ron privately, and never commented on his social media posts. I reached out to him again when Rolling Stone ran an excerpt from the book, and Ron encouraged me to write another one. (“Do it you obviously have the talent.”) Ron sent me a signed copy of his academic book Police Unions and the Reform Movement: The Battle for the Future of America’s Police. I’m a little afraid to read the whole thing and learn more of Ron’s beliefs. Flipping through the chapters, I can already see a contribution by someone who endorsed a presidential candidate I can’t abide. Maybe one day I’ll feel as tough as Ron DeLord and read the rest.

Cashing In

For years I disliked hip-hop. Of course I liked Run-DMC and Public Enemy, both of whom I’d discovered through their rock songs, and both of whom were too cool (read: old) to appear on MTV with all the most popular rappers. But I didn’t like the genre; the commercial, capitalist, materialist, millionaire hip-hop that dominated the pop charts throughout my middle school and high school years. The fakeness of it all repulsed me.

In fifth grade, I bought Green Day's Dookie with all my saved allowance money. It was funny, catchy, bratty, and affecting—the first music I loved that I didn’t get from my parents. I had never seen or heard anything cooler than alternative rock, and I jumped at any chance to find it wherever I could. In the nascent internet era, I couldn't see what the bands I loved looked and acted like unless I ended up at a friend's house with unregulated access to MTV, or if someone dropped me off somewhere with a comprehensive magazine rack. It didn't bother me in the least that Green Day left the independent Lookout Records for the major label Reprise, or that Offspring had jumped from Epitaph to Columbia Records. I loved Metallica’s cult favorite Kill ‘Em All as much as their Diamond-selling hit Black Album, and didn’t understand why some people who liked the former detested the latter. Why would Metallica’s success bother me? Didn't we want the bands we liked to be popular?

In ninth grade I started to understand “selling out.” It was around the time I met my first girlfriend, who loved Rent and the show’s anti-sellout theme about as much as I loved Metallica. She brought up selling out nearly every time we spoke—I wasn’t sure why she thought Francis Ford Coppola was a sellout for putting forth the idea for another Godfather movie, but she felt strongly about it. She also seemed smarter and more mature than me, as did the kids at my new high school who had moved on from Green Day to the Dead Kennedys long before I met them. People who knew the music that was on the radio and chose to listen to something different had me in awe. At some point, I didn’t want to listen to artists who had sold out. I didn’t stop loving Green Day, but I’d much rather be seen wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt.

If you were a 90s kid, especially a fan of punk rock, there was little worse that you could be than a sellout. If a band made money from anything that wasn’t music or shirts, their integrity was in question. The music industry was at its commercial peak, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate growing bigger each year, which all of us patronized but none of us liked. Our artistic heroes looked, dressed, and acted like our idea of slackers. “The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout,” wrote Chuck Klosterman in his book about the decade. “Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible…It meant someone was compromising the values they originally espoused in exchange for something superficial (which was usually money, but not necessarily).” 

My father, a lawyer who constantly pushed me to defend my beliefs, would poke holes in my arguments. “You’re pretty tough on Moby,” he said when I complained that the musician had sold his songs to commercials. “David Bowie’s in commercials now. Is he a sellout?”

“David Bowie was already famous. He didn’t do it to make himself rich and popular,” I protested. I still cringed whenever I heard “Changes”  in that software ad with all the fishbowls. 

Keeping up with who did or did not sell out was exhausting, and standards weren’t easy to maintain. Slipknot had gotten too popular, but maybe if their next record would be too heavy for their mainstream fanbase I could like them again. Lou Reed was in a Honda Scooter commercial, but that was because he didn’t care about alienating his fans, not because he sold out. Rage Against the Machine preached Marxism from a Sony-owned record label, but they had only signed with the corporation to spread their message, right? If Ozzy sold out with a TV show we could still like his music, right? Was any of this hypocritical?

As much as I didn’t like sellouts, I could do some mental gymnastics to keep liking my favorite artists. I started to make more exceptions for hip-hop when I found Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg, for no reason other than I liked their records too much to cut their music out of my life. Not to mention my hardcore favorites Body Count led me to the rap career of their quick-witted frontman, Ice-T. “The feeling in the ‘hood is, if you leave you’re selling out. I would like to know who invented that idea,” Ice told Musician magazine in 1991. “I don’t think it was nobody Black.”

“I think of what it is to grow up poor in one of your city's worst neighborhoods and dream of money. To grow up with an eye toward gold while young Black men who look like you and come from a neighborhood like the one you come from in a city just a highway away are covered in gold from rapping,” I read years later in Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Unless They Kill Us. “There is generosity in one who goes out of their way to look fly and raise the bar of the room they're in…As someone who grew up with no money, I know what it is to want to show someone, anyone who will look, what little you have earned. Whether it's drinks, or jewelry or some combination of both. Whether it's donating to a school or throwing a fistful of dollar bills to the sky. I believe all of these things to be noble acts."

Letting myself love hip-hop started opening a scary and fun world to me, with a refreshing difference from the one I lived in. But still, I didn’t want to listen to music by people that sold out. My favorite artist was GG Allin, the punkest of all punks, too raw and edgy for anything to come close to commercializing him. I loved GG’s music enough to separate it from the fact that he was an unrepentant misogynist, racist, and serial abuser. At least no one was calling him a sellout. Besides, punk was clearly ethical enough that we could afford to make room for guys like him. Us punk rock feminists liked Liz Phair, until she made a pop album with Avril Lavigne's co-writers. We liked Kathleen Hanna, too, unaware that more in-the-know punk circles were already calling her out for being a hypocrite who worked in a strip club during the day and sang Bikini Kill songs at night. Watching the controversy unravel years later in the Hanna documentary The Punk Singer, I’m awed by her perseverance and a little ashamed to think of how I’d have reacted in the 90s.

In Hanna’s memoir Rebel Girl, she recalls being asked to justify her position as a professional stripper and outspoken feminist artist. “The DC scene did not think my working as a dancer was a good look,” writes Hanna. “I wasn’t stripping as a statement, I just didn’t have a trust fund like so many DC punks did. And thanks to the Royal Palace, I’d already made the $1,000 we needed to get the van and start playing shows again.” She was consistently expected to prove her authenticity, over everything from stripping to writing dance hooks for Le Tigre to falling in love with and marrying a Beastie Boy. I’m guessing none of Hanna’s purist detractors have written anything as transcendent as “Rebel Girl.”

Not long ago, I met up with some friends at Tattoo Bar for pregame drinks before we headed next door to Kings Theatre for the Bikini Kill reunion. The bartenders knew their audience and played 90s alternative rock while we waited. When the playlist landed on No Doubt's "Just a Girl," a forty-something riot grrrl at our table looked up from her drink upon hearing the first notes.

"When this came out, to me, No Doubt was the enemy," she said. "It was fake punk, it was fake riot grrrl, I hated it. And now this is my karaoke song," she smiled. "I even get teary-eyed when I hear 'Don't Speak.'”

I also catch myself enjoying music that I wouldn’t have let myself like in high school, so much that I’ve started losing track of my teenage standards. I heard a popular song where a woman seethed at her ex who preferred “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” She sounded hurt. I didn’t know that was the kind of thing that could make a popular person feel hurt. I also really loved the song. GG Allin would’ve been appalled.

More recently, Ice-T has been appearing in an ad campaign for Honey Nut Cheerios. I’ve watched the commercials numerous times, laughing and sharing them with my friends who’d appreciate seeing the author of “Cop Killer,” “KKK Bitch,” and “Evil Dick” showing off his dance moves with a cartoon bumble bee. I might have been irked by those ads 25 years ago, horrified by the thought that Ice compromised his integrity by acting silly, and worried that nobody would take him seriously again. But Ice doesn’t care, and neither do I, listening to his music with the same reverence I’ve felt for most of my life. It’s hard for me to imagine younger listeners, most of whom have never bought a CD, caring either. Watching a hot newer punk band like Turnstile sell a song to Taco Bell with no discernible backlash, I’m thankful their fans aren’t wasting a month arguing over it like my high school buddies might have.

In college I met Pan Asian Repertory Theatre co-founder Ernest Abuba, whose acting career had included on-screen roles with Bruce Willis and Laurence Fishburne. While he regaled me with stories, I learned that he had turned down a role in 90s sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. “I had the part,” Ernest told me. “I was working on the scene with Bruce, when Luc Besson, the director, came over and said”—Ernest drew out an exaggerated French impression—“‘Uh, can you do this scene again, and this time do a funny Chinese accent.’”

Ernest laughed. “I said ‘Fuck you, racist!’ and I left,” he stated, punctuating the story with another laugh. Still a little shocked, I laughed too.

"But you know what," said Ernest. "If I were starving, I would have taken it."

I’ve never worried about starving in my life. It feels like I've worried about almost everything else that’s ever crossed my mind. But never starving.

Howie Klein

Howie Klein, president of 415 Records, with heavy-metal group Rude Girl in San Francisco, Calif., 1984 (Iris Schneider, Los Angeles Times - https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002sf7c)

Sad to see that Howie Klein, a political and music industry hero as well as one of the best storytellers I've known, has died. He relentlessly fought for important causes and used his stature to help artists and marginalized people. Great punk rock sense of humor, too. 

I was surprised to hear Jello Biafra tell me how much he loved Howie, and that I needed to talk to him. Not that I didn't have utmost respect for Howie—it's just that he was in the upper ranks of the corporate music industry, against so much of what Jello stands for. Of course, within minutes of speaking with Howie I could tell they were kindred spirits. Howie had a mischievous, anarchic streak that was constantly superseded authority and sticking it to the man, long after so many of the music forms he championed had become mainstream. From his concert bookings at a Stony Brook University student (the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, Otis Redding, the Who, many others) through his interviews as a San Francisco DJ (the Cramps, Devo, Iggy Pop, the Sex Pistols, many others) through his stints at 415, Sire, and Reprise Records (the Cure, Green Day, Fleetwood Mac, Ice-T,  Madonna, Alanis Morissette, the Pretenders, Ramones, Lou Reed, Romeo Void, the Smiths, Neil Young, many others), he's almost certainly worked with some music you love, likely something you'd never have heard without Howie's efforts and influence.

He signed Body Count out of a love for their music and the musicians, and staunchly defended them against pressure from America's government and police forces when the "Cop Killer" scandal broke. He spoke with me about flying out to New York solo to defend "Cop Killer" from corporate (when asked if he had a suit for the journey, his response was that he'd gotten one for his bar mitzvah), and revealed that the Time Warner bomb threats were being delivered by angry policemen. But my favorite Howie story is when the Body Count record went gold he had plaques printed for Dan Quayle and Charlton Heston. He was a critical help with my book, sharing stories he hadn't told before, and still made time to talk to me about getting Lou Reed to meet Vaclav Havel at the White House. Today I learned his buyout resignation amidst the disastrous Time Warner-AOL merger occurred a day before his successor infamously rejected Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Howie continued to fight for free speech, artists' rights and progressive causes long after the banning of "Cop Killer," even from his deathbed. I wish he'd written a book, though he certainly cared more about improving the world than promoting his brand. I cherish our conversations and will miss him. Thank you, Howie. 

Ace Frehley

Ace seemed like one of us. Kiss were superheroes, obviously, who could fly, breathe fire, spit blood and send smoke from their instruments upon command. Space Ace was right up there with them, shaking his axe in unison with his bandmates, riffs punctuated by arena-shaking explosives. But when the make came off and we started to see the men behind the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman and the Catman, Ace above all seemed like a regular guy, a laid back stoner who basically stumbled into company with his ambitious band dictators Paul and Gene. Nothing could stop those two guys from being rich and famous, and they've made it clear that money, power and (to use a nicer term than Gene's) women were their priorities. But even at the top, Ace seemed like he got there just because he was a nice guy who loved to rock. He could sing about as well as his fans, and that was perfect for "Rocket Ride," "Shock Me" and of course "New York Groove."

It's easy to see why Kiss fans, famously some of the most devoted and obsessive in modern music, almost universally prefer the Frehley lineup. He was there for the classics, and his contributions—that life-affirming guitar work on "Let Me Go, Rock 'n' Roll," the haunting breakdown in "Strange Ways," the skyscraping leads on "Shout It Out Loud"—are as entrenched in Kiss' DNA as anything the band ever recorded. It's no surprise that adolescents who listen to Kiss grew up to be Dimebag Darrell, Ihsahn, Tom Morello, Mike McCready and more than any published remembrances will contain. Young Kirk Hammett dressed as Ace for Halloween and Jason Newsted changed his musical direction upon hearing Dressed to Kill. Two members of Body Count (D-Roc the Executioner and "Ill Will" Dorsey) have cited Kiss as the reason they make music. Out of all Local H's storied Halloween shows, Scott Lucas cites their Kiss performance as a personal favorite.

Ace was not above embarrassing rock star indulgences or abhorrent political preferences, and much as we wish he'd stayed in Kiss, his habit seemed like more than his taskmaster bosses could bare. But I'd bet the most expensive piece of Kiss merchandise (maybe the Koffin? No, the Gene Simmons box set that he personally delivered to your house) that if polled, the Kiss Army would overwhelmingly pick Ace as the one we'd most like to hang with. He seemed like a genuine Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth type who was thrilled to be there, sometimes at the behest of this teetotaler bandmates (mention Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show among the Kiss Army and we'll all know exactly what you're talking about). But even Gene and Paul were willing to tolerate an inordinate amount of Ace tomfoolery in exchange for the joyous, unmistakable solos Ace put on record, a perfect dose of cheerful sloppiness for an otherwise Apollonian band.

Kiss' decision to release four solo albums from each member on the same day is widely viewed as an indulgent decision that helped tank the band's popularity. But like George Harrison releasing the best solo Beatles album, Ace stepped up from behind the confines of his bandleaders, proving that he had more good ideas than Gene and Paul knew what to do with, or had the sense to include on Kiss albums. "Rip It Up," "Snow Blind" and the underrated instrumental "Fractured Mirror" are worthy of classic-era Kiss, and his improvement of Hello's "New York Groove" has gone from being a Kiss Army favorite to a city anthem closing in on the ubiquity of Sinatra's "New York, New York." It now feels as beloved outside the Church of Kisstianity as "Rock and Roll All Nite" or "Detroit Rock City." It's covered by everyone from Yo La Tengo to the Roots. It's played over the PA at Citi Field Mets victories and soundtracks COVID-19 recovery campaigns. It's no surprise that Kiss now include in on their compilation albums, claiming it as one of the band's own.

Not long ago, I saw a mother out with her young daughter, a little girl in full Kiss make up. When I expressed my delight, the mother told me they were on their way home from a Kiss-themed birthday party, where all the kids got their faces painted and won Kiss goody bags. It reminded me that Kiss fandom is like Star Wars fandom, or Batman fandom—we read books about it, we dress like them for Halloween, we play along with their various ups and downs. Kiss are often criticized for being more of a business than a band (fair—part of that business is quality control, which Kiss delivers live and on record in droves), but Ace was an undeniable fan. No one could question his love of music or performing. Through much of this year, he was still playing Kiss songs as well as his body would let him, basing his setlist on fan favorites, happy to be anywhere he could play guitar. Thank you Space Ace, forever in a New York Groove.