“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.
