December 7, 2022 • 50 mins
Rapper Ice-T faced major backlash after he and his heavy-metal side project Body Count released their dark, menacing track “Cop Killer.” They’d been performing the song for a year before it appeared on their 1992 debut album, but the record landed in stores just weeks before four police officers were acquitted in the trial for the beating of Black motorist Rodney King and riots over the verdict erupted in the streets of Los Angeles.
Police organizations accused “Cop Killer” of inciting violence across the country, and it became an ideal target for right-wing politicians, including President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, who aimed to strike down anything that challenged “family values.” With the FBI, the IRS, and the NRA on his back, Ice-T suddenly found himself at the center of a debate over the limits of freedom of speech.
In this episode, we explore the origins of “Cop Killer,” the outrage it sparked in 1992, and how Ice-T and his label reacted to the fallout. With special guests Ice-T and Body Count guitarist Ernie C.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Where Were You in ninety two is a production of
I Heart Radio. A special note this episode features themes
of violence, explicit language, descriptions of sexual acts and desires,
and so many F bombs and may not be suitable
for all listeners. They turned around and apt Rodney King.
They were really looking for escape thought. The Fraternal Order
(00:23):
to Police in Texas found this song and they go, oh,
let's pointing him. He's the problem. And they try to,
you know, deflect what's really going on, which is cops
killing kids. Welcome to Where Are You In? A podcast
(00:43):
in which I your host Jason Lafier look back at
the major hits, one hit wonders, shocking news stories, and
irresistible scandals that shaped what might be the wildest, most eclectic,
most controversial twelve months of music effort. This week, legendary
rapper Ice T drew the ire of President Bush, the SBI,
(01:05):
the I R S, and the n r A when
he and his thrash metal side project body Count released
their dark, vicious track cop Killer. They've been performing the
song for a year before it appeared on their debut album,
but the record landed in stores just weeks before a
group of police officers were acquitted and the trial for
the beating of black motorist Rodney King, and riots over
(01:25):
the verdict erupted in the streets of Los Angeles. Critics
accused cop Killer of inciting violence across the country, and
it became the perfect fodder for right wing politicians aiming
to take down anything that challenged the idea of family values.
Ice T found himself and the crosshairs of his conservative
opponents and at the center of a debate over the
limits of freedom of speech. In this episode, we explore
(01:48):
the origins of cop Killer, the outrage that sparked in
and how ice T reacted to the fallout, and the
prospect of his career ending. Plus, Ice joins us to
discuss his new book, Split Decision, which reveals his deep
connection with a close friend and former crime partner who
was sentenced to life in prison that very same year,
(02:10):
March three. Rodney King, a construction worker who was on
parole after serving time for robbing a convenience store of
two hundred dollars, was heading home from a friend's house.
He'd been drinking and smoking weed and was speeding when
police attempted to pull him over. He tried out running them.
He eventually stopped in Lake Few Terrorists, a suburban neighborhood
in Los Angeles. Four police officers apprehended him, thinking he
(02:34):
was high on PCP because of his sweating and his strength.
During the struggle that ensued, when he lunged at one officer,
the officer hit him in the head with the baton.
King fell, and two officers continued hitting him as he
tried to stand back up. They continued to strike him
at their sergeant's direction, a total of fifty six times.
At one point, a fourth officer, Theodore Barsino, who was Latino,
(02:57):
tried to stop his three white colleagues. He did, however,
stomp on King. Once King was handcuffed, one officer dragged
him face down in the street. King was then taken
away in an ambulance. His injuries included fractures and cuts
on his face, multiple bruises, a broken cheekbone, and a
broken ankle. This was long before smartphones, but as Ben
(03:27):
Westhof rights in his two thousand sixteen book American Gangsters,
a man named George Holliday recorded King's beating for nine
minutes with a video camera from the balcony of his
apartment he sold the tape to a local TV station
for five dollars. The station sent the footage to the
Los Angeles Police Department and the officers were charged with
excessive force. As a documented assault aired on news outlets
(03:50):
all over the US. It was inescapable, despite the omnipresence
of the footage and the undeniably hostile beating at captured.
The trials, mostly white, jerk and Semi Valley, forty miles
from downtown l A was not convinced. On April twenty nine,
all four officers were acquitted on their assault charges, while
(04:10):
three were acquitted on their excessive force charges. A year later,
the officers would go before a jury in a federal
trial and two of them would be found guilty, with
both serving thirty months in prison. L A p D
Police Chief Daryl Gates took some heat for the incident.
He responded by announcing his retirement. That was hardly the
consolation confused and incent citizens needed after that original verdict.
(04:35):
For some of them, nothing would alleviate the pain and
the rage they felt. If they couldn't get justice, they
wanted to revenge. The Los Angeles riots began on a
Korean owned deli when five black men attempted to steal
bottles of whiskey and then attacked the owner's son when
he tried to stop them. They threw the bottles at
the door, shattering it, with one man yelling this is
(04:56):
for Rodney King before they ran off. Police officers weren't
able to touch them, but did arrest another man who
was swinging a baseball bat at a car with two
white men inside it. Elsewhere, a crowd chucked rocks at
officers who'd arrested a teenage boy. They were treated for
fear of their safety. Riders began pulling white people from
their vehicles and assaulting them. One man, Reginald Denny, was
(05:20):
hit with a hammer, a brick, and an oxygen tank
and suffered brain damage. Other riders swarmed l a p
D headquarters, curling trash cans at it and burning a
parking kiosk, while others targeted the Los Angeles Times office.
Protesters launched molotov cocktails into the air. Businesses, including gun stores,
(05:44):
were looted, some were severely damaged, buildings caught on fire.
You could hear hip hop group n W A song
Fucked the Police blaring from car stereos, a fitting soundtrack
to the unleashed fury, devastation and chaos US. The National Guard,
the Marines, and the U. S Army were called in
(06:06):
Schools shut Down, then West tough Rights and American Gangsters.
That the total cost of destruction citywide was estimated to
be a billion dollars and that more than sixty people
died during the riots, but witnesses say many more were
killed than what the news reported. Flashback to the nineteen eighties.
(06:29):
Ice Tea was not yet NYPD sergeant odif and Finn
Tutuola on Law and Order SPU, or much of an
actor at all. He'd had some bit parts. He was, however,
a gifted lyricist and producer, and one of the first
l A rappers to break big. Born Tracy Merrow and
raised in an affluent New Jersey suburb, Ice was forced
(06:49):
to go live with his aunt in south central Los
Angeles after both his parents died of heart attacks within
the span of four years. He attended Crenshaw High School,
where his classmates included members of the rival gang ings,
the Crips and the Brims later known as the Bloods.
He was never part of either, but hung around some
crips who took a liking to him. At seventeen, he
moved out of his aunt's place and was able to
get a cheap apartment. After serving four years in the
(07:12):
army in Hawaii, he returned to l A to make
money stealing rolexes, jewelry, and cars. When it got too dicey,
he decided to leave his life of crime behind. He
pivoted to hip hop, specifically hip hop, inspired by his
checkered past and life on the streets in South Central
(07:34):
As I said, I rap about what I know. In
his two thousand two books Split Decision, he calls his
breakout song six in the Morning, which is widely acknowledged
as a defining track in the gangster rap movement, a
piece of faction, saying quote, it's a fictional adventure based
on factual experiences. The song opens with the lines six
(08:02):
in the morning, Police at my door, Fresh Adidas squeak
across the bathroom floor, out my back window. I make
my escape. I didn't even get a chance to grab
my old school tape. Later, he wraps I'm a self
made monster of the city streets, remotely controlled by hard
hip hop beats, but just living in the city as
a serious task, didn't know what the cops wanted, didn't
(08:24):
have time to ask. He eventually became the first rapper
signed to Warner Brothers label Sire Records, then home to Madonna.
By the end of UD put out three albums of
Tough menacing explicit gangster rap that earned favorable reviews from critics,
but also a lot of attention from sensors sex, drugs,
(08:45):
gun violence, how police were bulldozing Western civilization. Nothing was
off the table in his detailed, profane, sometimes disturbing accounts
of hustling, running from the law, and rebellion against authority.
His debut album, rhymed As was one of the first
to get a prontal advisory sticker slapped on it. Ice
embrace that sticker like a badge of honor. He scoffed
(09:07):
at the idea of censorship. He believed in what he
called quote artistic integrity and rejected the idea of recording
radio audits of his songs, which weren't getting much airplay anyway.
He addressed this on his track Radio Suckers. They're making
radio whack. People have to escape. But even if I'm banned,
I'll sell a million tapes. He wasn't wrong his trio
(09:29):
of LPs for Warner Brothers seven Ryan plays Power, the
Iceberg freedom of speech. Just watch what you say. We're
all certified platinum or gold, so yeah, fuck radio. He
was raking it in just from sales and touring. I
didn't think his refusal to play by the rules would
result in a serious blow to his career. Or rather,
(09:51):
he took great pleasure in the gamble he got off
and being an agitator, living on the edge made him
feel alive. As he writes in two thousand elevens Ice
a mem war of gangster life and redemption from South
Central to Hollywood. Quote, I'm not a cat to stay
on cruise control. I like to keep ship moving. As
the eighties came to a close, he was ready for
the next challenge. He cemented his status as a formidable
(10:14):
force and gangster rap. Now it was time to take
a stabish on the even harder metal. Ice had gotten
into rock because of his cousin, Earl, with whom he'd
shared a bedroom when he was living with his aunt
as a kid in junior high in the mid seventies.
Earl exposed him to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Led
Zeppelin and Black Sabbath guitar wielding Titans, who left a
(10:36):
major imprint on him his iced tea. He'd sampled Black
Sabbath and incorporated guitars into his music. As he writes,
an ice rap was a form of rock because it,
like rock, was an active aggression of a revolt against
the status quo. But in while hanging out with some
of his old pals in the studio who were clamoring
(10:56):
to record with him, he decided to start an actual
hard rock band. They called themselves body Count. The mostly
white members of the hardcore scene, some tattooeds, some skinheads,
weren't always the most welcoming audience for a group of
black dudes showing up on their turf. They were suspicious
and racist, and body Count did nothing to hide their roots.
(11:20):
As the group's guitarist Ernie Cunnigan, better known as Ernie
c recalls, you know they were rock. There were black
rockers that played rock during that time. They were more
accepted than us because they were the makeup and all
this kind of stuff. We came out like we just
came from a drive box, but we didn't look like
a rock man we looked like, but once body Count
(11:41):
started playing, many skeptics changed their minds. Not that I
thought they had anything to prove. As he noted in
his song body Count from his album O G, original
gangster rock music was black music, originated by forefathers like
Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He reiterates the sentiment in
his book Split Decision, saying quote, they took the blues,
(12:02):
electrified it, and sped it up. Even the name rock
and roll was just the old time black slang for
fucking straight up. Ernie c who was ICE's friend from
Crenshaw High School, hooked him up with Perry Farrell of
Jane's Addiction, who invited him to take part in a
new roving festival he was launching called Lallapalooza. Ice accepted,
(12:22):
dividing his set in half, playing some of his solo
work before inviting body Count out onto the stage. The
performances were a success, and Ice found himself earning cred
with both hip hop heads and alternative audiences. Body Count
didn't have much material, but the response they witnessed it
shows proved to them that they were onto something. After
the first tour, Sire Records signed the group Ice now
(12:45):
had two deals with the same label. Body Count hunker
down in the studio to record their self titled debut
full length, which Sire released in March, a volcanic blast
of punk and metal that came wrapped in a miniature
body bag. Props to that marketing team body Count. That
(13:06):
album took a long, cold look at the dark side
of South central Los Angeles. This was a world played
by poverty, drugs, and desperation, where violent gangs clashed and
kids were the casualty. The tension mounts on with the
body count Ice cries and the title track illustrating not
only the bloodshed, but how impervious viewers have become to
(13:29):
the young corpses piling up in the news, they were
just blips before the anchor jumped to a sports segment.
This is what inspired the group's name. The World's insane
while you drink Champagne and I'm living in black brain
goes another line. This was also a land where good
guys with the bad guys, where police murdered men for
the way they dressed, for the type of music, they
(13:51):
blasted for the color of their skin. Body Counts most
memorable and most controversial song was cop Killer. It's about
his subtle as baby got Back, and for that reason,
some whould argue even funnier. It does exactly what it
says on the tin, with Ice reciting and it's spoken
word intro, I'd like to take a pig out here
(14:12):
in this parking lot and shoot him in their motherfucking face.
Cue the thrashing, foreboding guitars before Ice unleashes the titular
phrase before he launches into the breakneck chorus, we get
a fuse, a lot of shots fired into our ears,
as if we're the officer at the receiving end of
the narrator's maniacal rampage. Then the chorus, cop killer, better
(14:37):
you than me, cop Killer, Fuck police brutality, cop Killer.
I know your family's grieving, fuck them, cop Killer, But
tonight we get even. Okay. I know it may seem
weird that I said this song was funny, but it's
so over the top, so unsubtle, that by today's standards
(14:59):
it sounds almost quaint. But in this was risky business,
which was ICE's favorite kind of business. Ice has described
cop Killer as a protest song based on psycho killer
talking Heads seventy seven new wave and art rock classic.
The track was ICE's dark, twisted fantasy of an armed
(15:20):
assailant who loses his black friend at the hands of
police and then loses his mind hunting down cops one
night and snuffing them out one by one. It's nuts
to think he wrote it before Hordes of l a
residence on a war path ripped through the city, and
the spring of In Split Decision, Ice recalls feeling like
(15:43):
the l A p D Was a quote unquote criminal regime,
and notes that the beating of Rodney King was hardly
an isolated incident. He even remembers seeing cop cars in
his neighborhood with Confederate flags on their bumpers. Black men
feared the Los Angeles police, even if they've done nothing wrong.
Coming into a body count rehearsal. One day, Ice was
(16:04):
humming Psycho Killer and his bandmate beat Master V told
him they should write a song called cop Killer, revealing
that he had a friend who'd been shot by police
in the back and paralyzed. Ices other bandmate, Ernie C
wrote the music, Ice wrote the lyrics. If the subject
matter was gruesome, Ice asserted that it shouldn't be reboting.
(16:25):
As he writes in his memoir Ice, 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. With Cop Killer, Ice put slasher movie
imagery to music, hoping to use a slice of outlandish
(16:48):
camp fiction to depict a harsh truth. Racial bias and
police brutality were very real. Innocent men were dying. But
the end of the song breaks and fiction, ripping straight
from the headlines. Fucked the police for Darryl Gates, fucked
the police for Rodney King, fucked the police from my
(17:11):
dead homies, Fucked the police for your freedom. As Ernie
C explains, truth telling was body counts entire m O.
We wrote songs about what we knew about, and this
is what we knew. We know about racism, and we
know about a cop killing. That's what made it so irrelevant.
But his Ice or counts and split decision. When I
(17:32):
wrote Cop Killer, it wasn't addressing all cops. It was
addressing racist, abusive, corrupt, out of control cops. Cop Killer
wasn't necessarily groundbreaking. Compton hip hop group and w A
had already rapped about slaying cops and their infamous song
Fucked the Police. How Eric Clapton and even scored a
(17:53):
number one hit with his cover of Bob Marley's I
Shot the Sheriff way back into It was the timing
of the track's release that proved to be its undoing.
Soon Ice would have everyone powerful on his back up. Next,
(18:15):
after the break, we dig into the nationwide scandal surrounding
Iced Tea and Cop Killer after it came out in
just weeks before violent riots tore through the streets of
Los Angeles. Iced Tea had written cop kular In and
(18:37):
had been performing at Lallapalus of the year before it
appeared on body Counts debut album, But when the l
A p D officers who had beaten Rodney King were acquitted,
the response was intense and immediate. The Los Angeles race
riots broke out in April, just weeks after body Count dropped.
Body Count member Ernie c recalls the moment he first
(19:00):
saw the smoke and fire from the riots. He was
at ICE's house in the Hollywood Hills doing interviews with
some journalist who'd flown in from Germany and they get
here and it's like, hey, wind ellis burned it to
the ground. They're like, what's going on? And we're like, well,
this song right here kind of predicts. It's a precursor
to what's going on right now. We came out with
this last month, and this is what happens, you know now,
(19:22):
So you know, it wasn't a surprise to us, just
you know, it was getting to a boiling point given
the circumstances, controversy over cop Killer seemed inevitable. When it
caught wind of the song, The Combined Law Enforcement Association
of Texas or CLEAT, the state's largest police advocacy group,
boycotted Time Warner. It's president and co founder, Ronda Lord,
(19:46):
not only called for Warner Brothers to remove cop Killer
from Body Counts album and for the company and Iced
Tea to apologize, but it also demanded that ICE make
a million dollar donation to a community service program. All
of this July six, when Time Warners shareholders would have
a meeting in Beverly Hills. Other police organizations followed suit,
(20:07):
vilifying ICE and Time Warner media outlets reported on the boycott, but,
as Dan Charnis writes in his two thousand ten books
The Big Payback The History of the Business of Hip Hop,
most of them misidentified cop Killer as an Ice t
song and referred to it as a rap track rather
than a heavy metal track. The public outcry became specifically
(20:27):
a hip hop issue. Was an election year only made
matters worse for Ice and body count. Cop Killer was
the perfect target for right wing Republicans, an unflinching, incendiary
celebration of violence. It was the antithesis of conservative quote
unquote family values, and white kids loved it. They went
(20:49):
mad to it at live shows, washing and pumping their
fists in the air, shouting along with the lyrics. Ice
rights in his book Split Decision, the main thing I
learned about cop Killer is this, when you inject white
kids with black rage, and you do it through something
as seductive and persuasives rock and roll, that's dangerous to
the people in authority. That's always going to be seen
(21:10):
as a threat. Ice recalls wanting the racket to die down,
but things only escalated. The l a county board, an
Alabama governor, sixty members of the House of Representatives, led
by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich politicians began piling on
(21:32):
cop Killer. Soon President George H. W. Bush and Vice
President Dan Quail had both condemned the release of body count,
with Quail declaring at a campaign fundraiser, I am outraged
at the fact that Time Warner, a major corporation, is
making money off a record called cop Killer that suggests
that it is okay to kill cops. I find that outrageous.
(21:55):
Quail name dropped cop Killer continually during his and Bushes
campaign against Old Clinton that year. Dennis S. Martin, former
president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, claimed
this song had been implicated and quote at least two
incidents and has inflamed racial tensions in cities across the country,
and he called it quote an affront to the officers
(22:20):
alone who have been killed in the line of duty.
Time Warner employees received nasty letters and phone calls not
to mention death threats. Still, Gerald Levin, the white co
CEO of Time Warner at the time Penda Wall Street Journal,
op ed to clarify his stance on the matter. He
asserted there, rather than glorifying violence, cop Killer was a
(22:42):
portrait of what was going on in its narrator's head.
It was fantasy. He explained that instead of trying to
quote silence, the messenger opponent should be quote heating the
anguished cry contained in his message. He added the dropping
the song from Body count would be a quote destructive precedent,
hampering artists freedom of expression in the future. Ice too
(23:04):
initially stood his ground defending the message behind Cop Killer,
but then he started feeling like he was under piercing scrutiny.
He'd become a national security risk, he said, the I
r S started to audit his taxes, trying to determine
if he was amassing guns for some sort of coup,
and that his daughter was even pulled out of junior
high school and questioned about his possible ties to any
(23:27):
quote paramilitary organizations. He had nothing to hide. Everyone knew
he had a criminal background because he'd been honest about
it from the start of his career. But he was
growing uneasy, feeling like some powerful people were closing in.
The U S President and VP had decried Body Counts music,
but actor and National Rifle Association President Charles and Heston
(23:50):
took his disapproval straight to that July sixteenth time Warner
shareholders meeting, which took place at the Regent Beverly, Wilshire Hotel.
Well pickets sported side lines with slogans like rapid crap outside.
Haston addressed a group of roughly a thousand at the meeting.
He had stock in the company has been Westhough rights
in Original Gangsters. Haston read lyrics from cop Killer and
(24:12):
another body Count tract, KKK Bitch to drive his point home. Okay,
I gotta pause to just marvel at the absolute fucking
absurdity of KKK Bitch, which I literally cannot even say
without laughing. I won't go into too much detail, just
google it, but I will say this joint is about
(24:32):
fictional white supremacist orgies the body Count throw Down South
to teach white girls how to properly get laid. It
is graphic and deranged and makes even knee blush. Tipper Goore,
the wife of then Democratic VP candidate L Gore, had
co founded the Parents Music Resource Center or p MRC,
which advocated for labeling the covers of records that featured
(24:54):
profane language or content with a parental Advisory sticker. Kk
He bitch includes a mention of her young nieces to
picture middle aged oscar winning thespian Charleton Heston. Mr Ben
hur himself reciting any of its lyrics is the most
cringe thing I've imagined so far in this podcast. Meanwhile,
(25:15):
as Is re calls in his memoir ice before he
began reading the words to cop Killer, Heston announced, these
are the lyrics to Killer. Cop Oops, I mean cop Killer.
Dude clearly hadn't memorized his lines. On a more serious note,
two police officers who had been shot in the face
also showed up to criticize the song. The July six
(25:38):
deadline passed and Cop Killer remained available for purchase, but
shareholders were spooked. Time Warner brought in a crisis management expert.
Something needed to happen. Warner Brothers had stood behind body
Counts music home to Madonna and Prince and Lewd comedian
(25:59):
Andrew ice Clay. It was no stranger to controversial artists,
but the US President and the FBI also oku money
on the line that ship was serious. CEO Gerald Levin
in the label were never carrious position, even if all
the uproar helped boost Body Counts sales. Some music stores
wouldn't carry it. Meanwhile, as west Hough notes and Original Gangsters,
(26:23):
the police department in Greensboro, North Carolina, threatened to ignore
a stores emergency calls if it continued to stock the album.
I didn't want Warner Brothers to take responsibility for a
cut he had written. West off details and meeting the
artist had with Time Warner in which it placed a
quarter on a table, saying it represented its music division
and that Ice was just a tiny spot on that quarter.
(26:46):
But the musician says he wasn't forced to disavow cop Killer,
writing an Ice They never treated me like ship, never
got mad or yelled at me. Rather, Ice t says
he understood the gravity of the situation. Warner Brothers had
even been faced with bomb scares. As Dan Charnis writes
into Big Payback, a bomb squad brought in to investigate
(27:07):
even detonated a package. Ice empathized with the guys who
signed his checks, so he told Warner to remove the
song from the album. Cleet ceased its boycott. Ultimately body Count.
The album was re released without cop Killer, and the
song was given away as a free single at body
(27:28):
Count concerts to hear it today. You can snag a
CD copy of the original pressing of the album on
eBay or discards, or you can listen to it on YouTube.
But as many discovered in the wake of George Floyd's
murder at the hands of Minneapples police in two thousand twenty,
it is not streaming or available to download. The reason
(27:48):
why remains a mystery. But Jeffrey Weiss, a Warner Brothers
product manager for body Count's debut album, speculated to Billboard,
I can really imagine ice T doesn't want to think
about ninet ninety two that much, m unlike yours truly.
After the debacle, Warner dropped some of its wrap acts
(28:11):
because of the questionable content of their music. As for
ice t solo rap career at the Sire label, well,
his victoriol towards the Police was well intact on his
planned fifth album, Home Invasion, which boasted provocative, violent cover
art and included lyrics about cops breath smelling like semen
and a narrator taking them in an alley and giving
them a pop pop pop to the dome time. Warner
(28:34):
balked at this, even though he still owed the label
two Records. Ice knew what was at stake for him,
his bandmates, and the label if he kept their arrangement
and continued to speak filter free constant conflict, He felt
he had no choice but to ask to terminate his
embody Counts contracts, says body Counts er Andy, See, we
were stopped. We were stopped at a stop, you know
(28:56):
what I mean. And in the band, which is brand new,
we weren't going anywhere. Mortars didn't want to book us,
you know, and when people yeah, it was just time
for us to go to keep moving forward. After having
worked with Ice for six years, Warner Brothers obliged and
turned him loose. Released on Priority Records in March, Home
(29:18):
Invasion went gold, but sold about half the copies of
its predecessor, O G Original Gangster. Some records stores refused
to carry it, others kept its placement. Discreet reviews were mixed.
ICE's music career is never the same. Even after cop
(29:40):
Cler disappeared from Body Count's debut album, police groups continue
to boycott the band shows. He'd arguably become more famous
for his acting on Law and Order SVU, as Ice
writes in his two thousand eleven memoir, Ice. People think
controversy helps your bottom line, but I disagree. There was
a big trade off. Yes, you sell some records with
(30:02):
all that static, the cancelation of concerts, the hiking insurance
for the shows you do get, there are way more
costs to come along with controversy than benefits. I would
never advise people the controversy is the way to blow up.
You'll become known, but will translate into money probably not.
Ice had long been considered an o G, but after
he essentially tossed cop Killer in the bargain bin of
(30:24):
his catalog hip hop magazine, the source castigated him, with
the REGINALD C. Dennis writing an op ed titled the
Cops gag Iced Tea as Rerap Dead. The piece began
mark July on your calendars as the beginning of the
end of rap music? Would conservatives win? Some of ICE's
(30:45):
peers now deem him a coward. They became as harsh
as critics. He claims, why stifle his creativity, his resounding
rallying cry against police brutality for a bunch of stuffy Republicans?
Why give in? Why risk opening the floodgates from more
censorship in hip hop and music in general. Still, he
stands his ground ready in his memoir walk in My
(31:08):
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 up. The body count backlash took its
toll on Iced Tea. But in addition to career drama,
(31:31):
he was dealing with some personal stuff. In ninety two well,
he had stopped coordinating jewel heights to pursue music. His
longtime friend, an ex crime partner, Spike, had fallen deeper
and deeper into crime, his schemes getting more and more elaborate,
more and more dangerous. After one of his robberies resulted
in a fatal shooting, Spike, who orchestrated the theft, was
(31:52):
sentenced to thirty five years to life in prison. Ice
was shocked when he heard the news. He and Spike
had never been by during their days executing heist. He
soon learned that Spike hadn't shot the victim, but had
been implicated for overseeing the robbery. Spike disappeared. I didn't
hear from him for three years. When he finally did,
(32:14):
Spike was calling him from a phone in prison. At
that moment, I became very aware of how lucky he
was to have abandoned the life of hustling and heights.
He'd had Potus, the FBI, the I R S, the
n r A, and the police on his back, but
unlike Spike, he had his freedom up Next, after the break,
(32:38):
Ice Tea joins us to talk about the legacy of
Cop Killer, the fallout from its release, and his new
book Split Decision, which chronicles his life as a jewel
thief and traces the very different paths he and Spike followed.
(33:06):
Please know this segment contains themes of violence, explicit language,
and cursing that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Welcome back to Where Were You and nine two. We've
been discussing Ice Team and as heavy metal band Body
Counts track cop Killer and Off the Rails, controversial protest
anthem that address police brutality. Now it's time to hear
(33:29):
from the man behind it, rapper, actor, songwriter and producer
Ice Team. So can you tell me about that particular
moment in your life? I've I've asked a lot of
the guests, where were you in ninety two? That's how
I start the interview, and uh, you you can tell
me very clearly where you were. And this book is,
(33:50):
like I said, sort of hinges on that particular moment
in time. So you know, ninety two is kind of
like when we got hit with the cop Killers ship,
you know, like they turned around and after Rodney King,
they were really looking for escapegoat. They were looking. You know,
the pressure was on the police because obviously for video
(34:11):
they people saw they were out of pocket, and the
Fraternal Order the police in Texas found this song and
they go, oh, let's pointing him. He's the problem. And
they try to, you know, deflect what's really going on,
which is cops killing kids. To me making an imaginary
strong about someone who who went after the cops. Now,
(34:34):
now I gotta remember, if the cops weren't out of
pocket at that time, there was no energy to write
cop killer, you know. If the cops are out doing
the right thing, pulling cats out of trees and everyone
loved him, I couldn't have done fireman killer. I couldn't
have done school teacher killer. I couldn't have done anything.
(34:55):
But the cops were at that place where people were
like these motherfucker's and I come up with this character. Well,
the ship at the fan for me, you know, the
president came after me everybody time Warner was with madness. Simultaneously,
I got one of my friends who disappeared, and next
(35:17):
thing you know, Spike was gone. Spike went to prison
and didn't make a phone call for five years. Um,
and now I'm getting these broken like what happened? What
went wrong? This? That and the other? You know, somebody
got killed and Spike got the got the charge which
is a conspiracy for setting it up. And they told
(35:39):
me he had a life sentence and I'm like wow,
you know wow. So but this not only was happening
with Spike, it was happening with multiple with my friends.
So no matter what music you ever heard out of
Ice Team, it's always gone down in the turmoil of
the reality of it. And that's why I see music
(36:01):
always is a is a warning like this looks like fun,
but it all One of my first records on the
first album is fun in the beginning, but it's paying
me in and uh yeah, that's why we ended up
doing this book. You have to really defend yourself when
this was going down to there's this line that I
(36:23):
really like. You say it's fiction. I mean, it's based
on reality, but I'm not. I'm not killing cops. I
don't want to kill cops. You say, if if you
believe Ice Tea is out there killing cops, and you
believe David Bowie is an astronaut. The problem with hip
hop is that it's blurs that line so many times.
Sometimes I am talking about myself. Sometimes I'm creating characters
(36:45):
that are living it out. Like in Power I said,
I'm living large as possible. Posse's unstoppable style, topical, vividly optical. Listen,
you'll see them sometimes I'll be them, so you know,
and colors, I become a gang member, and and and
and you know. So this is it. I just think
(37:07):
because it was hip hop and it was such an
un understood genre, they didn't want to give us that
artistic license. It had to be you know, autobiographical card
directly even though. But it was a lot of racism
thrown in there too, because body count ain't rapped. Body
(37:30):
counts rock, but they called it a rap record because
if you say rock, a lot of white people will
go well, I like Fleetwood Mac. I mean like, what's
the problem? Rock is rebellion? You know, so they knew
what they were doing. You know, when you say rap,
you say nigga music, you did what I'm saying that
(37:53):
that black music they talked. So I got put into
that zone for minute, but I hadn't. I didn't have
to defend myself with my fans. Next record, like stop,
apologize and don't waste your time because you're not really
talking to people that like you any fucking way. So
(38:16):
you know, now here I am. How what many years later,
the longest running cop in the history of television? How
about that for America? The ironing, the irony. I don't
think you could find more ironic person than you know.
What is it like? You know you're still performing? You
(38:36):
can you just forgot? There's a twist at the end
of the dayn book where you win and Grammy and
you know, your body Count wins to Grammy in one
and you you surprised. You're surprised, Spike. I won't say
exactly how I don't want to spoil it, but um,
what is it like to perform cop Killer today? Yeah?
(38:58):
Do you have any hesitations? What's the feat like? No hesitations? Um?
I just I mean, right now, I hate to say it,
but it's a fucking hit, and it's a hit. Seat
music happens and climates. You did get what I'm saying.
So if we're watching, if we're listening to Grateful Dead,
(39:21):
you might want to take some acid. Because that's the sixties,
that's the climate. Body Count happened in climate of rage
against the machine, public enemy, so it almost needs that
unrest for it to work. Right. It's it's so kind
(39:43):
of like when Obama was president. You couldn't even be mad.
You like my Obamas, like, oh yeah, by the way,
we caught in live and y'all chill, have some more champagne.
Take it easy. He was just so smooth, like, you know,
whether the country, whatever the country was. Obama never lets
you know anything was going wrong. It was just like, yo,
jay Z will be up here tonight. We're gonna play
a little basketball. You know. It was very player. Baba
(40:06):
was the most player president. Okay. Then Trump came scared
ship out of everybody. Trump's like I'm gonna die tomorrow,
you know, and perfect climate for rage to come back.
Body count and the cops were back out of control.
So now I'm singing a record it's twenty five years old.
(40:28):
But the people understand what I'm saying because the keywords
and cop killer is. The theory of it is is
that if me and you were in the street and
you're a police officer and you're about to take my
life at that moment, fuck law. Now we're too human
(40:48):
beings in the streets. So it's better you than me.
I'm not gonna this kneel because you're the law, and
let you put a bullet in my fucking head. George
Floyd had every reason to fight back. They were trying
to kill him, you know, so that submitship. So but
the keywords is cop killer is better you than me?
Cop killer? Fuck police brutality. This is a song that's
(41:11):
bent on someone who's spilt that over police brutality. So
when I go out and I sing it right now,
I'm quite sure people like, wow, you're a law in
order you're singing it. But trust me, Dick Wolf. They
hired Iced Tea for Iced Tea. They know who I am,
and they know how I stand politically. You made it
(41:33):
very clear in the lyrics what you were going for.
You say police brutality, explicitly. It's almost like you know, foreshadowing,
you know, these these these recent moments that's just very
much back in the news in a major way. Um,
what do you think the legacy of body Count is?
(41:57):
What do you think the legacy of a track like
cop Killer is? I just think, you know, basically body
Count is just good protests music, and we think sing
about issues, We sing about topics. You know, with heavy metal,
a lot of it is just being brutal, you know.
(42:18):
So we got those songs No Remorse and all that hardcore.
You know. I'm writing a new album it's called Merciless,
you know. But in a body Count album, really body
Count album is, it's really an iced t album done
the metal. So there's a one. There's always a song
about girls, probably sexy. There's always something that's totally fucking outrageous,
(42:42):
but there will be some knowledge in there, some games,
something that's we you need to hear and learn and understand.
So I think the legacy of body Count is not
just a metal band, but a metal band that always
talked about something to fix that people can get behind,
you know. I remember Raging and it's the machine opened
(43:05):
for us when they were first starting out and we're
on the same channel. You know. Um, the only difference
with body Count is I didn't want to be totally
political because I kin't think that can kind of get monotonous,
you know. So I call body count. I call body count.
Body Count is is grindhouse. It's a Tarantino movie. It's
(43:30):
so violent that it's funny. It's over the top grindhouse.
You know, when the guy goes to his car, he
doesn't grab a gun, he grabs a rocket launch here.
You know, So some of this stuff, if you don't
get the the humor and KKK, bitch, if you don't
get the humor, and Mama's Gotta Die to night where
I decapitate and dismember my mother with again suit car
(43:53):
harving knife that we only use for bullshit holidays like things,
if you don't get that dark humor, if it a
shift out of it. But the people that like it
get it, and they don't. They like the humor, they
like the edge. They get it. It's so funny that,
you know, people watch slasher films horror movies, and you know,
(44:16):
I'm not saying that the directors get a carte blanche
for that, but it's just funny that people will let
that slip through the cracks a little bit more easily
than these sort of this sort of imagery and music,
and really, what's the difference. It's still there's entertaining, still
inject entertainment and humor and gore, and just like you said,
(44:37):
to the point where it's camp this sort of level
of of of of you know, of horror and imagery
that that you know, can just scare people, frankly, and
I just don't. I don't. I know, it's always kind
of struck me as odd that that people will make
that distinction when it's just another form of a fantasy
and fiction what it is. Jason, I think the problem
(44:58):
is I shift from that to dead series and people
don't Sometimes they just don't know when I'm being serious
or when I'm fucking with you, and I can't. I
can't change that. I mean, to me, that's part of
the fund is that, you know, I mean, I used
to always have people come over my house and there's
(45:20):
out there'll be doing interviews with me and I'll go, oh, well,
you know, homelessness, and you know, we have the AIDS
epidemic and we have to go through these problems with poverty.
But I'm running late. I gotta get to a pit
bull fight, So could we hurry up and cut this
interview off? There? Like what the fund is, But I'm
not going to a pit bull fight. I'm just saying
this ship the funk with them body's head, and I
(45:41):
just Rick Rubin said Iced Tea Andrew Dice, Clay Eminem
have the ability to say the most wrong thing at
the most inopportune time, and it's wonderful, WONDERFULK Then I
could also bite you in the asp, you know, like
(46:02):
like it did you know when when cop Killer came
back to hut you well a year after it actually
came out, just because, like you said, they were trying
to find a target for election, yere, Well, you gotta
you got you gotta be prepared for it, you know.
I mean, if you're outrageous and you're pushing the edge,
you never know when you're gonna really offend some fucking body,
you know. So, like Seymour Science said, it wasn't the
(46:23):
best title. It's kind of like, you know, you're really
asking for it. So I learned, I learned, but you know,
I still can't stop doing it. Like I don't, and
I don't think you have any regrets about it about
that song. No, not at all, not at all, because
like I said, I wasn't telling people you should go
(46:43):
kill cops. I don't hate cops. This was a song. See,
like I said, the song was made off psycho Killer
by Talking Ted. I was singing psycho Killer in the
rehearsal Hall and Dick my drummer rest and Pie said
we need a cop killer, so coming off the third
psycho Killer. So the psycho killer is a cop killer.
(47:08):
So it's it's not it's an insane person, you know.
But they're not mad at talking heads for singing psycho Killer,
which is a song about a psycho killer. So I
just targeted somebody with this crazy lunatic. I think what
scared people about it is because the cop killer kind
of became a hero like that. They people liked it.
(47:30):
And like I said, if I made a song called
school teacher killer, wife killer, fireman killer, nobody would what
the are you talking about? But the fact and also
Ernie said, it's not even really about cops. It's about authority.
People hate authority, They hate security guards, they hate anyone
that says no, So it's like funck authority right now,
(47:53):
especially when your brutal fuck you iced tea story as
a happy ending, I don't just mean that he wounded
up playing one of the most famous cops on TV,
the kind of irony Ice relishes. He also got to
reconnect with Spike and team up with him again, however,
(48:13):
this time not for anything dodgy or illegal. You can
read all about it in Nice, his new book, Split Decision.
As for cop Killer, when asked about its legacy, Body
Con guitarist Ernie c sums it up as a bunch
of angry black kids from South Central channeling their inner
Ramoans and just writing a plain spoken, no nonsense punk song.
(48:36):
But he also recognizes that it's more than that. It
defined a movement and defined cop Killer is part of
our legacy. It kept us around for this long. We
stood for something and we really said what we meant,
you know. And that's what's so important about that song.
We wrote the soundtrack to the Riot, and you can't
(48:57):
take that away. That song reflects that year. If you
put that gear in a capsule, that song would have
to be part of it. The tracks message feels more
relevant and resident than ever after the killing of George
Floyd and so many more victims of police brutality and
the unrest, riots, and racial recording that followed in two
Thou the song may not be as readily available as
(49:18):
other protest anthems, but if you're frustrated enough, hurt enough,
enraged enough, you can find it, play it, and scream
along to that chorus. It exists, furious and unhinged, fearless
and unstoppable, the sound of something cracking open and waking up.
(49:52):
Where Were You in ninety two was a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown and
Jordan run Tog. The show is researched, written and hosted
by me Jason Lafier, with editing and sound design by
Michael Alder June. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts for
my Heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
(50:14):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Where Were You in ninety two is a production of
I Heart Radio. A special note this episode features themes
of violence, explicit language, descriptions of sexual acts and desires,
and so many F bombs and may not be suitable
for all listeners. They turned around and apt Rodney King.
They were really looking for escape thought. The Fraternal Order
(00:23):
to Police in Texas found this song and they go, oh,
let's pointing him. He's the problem. And they try to,
you know, deflect what's really going on, which is cops
killing kids. Welcome to Where Are You In? A podcast
(00:43):
in which I your host Jason Lafier look back at
the major hits, one hit wonders, shocking news stories, and
irresistible scandals that shaped what might be the wildest, most eclectic,
most controversial twelve months of music effort. This week, legendary
rapper Ice T drew the ire of President Bush, the SBI,
(01:05):
the I R S, and the n r A when
he and his thrash metal side project body Count released
their dark, vicious track cop Killer. They've been performing the
song for a year before it appeared on their debut album,
but the record landed in stores just weeks before a
group of police officers were acquitted and the trial for
the beating of black motorist Rodney King, and riots over
(01:25):
the verdict erupted in the streets of Los Angeles. Critics
accused cop Killer of inciting violence across the country, and
it became the perfect fodder for right wing politicians aiming
to take down anything that challenged the idea of family values.
Ice T found himself and the crosshairs of his conservative
opponents and at the center of a debate over the
limits of freedom of speech. In this episode, we explore
(01:48):
the origins of cop Killer, the outrage that sparked in
and how ice T reacted to the fallout, and the
prospect of his career ending. Plus, Ice joins us to
discuss his new book, Split Decision, which reveals his deep
connection with a close friend and former crime partner who
was sentenced to life in prison that very same year,
(02:10):
March three. Rodney King, a construction worker who was on
parole after serving time for robbing a convenience store of
two hundred dollars, was heading home from a friend's house.
He'd been drinking and smoking weed and was speeding when
police attempted to pull him over. He tried out running them.
He eventually stopped in Lake Few Terrorists, a suburban neighborhood
in Los Angeles. Four police officers apprehended him, thinking he
(02:34):
was high on PCP because of his sweating and his strength.
During the struggle that ensued, when he lunged at one officer,
the officer hit him in the head with the baton.
King fell, and two officers continued hitting him as he
tried to stand back up. They continued to strike him
at their sergeant's direction, a total of fifty six times.
At one point, a fourth officer, Theodore Barsino, who was Latino,
(02:57):
tried to stop his three white colleagues. He did, however,
stomp on King. Once King was handcuffed, one officer dragged
him face down in the street. King was then taken
away in an ambulance. His injuries included fractures and cuts
on his face, multiple bruises, a broken cheekbone, and a
broken ankle. This was long before smartphones, but as Ben
(03:27):
Westhof rights in his two thousand sixteen book American Gangsters,
a man named George Holliday recorded King's beating for nine
minutes with a video camera from the balcony of his
apartment he sold the tape to a local TV station
for five dollars. The station sent the footage to the
Los Angeles Police Department and the officers were charged with
excessive force. As a documented assault aired on news outlets
(03:50):
all over the US. It was inescapable, despite the omnipresence
of the footage and the undeniably hostile beating at captured.
The trials, mostly white, jerk and Semi Valley, forty miles
from downtown l A was not convinced. On April twenty nine,
all four officers were acquitted on their assault charges, while
(04:10):
three were acquitted on their excessive force charges. A year later,
the officers would go before a jury in a federal
trial and two of them would be found guilty, with
both serving thirty months in prison. L A p D
Police Chief Daryl Gates took some heat for the incident.
He responded by announcing his retirement. That was hardly the
consolation confused and incent citizens needed after that original verdict.
(04:35):
For some of them, nothing would alleviate the pain and
the rage they felt. If they couldn't get justice, they
wanted to revenge. The Los Angeles riots began on a
Korean owned deli when five black men attempted to steal
bottles of whiskey and then attacked the owner's son when
he tried to stop them. They threw the bottles at
the door, shattering it, with one man yelling this is
(04:56):
for Rodney King before they ran off. Police officers weren't
able to touch them, but did arrest another man who
was swinging a baseball bat at a car with two
white men inside it. Elsewhere, a crowd chucked rocks at
officers who'd arrested a teenage boy. They were treated for
fear of their safety. Riders began pulling white people from
their vehicles and assaulting them. One man, Reginald Denny, was
(05:20):
hit with a hammer, a brick, and an oxygen tank
and suffered brain damage. Other riders swarmed l a p
D headquarters, curling trash cans at it and burning a
parking kiosk, while others targeted the Los Angeles Times office.
Protesters launched molotov cocktails into the air. Businesses, including gun stores,
(05:44):
were looted, some were severely damaged, buildings caught on fire.
You could hear hip hop group n W A song
Fucked the Police blaring from car stereos, a fitting soundtrack
to the unleashed fury, devastation and chaos US. The National Guard,
the Marines, and the U. S Army were called in
(06:06):
Schools shut Down, then West tough Rights and American Gangsters.
That the total cost of destruction citywide was estimated to
be a billion dollars and that more than sixty people
died during the riots, but witnesses say many more were
killed than what the news reported. Flashback to the nineteen eighties.
(06:29):
Ice Tea was not yet NYPD sergeant odif and Finn
Tutuola on Law and Order SPU, or much of an
actor at all. He'd had some bit parts. He was, however,
a gifted lyricist and producer, and one of the first
l A rappers to break big. Born Tracy Merrow and
raised in an affluent New Jersey suburb, Ice was forced
(06:49):
to go live with his aunt in south central Los
Angeles after both his parents died of heart attacks within
the span of four years. He attended Crenshaw High School,
where his classmates included members of the rival gang ings,
the Crips and the Brims later known as the Bloods.
He was never part of either, but hung around some
crips who took a liking to him. At seventeen, he
moved out of his aunt's place and was able to
get a cheap apartment. After serving four years in the
(07:12):
army in Hawaii, he returned to l A to make
money stealing rolexes, jewelry, and cars. When it got too dicey,
he decided to leave his life of crime behind. He
pivoted to hip hop, specifically hip hop, inspired by his
checkered past and life on the streets in South Central
(07:34):
As I said, I rap about what I know. In
his two thousand two books Split Decision, he calls his
breakout song six in the Morning, which is widely acknowledged
as a defining track in the gangster rap movement, a
piece of faction, saying quote, it's a fictional adventure based
on factual experiences. The song opens with the lines six
(08:02):
in the morning, Police at my door, Fresh Adidas squeak
across the bathroom floor, out my back window. I make
my escape. I didn't even get a chance to grab
my old school tape. Later, he wraps I'm a self
made monster of the city streets, remotely controlled by hard
hip hop beats, but just living in the city as
a serious task, didn't know what the cops wanted, didn't
(08:24):
have time to ask. He eventually became the first rapper
signed to Warner Brothers label Sire Records, then home to Madonna.
By the end of UD put out three albums of
Tough menacing explicit gangster rap that earned favorable reviews from critics,
but also a lot of attention from sensors sex, drugs,
(08:45):
gun violence, how police were bulldozing Western civilization. Nothing was
off the table in his detailed, profane, sometimes disturbing accounts
of hustling, running from the law, and rebellion against authority.
His debut album, rhymed As was one of the first
to get a prontal advisory sticker slapped on it. Ice
embrace that sticker like a badge of honor. He scoffed
(09:07):
at the idea of censorship. He believed in what he
called quote artistic integrity and rejected the idea of recording
radio audits of his songs, which weren't getting much airplay anyway.
He addressed this on his track Radio Suckers. They're making
radio whack. People have to escape. But even if I'm banned,
I'll sell a million tapes. He wasn't wrong his trio
(09:29):
of LPs for Warner Brothers seven Ryan plays Power, the
Iceberg freedom of speech. Just watch what you say. We're
all certified platinum or gold, so yeah, fuck radio. He
was raking it in just from sales and touring. I
didn't think his refusal to play by the rules would
result in a serious blow to his career. Or rather,
(09:51):
he took great pleasure in the gamble he got off
and being an agitator, living on the edge made him
feel alive. As he writes in two thousand elevens Ice
a mem war of gangster life and redemption from South
Central to Hollywood. Quote, I'm not a cat to stay
on cruise control. I like to keep ship moving. As
the eighties came to a close, he was ready for
the next challenge. He cemented his status as a formidable
(10:14):
force and gangster rap. Now it was time to take
a stabish on the even harder metal. Ice had gotten
into rock because of his cousin, Earl, with whom he'd
shared a bedroom when he was living with his aunt
as a kid in junior high in the mid seventies.
Earl exposed him to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Led
Zeppelin and Black Sabbath guitar wielding Titans, who left a
(10:36):
major imprint on him his iced tea. He'd sampled Black
Sabbath and incorporated guitars into his music. As he writes,
an ice rap was a form of rock because it,
like rock, was an active aggression of a revolt against
the status quo. But in while hanging out with some
of his old pals in the studio who were clamoring
(10:56):
to record with him, he decided to start an actual
hard rock band. They called themselves body Count. The mostly
white members of the hardcore scene, some tattooeds, some skinheads,
weren't always the most welcoming audience for a group of
black dudes showing up on their turf. They were suspicious
and racist, and body Count did nothing to hide their roots.
(11:20):
As the group's guitarist Ernie Cunnigan, better known as Ernie
c recalls, you know they were rock. There were black
rockers that played rock during that time. They were more
accepted than us because they were the makeup and all
this kind of stuff. We came out like we just
came from a drive box, but we didn't look like
a rock man we looked like, but once body Count
(11:41):
started playing, many skeptics changed their minds. Not that I
thought they had anything to prove. As he noted in
his song body Count from his album O G, original
gangster rock music was black music, originated by forefathers like
Chuck Berry and Little Richard. He reiterates the sentiment in
his book Split Decision, saying quote, they took the blues,
(12:02):
electrified it, and sped it up. Even the name rock
and roll was just the old time black slang for
fucking straight up. Ernie c who was ICE's friend from
Crenshaw High School, hooked him up with Perry Farrell of
Jane's Addiction, who invited him to take part in a
new roving festival he was launching called Lallapalooza. Ice accepted,
(12:22):
dividing his set in half, playing some of his solo
work before inviting body Count out onto the stage. The
performances were a success, and Ice found himself earning cred
with both hip hop heads and alternative audiences. Body Count
didn't have much material, but the response they witnessed it
shows proved to them that they were onto something. After
the first tour, Sire Records signed the group Ice now
(12:45):
had two deals with the same label. Body Count hunker
down in the studio to record their self titled debut
full length, which Sire released in March, a volcanic blast
of punk and metal that came wrapped in a miniature
body bag. Props to that marketing team body Count. That
(13:06):
album took a long, cold look at the dark side
of South central Los Angeles. This was a world played
by poverty, drugs, and desperation, where violent gangs clashed and
kids were the casualty. The tension mounts on with the
body count Ice cries and the title track illustrating not
only the bloodshed, but how impervious viewers have become to
(13:29):
the young corpses piling up in the news, they were
just blips before the anchor jumped to a sports segment.
This is what inspired the group's name. The World's insane
while you drink Champagne and I'm living in black brain
goes another line. This was also a land where good
guys with the bad guys, where police murdered men for
the way they dressed, for the type of music, they
(13:51):
blasted for the color of their skin. Body Counts most
memorable and most controversial song was cop Killer. It's about
his subtle as baby got Back, and for that reason,
some whould argue even funnier. It does exactly what it
says on the tin, with Ice reciting and it's spoken
word intro, I'd like to take a pig out here
(14:12):
in this parking lot and shoot him in their motherfucking face.
Cue the thrashing, foreboding guitars before Ice unleashes the titular
phrase before he launches into the breakneck chorus, we get
a fuse, a lot of shots fired into our ears,
as if we're the officer at the receiving end of
the narrator's maniacal rampage. Then the chorus, cop killer, better
(14:37):
you than me, cop Killer, Fuck police brutality, cop Killer.
I know your family's grieving, fuck them, cop Killer, But
tonight we get even. Okay. I know it may seem
weird that I said this song was funny, but it's
so over the top, so unsubtle, that by today's standards
(14:59):
it sounds almost quaint. But in this was risky business,
which was ICE's favorite kind of business. Ice has described
cop Killer as a protest song based on psycho killer
talking Heads seventy seven new wave and art rock classic.
The track was ICE's dark, twisted fantasy of an armed
(15:20):
assailant who loses his black friend at the hands of
police and then loses his mind hunting down cops one
night and snuffing them out one by one. It's nuts
to think he wrote it before Hordes of l a
residence on a war path ripped through the city, and
the spring of In Split Decision, Ice recalls feeling like
(15:43):
the l A p D Was a quote unquote criminal regime,
and notes that the beating of Rodney King was hardly
an isolated incident. He even remembers seeing cop cars in
his neighborhood with Confederate flags on their bumpers. Black men
feared the Los Angeles police, even if they've done nothing wrong.
Coming into a body count rehearsal. One day, Ice was
(16:04):
humming Psycho Killer and his bandmate beat Master V told
him they should write a song called cop Killer, revealing
that he had a friend who'd been shot by police
in the back and paralyzed. Ices other bandmate, Ernie C
wrote the music, Ice wrote the lyrics. If the subject
matter was gruesome, Ice asserted that it shouldn't be reboting.
(16:25):
As he writes in his memoir Ice, 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. With Cop Killer, Ice put slasher movie
imagery to music, hoping to use a slice of outlandish
(16:48):
camp fiction to depict a harsh truth. Racial bias and
police brutality were very real. Innocent men were dying. But
the end of the song breaks and fiction, ripping straight
from the headlines. Fucked the police for Darryl Gates, fucked
the police for Rodney King, fucked the police from my
(17:11):
dead homies, Fucked the police for your freedom. As Ernie
C explains, truth telling was body counts entire m O.
We wrote songs about what we knew about, and this
is what we knew. We know about racism, and we
know about a cop killing. That's what made it so irrelevant.
But his Ice or counts and split decision. When I
(17:32):
wrote Cop Killer, it wasn't addressing all cops. It was
addressing racist, abusive, corrupt, out of control cops. Cop Killer
wasn't necessarily groundbreaking. Compton hip hop group and w A
had already rapped about slaying cops and their infamous song
Fucked the Police. How Eric Clapton and even scored a
(17:53):
number one hit with his cover of Bob Marley's I
Shot the Sheriff way back into It was the timing
of the track's release that proved to be its undoing.
Soon Ice would have everyone powerful on his back up. Next,
(18:15):
after the break, we dig into the nationwide scandal surrounding
Iced Tea and Cop Killer after it came out in
just weeks before violent riots tore through the streets of
Los Angeles. Iced Tea had written cop kular In and
(18:37):
had been performing at Lallapalus of the year before it
appeared on body Counts debut album, But when the l
A p D officers who had beaten Rodney King were acquitted,
the response was intense and immediate. The Los Angeles race
riots broke out in April, just weeks after body Count dropped.
Body Count member Ernie c recalls the moment he first
(19:00):
saw the smoke and fire from the riots. He was
at ICE's house in the Hollywood Hills doing interviews with
some journalist who'd flown in from Germany and they get
here and it's like, hey, wind ellis burned it to
the ground. They're like, what's going on? And we're like, well,
this song right here kind of predicts. It's a precursor
to what's going on right now. We came out with
this last month, and this is what happens, you know now,
(19:22):
So you know, it wasn't a surprise to us, just
you know, it was getting to a boiling point given
the circumstances, controversy over cop Killer seemed inevitable. When it
caught wind of the song, The Combined Law Enforcement Association
of Texas or CLEAT, the state's largest police advocacy group,
boycotted Time Warner. It's president and co founder, Ronda Lord,
(19:46):
not only called for Warner Brothers to remove cop Killer
from Body Counts album and for the company and Iced
Tea to apologize, but it also demanded that ICE make
a million dollar donation to a community service program. All
of this July six, when Time Warners shareholders would have
a meeting in Beverly Hills. Other police organizations followed suit,
(20:07):
vilifying ICE and Time Warner media outlets reported on the boycott, but,
as Dan Charnis writes in his two thousand ten books
The Big Payback The History of the Business of Hip Hop,
most of them misidentified cop Killer as an Ice t
song and referred to it as a rap track rather
than a heavy metal track. The public outcry became specifically
(20:27):
a hip hop issue. Was an election year only made
matters worse for Ice and body count. Cop Killer was
the perfect target for right wing Republicans, an unflinching, incendiary
celebration of violence. It was the antithesis of conservative quote
unquote family values, and white kids loved it. They went
(20:49):
mad to it at live shows, washing and pumping their
fists in the air, shouting along with the lyrics. Ice
rights in his book Split Decision, the main thing I
learned about cop Killer is this, when you inject white
kids with black rage, and you do it through something
as seductive and persuasives rock and roll, that's dangerous to
the people in authority. That's always going to be seen
(21:10):
as a threat. Ice recalls wanting the racket to die down,
but things only escalated. The l a county board, an
Alabama governor, sixty members of the House of Representatives, led
by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich politicians began piling on
(21:32):
cop Killer. Soon President George H. W. Bush and Vice
President Dan Quail had both condemned the release of body count,
with Quail declaring at a campaign fundraiser, I am outraged
at the fact that Time Warner, a major corporation, is
making money off a record called cop Killer that suggests
that it is okay to kill cops. I find that outrageous.
(21:55):
Quail name dropped cop Killer continually during his and Bushes
campaign against Old Clinton that year. Dennis S. Martin, former
president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, claimed
this song had been implicated and quote at least two
incidents and has inflamed racial tensions in cities across the country,
and he called it quote an affront to the officers
(22:20):
alone who have been killed in the line of duty.
Time Warner employees received nasty letters and phone calls not
to mention death threats. Still, Gerald Levin, the white co
CEO of Time Warner at the time Penda Wall Street Journal,
op ed to clarify his stance on the matter. He
asserted there, rather than glorifying violence, cop Killer was a
(22:42):
portrait of what was going on in its narrator's head.
It was fantasy. He explained that instead of trying to
quote silence, the messenger opponent should be quote heating the
anguished cry contained in his message. He added the dropping
the song from Body count would be a quote destructive precedent,
hampering artists freedom of expression in the future. Ice too
(23:04):
initially stood his ground defending the message behind Cop Killer,
but then he started feeling like he was under piercing scrutiny.
He'd become a national security risk, he said, the I
r S started to audit his taxes, trying to determine
if he was amassing guns for some sort of coup,
and that his daughter was even pulled out of junior
high school and questioned about his possible ties to any
(23:27):
quote paramilitary organizations. He had nothing to hide. Everyone knew
he had a criminal background because he'd been honest about
it from the start of his career. But he was
growing uneasy, feeling like some powerful people were closing in.
The U S President and VP had decried Body Counts music,
but actor and National Rifle Association President Charles and Heston
(23:50):
took his disapproval straight to that July sixteenth time Warner
shareholders meeting, which took place at the Regent Beverly, Wilshire Hotel.
Well pickets sported side lines with slogans like rapid crap outside.
Haston addressed a group of roughly a thousand at the meeting.
He had stock in the company has been Westhough rights
in Original Gangsters. Haston read lyrics from cop Killer and
(24:12):
another body Count tract, KKK Bitch to drive his point home. Okay,
I gotta pause to just marvel at the absolute fucking
absurdity of KKK Bitch, which I literally cannot even say
without laughing. I won't go into too much detail, just
google it, but I will say this joint is about
(24:32):
fictional white supremacist orgies the body Count throw Down South
to teach white girls how to properly get laid. It
is graphic and deranged and makes even knee blush. Tipper Goore,
the wife of then Democratic VP candidate L Gore, had
co founded the Parents Music Resource Center or p MRC,
which advocated for labeling the covers of records that featured
(24:54):
profane language or content with a parental Advisory sticker. Kk
He bitch includes a mention of her young nieces to
picture middle aged oscar winning thespian Charleton Heston. Mr Ben
hur himself reciting any of its lyrics is the most
cringe thing I've imagined so far in this podcast. Meanwhile,
(25:15):
as Is re calls in his memoir ice before he
began reading the words to cop Killer, Heston announced, these
are the lyrics to Killer. Cop Oops, I mean cop Killer.
Dude clearly hadn't memorized his lines. On a more serious note,
two police officers who had been shot in the face
also showed up to criticize the song. The July six
(25:38):
deadline passed and Cop Killer remained available for purchase, but
shareholders were spooked. Time Warner brought in a crisis management expert.
Something needed to happen. Warner Brothers had stood behind body
Counts music home to Madonna and Prince and Lewd comedian
(25:59):
Andrew ice Clay. It was no stranger to controversial artists,
but the US President and the FBI also oku money
on the line that ship was serious. CEO Gerald Levin
in the label were never carrious position, even if all
the uproar helped boost Body Counts sales. Some music stores
wouldn't carry it. Meanwhile, as west Hough notes and Original Gangsters,
(26:23):
the police department in Greensboro, North Carolina, threatened to ignore
a stores emergency calls if it continued to stock the album.
I didn't want Warner Brothers to take responsibility for a
cut he had written. West off details and meeting the
artist had with Time Warner in which it placed a
quarter on a table, saying it represented its music division
and that Ice was just a tiny spot on that quarter.
(26:46):
But the musician says he wasn't forced to disavow cop Killer,
writing an Ice They never treated me like ship, never
got mad or yelled at me. Rather, Ice t says
he understood the gravity of the situation. Warner Brothers had
even been faced with bomb scares. As Dan Charnis writes
into Big Payback, a bomb squad brought in to investigate
(27:07):
even detonated a package. Ice empathized with the guys who
signed his checks, so he told Warner to remove the
song from the album. Cleet ceased its boycott. Ultimately body Count.
The album was re released without cop Killer, and the
song was given away as a free single at body
(27:28):
Count concerts to hear it today. You can snag a
CD copy of the original pressing of the album on
eBay or discards, or you can listen to it on YouTube.
But as many discovered in the wake of George Floyd's
murder at the hands of Minneapples police in two thousand twenty,
it is not streaming or available to download. The reason
(27:48):
why remains a mystery. But Jeffrey Weiss, a Warner Brothers
product manager for body Count's debut album, speculated to Billboard,
I can really imagine ice T doesn't want to think
about ninet ninety two that much, m unlike yours truly.
After the debacle, Warner dropped some of its wrap acts
(28:11):
because of the questionable content of their music. As for
ice t solo rap career at the Sire label, well,
his victoriol towards the Police was well intact on his
planned fifth album, Home Invasion, which boasted provocative, violent cover
art and included lyrics about cops breath smelling like semen
and a narrator taking them in an alley and giving
them a pop pop pop to the dome time. Warner
(28:34):
balked at this, even though he still owed the label
two Records. Ice knew what was at stake for him,
his bandmates, and the label if he kept their arrangement
and continued to speak filter free constant conflict, He felt
he had no choice but to ask to terminate his
embody Counts contracts, says body Counts er Andy, See, we
were stopped. We were stopped at a stop, you know
(28:56):
what I mean. And in the band, which is brand new,
we weren't going anywhere. Mortars didn't want to book us,
you know, and when people yeah, it was just time
for us to go to keep moving forward. After having
worked with Ice for six years, Warner Brothers obliged and
turned him loose. Released on Priority Records in March, Home
(29:18):
Invasion went gold, but sold about half the copies of
its predecessor, O G Original Gangster. Some records stores refused
to carry it, others kept its placement. Discreet reviews were mixed.
ICE's music career is never the same. Even after cop
(29:40):
Cler disappeared from Body Count's debut album, police groups continue
to boycott the band shows. He'd arguably become more famous
for his acting on Law and Order SVU, as Ice
writes in his two thousand eleven memoir, Ice. People think
controversy helps your bottom line, but I disagree. There was
a big trade off. Yes, you sell some records with
(30:02):
all that static, the cancelation of concerts, the hiking insurance
for the shows you do get, there are way more
costs to come along with controversy than benefits. I would
never advise people the controversy is the way to blow up.
You'll become known, but will translate into money probably not.
Ice had long been considered an o G, but after
he essentially tossed cop Killer in the bargain bin of
(30:24):
his catalog hip hop magazine, the source castigated him, with
the REGINALD C. Dennis writing an op ed titled the
Cops gag Iced Tea as Rerap Dead. The piece began
mark July on your calendars as the beginning of the
end of rap music? Would conservatives win? Some of ICE's
(30:45):
peers now deem him a coward. They became as harsh
as critics. He claims, why stifle his creativity, his resounding
rallying cry against police brutality for a bunch of stuffy Republicans?
Why give in? Why risk opening the floodgates from more
censorship in hip hop and music in general. Still, he
stands his ground ready in his memoir walk in My
(31:08):
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 up. The body count backlash took its
toll on Iced Tea. But in addition to career drama,
(31:31):
he was dealing with some personal stuff. In ninety two well,
he had stopped coordinating jewel heights to pursue music. His
longtime friend, an ex crime partner, Spike, had fallen deeper
and deeper into crime, his schemes getting more and more elaborate,
more and more dangerous. After one of his robberies resulted
in a fatal shooting, Spike, who orchestrated the theft, was
(31:52):
sentenced to thirty five years to life in prison. Ice
was shocked when he heard the news. He and Spike
had never been by during their days executing heist. He
soon learned that Spike hadn't shot the victim, but had
been implicated for overseeing the robbery. Spike disappeared. I didn't
hear from him for three years. When he finally did,
(32:14):
Spike was calling him from a phone in prison. At
that moment, I became very aware of how lucky he
was to have abandoned the life of hustling and heights.
He'd had Potus, the FBI, the I R S, the
n r A, and the police on his back, but
unlike Spike, he had his freedom up Next, after the break,
(32:38):
Ice Tea joins us to talk about the legacy of
Cop Killer, the fallout from its release, and his new
book Split Decision, which chronicles his life as a jewel
thief and traces the very different paths he and Spike followed.
(33:06):
Please know this segment contains themes of violence, explicit language,
and cursing that may not be suitable for all listeners.
Welcome back to Where Were You and nine two. We've
been discussing Ice Team and as heavy metal band Body
Counts track cop Killer and Off the Rails, controversial protest
anthem that address police brutality. Now it's time to hear
(33:29):
from the man behind it, rapper, actor, songwriter and producer
Ice Team. So can you tell me about that particular
moment in your life? I've I've asked a lot of
the guests, where were you in ninety two? That's how
I start the interview, and uh, you you can tell
me very clearly where you were. And this book is,
(33:50):
like I said, sort of hinges on that particular moment
in time. So you know, ninety two is kind of
like when we got hit with the cop Killers ship,
you know, like they turned around and after Rodney King,
they were really looking for escapegoat. They were looking. You know,
the pressure was on the police because obviously for video
(34:11):
they people saw they were out of pocket, and the
Fraternal Order the police in Texas found this song and
they go, oh, let's pointing him. He's the problem. And
they try to, you know, deflect what's really going on,
which is cops killing kids. To me making an imaginary
strong about someone who who went after the cops. Now,
(34:34):
now I gotta remember, if the cops weren't out of
pocket at that time, there was no energy to write
cop killer, you know. If the cops are out doing
the right thing, pulling cats out of trees and everyone
loved him, I couldn't have done fireman killer. I couldn't
have done school teacher killer. I couldn't have done anything.
(34:55):
But the cops were at that place where people were
like these motherfucker's and I come up with this character. Well,
the ship at the fan for me, you know, the
president came after me everybody time Warner was with madness. Simultaneously,
I got one of my friends who disappeared, and next
(35:17):
thing you know, Spike was gone. Spike went to prison
and didn't make a phone call for five years. Um,
and now I'm getting these broken like what happened? What
went wrong? This? That and the other? You know, somebody
got killed and Spike got the got the charge which
is a conspiracy for setting it up. And they told
(35:39):
me he had a life sentence and I'm like wow,
you know wow. So but this not only was happening
with Spike, it was happening with multiple with my friends.
So no matter what music you ever heard out of
Ice Team, it's always gone down in the turmoil of
the reality of it. And that's why I see music
(36:01):
always is a is a warning like this looks like fun,
but it all One of my first records on the
first album is fun in the beginning, but it's paying
me in and uh yeah, that's why we ended up
doing this book. You have to really defend yourself when
this was going down to there's this line that I
(36:23):
really like. You say it's fiction. I mean, it's based
on reality, but I'm not. I'm not killing cops. I
don't want to kill cops. You say, if if you
believe Ice Tea is out there killing cops, and you
believe David Bowie is an astronaut. The problem with hip
hop is that it's blurs that line so many times.
Sometimes I am talking about myself. Sometimes I'm creating characters
(36:45):
that are living it out. Like in Power I said,
I'm living large as possible. Posse's unstoppable style, topical, vividly optical. Listen,
you'll see them sometimes I'll be them, so you know,
and colors, I become a gang member, and and and
and you know. So this is it. I just think
(37:07):
because it was hip hop and it was such an
un understood genre, they didn't want to give us that
artistic license. It had to be you know, autobiographical card
directly even though. But it was a lot of racism
thrown in there too, because body count ain't rapped. Body
(37:30):
counts rock, but they called it a rap record because
if you say rock, a lot of white people will
go well, I like Fleetwood Mac. I mean like, what's
the problem? Rock is rebellion? You know, so they knew
what they were doing. You know, when you say rap,
you say nigga music, you did what I'm saying that
(37:53):
that black music they talked. So I got put into
that zone for minute, but I hadn't. I didn't have
to defend myself with my fans. Next record, like stop,
apologize and don't waste your time because you're not really
talking to people that like you any fucking way. So
(38:16):
you know, now here I am. How what many years later,
the longest running cop in the history of television? How
about that for America? The ironing, the irony. I don't
think you could find more ironic person than you know.
What is it like? You know you're still performing? You
(38:36):
can you just forgot? There's a twist at the end
of the dayn book where you win and Grammy and
you know, your body Count wins to Grammy in one
and you you surprised. You're surprised, Spike. I won't say
exactly how I don't want to spoil it, but um,
what is it like to perform cop Killer today? Yeah?
(38:58):
Do you have any hesitations? What's the feat like? No hesitations? Um?
I just I mean, right now, I hate to say it,
but it's a fucking hit, and it's a hit. Seat
music happens and climates. You did get what I'm saying.
So if we're watching, if we're listening to Grateful Dead,
(39:21):
you might want to take some acid. Because that's the sixties,
that's the climate. Body Count happened in climate of rage
against the machine, public enemy, so it almost needs that
unrest for it to work. Right. It's it's so kind
(39:43):
of like when Obama was president. You couldn't even be mad.
You like my Obamas, like, oh yeah, by the way,
we caught in live and y'all chill, have some more champagne.
Take it easy. He was just so smooth, like, you know,
whether the country, whatever the country was. Obama never lets
you know anything was going wrong. It was just like, yo,
jay Z will be up here tonight. We're gonna play
a little basketball. You know. It was very player. Baba
(40:06):
was the most player president. Okay. Then Trump came scared
ship out of everybody. Trump's like I'm gonna die tomorrow,
you know, and perfect climate for rage to come back.
Body count and the cops were back out of control.
So now I'm singing a record it's twenty five years old.
(40:28):
But the people understand what I'm saying because the keywords
and cop killer is. The theory of it is is
that if me and you were in the street and
you're a police officer and you're about to take my
life at that moment, fuck law. Now we're too human
(40:48):
beings in the streets. So it's better you than me.
I'm not gonna this kneel because you're the law, and
let you put a bullet in my fucking head. George
Floyd had every reason to fight back. They were trying
to kill him, you know, so that submitship. So but
the keywords is cop killer is better you than me?
Cop killer? Fuck police brutality. This is a song that's
(41:11):
bent on someone who's spilt that over police brutality. So
when I go out and I sing it right now,
I'm quite sure people like, wow, you're a law in
order you're singing it. But trust me, Dick Wolf. They
hired Iced Tea for Iced Tea. They know who I am,
and they know how I stand politically. You made it
(41:33):
very clear in the lyrics what you were going for.
You say police brutality, explicitly. It's almost like you know, foreshadowing,
you know, these these these recent moments that's just very
much back in the news in a major way. Um,
what do you think the legacy of body Count is?
(41:57):
What do you think the legacy of a track like
cop Killer is? I just think, you know, basically body
Count is just good protests music, and we think sing
about issues, We sing about topics. You know, with heavy metal,
a lot of it is just being brutal, you know.
(42:18):
So we got those songs No Remorse and all that hardcore.
You know. I'm writing a new album it's called Merciless,
you know. But in a body Count album, really body
Count album is, it's really an iced t album done
the metal. So there's a one. There's always a song
about girls, probably sexy. There's always something that's totally fucking outrageous,
(42:42):
but there will be some knowledge in there, some games,
something that's we you need to hear and learn and understand.
So I think the legacy of body Count is not
just a metal band, but a metal band that always
talked about something to fix that people can get behind,
you know. I remember Raging and it's the machine opened
(43:05):
for us when they were first starting out and we're
on the same channel. You know. Um, the only difference
with body Count is I didn't want to be totally
political because I kin't think that can kind of get monotonous,
you know. So I call body count. I call body count.
Body Count is is grindhouse. It's a Tarantino movie. It's
(43:30):
so violent that it's funny. It's over the top grindhouse.
You know, when the guy goes to his car, he
doesn't grab a gun, he grabs a rocket launch here.
You know, So some of this stuff, if you don't
get the the humor and KKK, bitch, if you don't
get the humor, and Mama's Gotta Die to night where
I decapitate and dismember my mother with again suit car
(43:53):
harving knife that we only use for bullshit holidays like things,
if you don't get that dark humor, if it a
shift out of it. But the people that like it
get it, and they don't. They like the humor, they
like the edge. They get it. It's so funny that,
you know, people watch slasher films horror movies, and you know,
(44:16):
I'm not saying that the directors get a carte blanche
for that, but it's just funny that people will let
that slip through the cracks a little bit more easily
than these sort of this sort of imagery and music,
and really, what's the difference. It's still there's entertaining, still
inject entertainment and humor and gore, and just like you said,
(44:37):
to the point where it's camp this sort of level
of of of of you know, of horror and imagery
that that you know, can just scare people, frankly, and
I just don't. I don't. I know, it's always kind
of struck me as odd that that people will make
that distinction when it's just another form of a fantasy
and fiction what it is. Jason, I think the problem
(44:58):
is I shift from that to dead series and people
don't Sometimes they just don't know when I'm being serious
or when I'm fucking with you, and I can't. I
can't change that. I mean, to me, that's part of
the fund is that, you know, I mean, I used
to always have people come over my house and there's
(45:20):
out there'll be doing interviews with me and I'll go, oh, well,
you know, homelessness, and you know, we have the AIDS
epidemic and we have to go through these problems with poverty.
But I'm running late. I gotta get to a pit
bull fight, So could we hurry up and cut this
interview off? There? Like what the fund is, But I'm
not going to a pit bull fight. I'm just saying
this ship the funk with them body's head, and I
(45:41):
just Rick Rubin said Iced Tea Andrew Dice, Clay Eminem
have the ability to say the most wrong thing at
the most inopportune time, and it's wonderful, WONDERFULK Then I
could also bite you in the asp, you know, like
(46:02):
like it did you know when when cop Killer came
back to hut you well a year after it actually
came out, just because, like you said, they were trying
to find a target for election, yere, Well, you gotta
you got you gotta be prepared for it, you know.
I mean, if you're outrageous and you're pushing the edge,
you never know when you're gonna really offend some fucking body,
you know. So, like Seymour Science said, it wasn't the
(46:23):
best title. It's kind of like, you know, you're really
asking for it. So I learned, I learned, but you know,
I still can't stop doing it. Like I don't, and
I don't think you have any regrets about it about
that song. No, not at all, not at all, because
like I said, I wasn't telling people you should go
(46:43):
kill cops. I don't hate cops. This was a song. See,
like I said, the song was made off psycho Killer
by Talking Ted. I was singing psycho Killer in the
rehearsal Hall and Dick my drummer rest and Pie said
we need a cop killer, so coming off the third
psycho Killer. So the psycho killer is a cop killer.
(47:08):
So it's it's not it's an insane person, you know.
But they're not mad at talking heads for singing psycho Killer,
which is a song about a psycho killer. So I
just targeted somebody with this crazy lunatic. I think what
scared people about it is because the cop killer kind
of became a hero like that. They people liked it.
(47:30):
And like I said, if I made a song called
school teacher killer, wife killer, fireman killer, nobody would what
the are you talking about? But the fact and also
Ernie said, it's not even really about cops. It's about authority.
People hate authority, They hate security guards, they hate anyone
that says no, So it's like funck authority right now,
(47:53):
especially when your brutal fuck you iced tea story as
a happy ending, I don't just mean that he wounded
up playing one of the most famous cops on TV,
the kind of irony Ice relishes. He also got to
reconnect with Spike and team up with him again, however,
(48:13):
this time not for anything dodgy or illegal. You can
read all about it in Nice, his new book, Split Decision.
As for cop Killer, when asked about its legacy, Body
Con guitarist Ernie c sums it up as a bunch
of angry black kids from South Central channeling their inner
Ramoans and just writing a plain spoken, no nonsense punk song.
(48:36):
But he also recognizes that it's more than that. It
defined a movement and defined cop Killer is part of
our legacy. It kept us around for this long. We
stood for something and we really said what we meant,
you know. And that's what's so important about that song.
We wrote the soundtrack to the Riot, and you can't
(48:57):
take that away. That song reflects that year. If you
put that gear in a capsule, that song would have
to be part of it. The tracks message feels more
relevant and resident than ever after the killing of George
Floyd and so many more victims of police brutality and
the unrest, riots, and racial recording that followed in two
Thou the song may not be as readily available as
(49:18):
other protest anthems, but if you're frustrated enough, hurt enough,
enraged enough, you can find it, play it, and scream
along to that chorus. It exists, furious and unhinged, fearless
and unstoppable, the sound of something cracking open and waking up.
(49:52):
Where Were You in ninety two was a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown and
Jordan run Tog. The show is researched, written and hosted
by me Jason Lafier, with editing and sound design by
Michael Alder June. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts for
my Heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app,
(50:14):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Jason Lamphier
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