Excerpt from 'Body Count' (33 1/3) by Ben Apatoff (2024)

On July 28, 1992, acclaimed rapper and actor Ice-T held a news conference at Los Angeles’ Ma Maison Sofitel hotel. Ice’s hardcore band Body Count’s debut album, released less than four months earlier, had sold under 500,000 records but caused the music industry’s biggest media storm. Other artists might’ve craved the notoriety, or played it up for publicity. But at the Sofitel, Ice-T put a halt to it.

Clad in all-black jeans and shirt, with alert eyes and a black No Fear baseball cap, Ice-T started the conference by screening a short film about the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. “I don’t understand why I’m supposed to like the police,” he stated after the film. “They’ve never been a friend of Black people. As for the ones that are handling the job correctly, I have all the respect in the world for them. As for the brutal ones, I’d rather get rid of them before they get rid of me.”

Ice scanned the room. “This song is about anger and the community and how people get that way. It is not a call to murder police.”

“At the moment, the cops are in a criminal mode,” he continued. “They’ve threatened to bomb the record company. I’m in the position now where I think Warner Bros. is taking the war for me. So, as of today, I’m gonna pull the song off the record.”

“If you wanna kill me, come get me,” Ice added. “Why haven’t I received the death threats? Because they know that they can’t scare me. They know that I’m not afraid of them, they know that I’m prepared to die behind this.”

Ice vowed to give the record away for free at his concerts and asserted that his new record would be even harder. Asked about standing up for his free speech rights, Ice was dismissive. “The First Amendment ain’t got sh*t to do with me. When the First Amendment was written, I was property, Black people were property,” he stated. “The Constitution is a piece of sh*t.”

“The police are sending out a message to all other record companies,” Ice continued. “I predict they will try to shut down rap music in the next three years.”

Ice showed a video of a recent Body Count live performance. He directed reporters’ attention to the outdoor crowd, a sea of headbangers throwing their hands in the air, pushing against the stage, taken in by the band’s power. “Here’s the problem,” Ice explained. “Ain’t no Black hands.”

`It was an issue before the dawn of rock music, from Bo Diddley remembering white appropriation in the 1950s (“It became separated, R&B became what we was doing, and rock ‘n’ roll became what the white kids was doing.”) through Body Count’s spoken word “The Real Problem” in 1992. (“The problem isn’t the lyrics on the records, it’s the fear of the white kids liking a Black artist. But the real problem is the fear of the white girl falling in love with the Black man.”) Moral panic fears of “race-mixing” that reared their head in circ*mstances like the White Citizens’ Councils flyering the South with “Help Save the Youth of America: DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS” pamphlets were now visible in the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) sending a 1989 newsletter listing songs with warning labels, all of which were by Black artists. “Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino weren’t loved by everybody in the ‘50s either,” Ice-T said in 1990. “Now a white parent gets all paranoid when his kid says, ‘I like Ice-T.’”

Many of Body Count’s vilifiers would have been fine with the record staying in South Central Los Angeles. But as a rock band fronted by a rapper, Body Count could be the gateway for countless white kids to discover artists like Ice-T. Ice’s upcoming Home Invasion cover, drawn by Body Count cover artist Dave Halili, depicted a young white man with headphones, surrounded by violent images, plus some books (Malcolm X, Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines) and cassettes (Ice Cube and Public Enemy), with Ice-T’s looming, spectral face in the top right corner.

“The song’s off the record. Shut up,” said Ice. “I’m not apologizing to ’em.”

Of all the statements Ice-T could have made that day, this probably upset the most people. His peers, fans, and detractors all found something to complain about. CNN interviewed young fans at record stores expressing their disappointment in Ice dropping the song. Eazy-E told Howard Stern he never would have taken the song off his own album. (The previous year, Ice had called Eazy “a sucker” in Rolling Stone for donating to Republicans.) “The Iceman Concedeth” ran a Newsweek headline. “Ice-T announced at a press conference that he would no longer fight the power,” reported Billboard.

Numerous publications indicated that Ice had caved to behind-the-scenes pressure from Time Warner. “Mark July 28, 1992, on your calendars as the beginning of the end of rap music.” The Source’s Reginald C. Dennis seethed in an editorial titled “Is Rap Dead?” “When he ‘voluntarily’ removed ‘Cop Killer’ from the Body Count album, Ice-T allowed a devastating precedent to be set, opening the door for widespread censorship of rap.”

“The Source didn’t know. They didn’t do any reporting on that,” says hip-hop journalist Dan Charnas. “I was there, dude. That is not something that [Warner Bros. CEO] Mo [Ostin] would have done to Ice-T. But none of these people who were saying these things were there.”

The day after Ice’s announcement, Warner execs, artists, and managers met for an emergency summit at Warner’s Burbank offices, including Charnas and his then-Def American boss Rick Rubin. Over the next several weeks, Warner and its hip-hop subsidiaries Tommy Boy and Cold Chillin’ canceled upcoming releases from Paris, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo, Juvenile Committee, The Almighty RSO, and Live Squad for anti-police themes. Warner-owned Giant Records pulled out of a distribution deal with the Geto Boys. Other labels followed suit, with A&M’s Intelligent Hoodlum and Hollywood Basic’s Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. pressured into removing police brutality-themed songs from upcoming releases and then dropped from their respective labels. Even Dr. Dre’s anti-cop single with Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Deep Cover,” was removed from Dre’s hotly anticipated album The Chronic, which was blocked from release until the song “Mr. Officer” was rewritten for album inclusion.

“Mo Ostin was very contrite. He was apologetic for having to basically say, ‘Hey, it’s going to be a new day here at Time Warner. I can’t do anything about it. They’re going to be scrutinizing your lyrics. They’re going to be scrutinizing your artwork. And if you feel like the scrutiny is intruding on your art, I will make it easy for you to leave, with our blessing,’” says Charnas.

Perhaps the most satisfied response to Ice’s decision came from the US federal government. “I am glad that they did respond to my criticism, and the President’s criticism, and the law enforcement officials’ criticism,” Vice President Dan Quayle stated on July 29, with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich by his side. “They can’t just hide behind the Constitution. I’m not going to get into an argument of whether this was constitutional or not constitutional, I’ll just assume that it was constitutional and there was nothing illegal. It was wrong! It was fundamentally wrong.”

Senior publicist Bob Merlis announced that Warner would be recalling the album, and said the label had no comment on Ice’s statement that the threats were coming from the police. A revised version would be in stores within four weeks. The rerelease changed the hand-drawn “Cop Killer” tattoo in the cover art to a computer typeface “Body Count.” The album’s last two tracks, “Out in the Parking Lot” and “Cop Killer,” were replaced by a rock-fused cover of Ice’s 1989 anti-censorship solo track “Freedom of Speech,” featuring the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and a Jimi Hendrix sample. “Smoked Pork,” a skit in which Ice murders a cop, stayed on the record.

“We’re not finished with them yet,” said Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT) President Ron DeLord, who had spearheaded much of the campaign. “What bothered us was that this company was willing to exploit the advocation of the murder of police to earn a buck. We’re not going to be happy until Time Warner admits that they made a mistake.”

“I applaud Ice-T’s decision to pull the record,” DeLord told Billboard. “It’s a first step to resolving the situation.”

“I kind of wanted to keep going,” remembers DeLord. But a call from Phil Caruso, the longtime president of New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, helped change his mind. “He said ‘Ron, it’s over. We won, move on.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’ And that was it.”

On August 3, CLEAT issued a press release announcing the end of the boycott, declaring a “major victory.” The next day, Body Count was certified gold (500,000 copies sold) by the RIAA and sold out at record stores across the country.

The movement to ban “Cop Killer” had united nationwide political and law enforcement support, and without it, divisions started showing almost immediately. Several police organization leaders, the Dallas Police Association’s Glenn White among them, complained that the boycott was ending too soon. “This is like Charles Manson promising to never go back to the LaBianca home again to commit a killing,” stated disgraced former Reagan aide Oliver North. “We are going to pursue Time Warner to the full extent of the law in as many jurisdictions as we can.” That summer, North had used his new foundation, the 120,000-member Freedom Alliance, to launch petitions calling on the governors of all fifty states to “apply sedition or anarchy and other criminal statutes which could be used to hold Time Warner legally accountable for its call to kill police.” Five years earlier, Ice-T had called out North’s Iran-Contra dealings on 1987’s “Squeeze the Trigger.”

But while participants on all sides of the issue fumed, one activist was not giving in. “Just two days after pulling the song ‘Cop Killer’ from his album after a national protest, Ice-T is back in the middle of yet another controversy,” Entertainment Tonight reported. “The singer is on the cover of Rolling Stone, and police are not happy about how he’s dressed.” The show cut to clips of five different police officers, including San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen, plus one officer’s wife, expressing various outrage and disgust at Ice-T.

He was wearing a policeman’s uniform on the cover.