"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat," wrote Robert Frost. Tracy Marrow's poetry takes a switchblade and deftly slices life's jugular. Since his 1987 debut album, Rhyme Pays, Marrow -- who goes by his high school nickname of Ice-T -- has set off critics who accuse him of glorifying crime, homophobia, sexism and violence. His profanity-laced descriptions of gang life in a Los Angeles ghetto fostered a genre of hard-core black music known as "gangster rap." Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Center singled out Ice-T for the "vileness of his message."
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