"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."
Last week more people were trying to shut him down. A group of law- enforcement officials in Texas called for a boycott of Time Warner, the parent company of his record label, Sire (and of TIME) because of one of his recent tracks, Cop Killer ("I'm 'bout to bust some shots off/ I'm 'bout to dust some cops off"). Said Doug Elder, president of the Houston Police Officers Association: "You mix this with the summer, the violence and a little drugs, and they are going to unleash a reign of terror on communities all across this country."
But what guardians of respectability find vile is considered compelling and clever by the hundreds of thousands of fans who have made Ice-T the world's most consistently successful hard-core rapper. Despite very little radio play or MTV time -- his cuts are too hot for the air -- he has produced four gold- selling albums. His fans are mainly young males, but they range through all races and classes, and they can be found from his adopted hometown of Los Angeles to Harlem and Harvard -- where his 1989 album, The Iceberg Freedom of Speech, was No. 1 on the campus charts.
Ice-T does not want to be adored. He'd prefer to be shocking -- and well paid. For the most part, he lets his music speak for itself because he knows trying to reason with his critics is wasting time. "The way I rap, and what I rap about, is based in reality," he says angrily. "I don't really care what people who don't give me a chance say."
After the defiance, though, comes Ice-T's real message. "I write to create some brain-cell activity," he insists. "I want people to think about life on the street, but I don't want to bore them. I want them to ask themselves, ; 'Does it matter to me?' "
The recent violence in Los Angeles, says Ice-T, "only vindicated what I've been rapping about for years. I have been one of the voices from the 'hood trying to let you know what kids on the street are thinking." To him, the riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict were predictable. "If you didn't expect the rebellion after such a miscarriage of justice, then it just shows how out of touch you are."
What about the profanity? Ice-T sighs in frustration. "You're overhearing black guys on a street corner talking to one another. It's s--- talking, a dialect. But people take it so seriously." What he fails to realize is that people do take words seriously, and understandably so, when they are so offensive and degrading. When Ice-T sang on one of his first albums about a friend who "f---ed the bitch with a flashlight/ Pulled it out, left the batteries in/ So he could get a charge when he begins," he let his own definition of "reality" overcome his responsibility.