Before my hiatus from this column (apologies!), I promised I would embark on an examination of the controversial themes of crime, violence, and power in hip hop. “Cop Killer” by Ice-T and Body Count isn’t exactly hip hop, but it was the track that brought the gangster mentality into the brightest limelight. Possibly the most controversial song since Elvis shook his hips, the release of “Cop Killer” dragged the nation into an embarrassing and very noisy debate about First Amendment rights and, despite being pure punk rock, the place of hip hop in mainstream culture.
It isn’t entirely surprising that the controversy surrounding this track reflected mostly on hip hop as a genre. Ice-T was a rapper, and even his work as a vocalist for the band Body Count was clearly rap. Also, remember that this track dropped in 1992, after a good five years of increasing visibility of and, indeed, hostility towards, gangster hip hop. In the coming weeks, we’ll get into some of the drama caused by groups like NWA in years previous, but “Cop Killer” is undoubtedly the pinnacle of this period of angst as gangster hip hop invaded suburbia.
The song is all about a guy who’s been fed up with police brutality and being stopped by a cop for no reason, so he decides to get his black gloves and his black shirt and his ski mask and head out to kill some cops. Not exactly the deepest of lyrics, but the message is, errr, blatant. It shouts out Rodney King and Darryl Gates (who was the LAPD Chief at the time), and was released the year following the LA riots that stemmed from the Rodney King beating. Ice-T called it a “protest song,” one that was meant to speak for the angst of the lower classes who were sick and tired of mistreatment by the police.
While eventually the band decided that the controversy surrounding the song had outweighed the musical value and re-released the album without the track, the scandal was huge. You had people like George HW Bush, Tipper Gore, and Dan Quayle comparing the song to Nazis on the one hand, and others crying free speech and racism on the other. While the song isn’t available in any official format any more, in some ways its release wasn’t a total defeat for freedom of speech. After the controversy subsided, hindsight has proven 20/20, and the nation as a whole became far more accepting of such themes in music.
And if you don’t know, now you know…
Ice-T now played a cop in the movie “New Jack City” and currently plays one on “Law and Order: SVU.”
Bob Marley and the Wailers are the original cop killers.
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