When Ice-T released O.G. Original Gangster in 1991, the 33-year-old gangsta-rap superstar’s album was an instant hit and his biggest release to date. Deep in the track list was a quick-paced hardcore-punk song expressing frustration with the status quo in Black communities called “Body Count,” which he prefaced by saying, “I’ve got my own rock band that’s ’bout to jump off, this real Black hardcore band called Body Count.” One lyric goes, “You know what you’d do if … a cop shot your kid in the backyard/Shit would hit the fan, mutherfucka.” It’s a concept he developed further on Body Count’s self-titled debut album, which came out March 30, 1992 — a year after four L.A. policemen critically beat an unarmed Black man, Rodney King, at a traffic stop.
In an intro skit, he dedicated the album’s final song, “Cop Killer,” to “some personal friends of mine, the L.A.P.D.” He added that, for every policeman who has beaten someone for being the “wrong color,” he’d like to “take a pig out here in this parking lot and shoot ’em in their motherfucking face.” Then Ernie C.’s guitar rages in, and Ice-T screams, “Cop killer!”
The rapper sings about his mounting rage until drummer Beatmaster V batters his snare like a machine gun, signaling the chorus: “Cop killer, better you than me/Cop killer, fuck police brutality/Cop Killer, I know your family’s grievin’ … fuck ’em/Cop killer, but tonight we get even.” In the bridge, he big-ups N.W.A by chanting “Fuck the police” and adds “for Rodney King” to the end. In Ice-T’s eyes, the song continued the tradition of punk bands like Black Flag, who railed against police, and one group that called itself Millions of Dead Cops.
The album came out one month before a jury acquitted the policemen who beat King of using excessive force, leading to an uprising throughout Los Angeles. From April 29 to May 4, 1992, thousands of people set fires and looted businesses throughout the city; a total of 63 people died, including nine shot by police. With Ice-T’s profile at an all-time high and Body Count in the Top 30 of Billboard’s best-selling albums chart, police organizations decided that, no sir, they didn’t like the extra scrutiny one bit.
Body Count — author Ben Apatoff’s contribution to the 33 1/3 series of music books — chronicles the genesis of the album and the blowback to “Cop Killer” that Ice-T received, prompting him to remove it from the track list. The tune is still unavailable on CD or officially on streaming services.
In an excerpt from the book, the album’s sales are on the rise despite widespread boycotts. The furor had kicked off in May when a Dallas policeman, Glenn White, published an article titled “New Rap Song Encourages Killing Police Officers” in a Dallas police department newsletter called The Shield. He printed the address of Warner Bros. Records President Lenny Waronker and called for a boycott of all Time Warner products. A Corpus Christi newspaper picked up the story, and a Texas coalition of law enforcement agencies called CLEAT, cofounded by a former Texas cop named Ron DeLord, set up a press conference at Arlington, Texas’ Time Warner–owned Six Flags where they demanded apologies from Ice-T and Time Warner, as well as a removal of the song and a donation to community services. They threatened to divest their pensions from Time Warner stock.
Their demands went viral and people around the country started threatening to boycott the company in solidarity. Time Warner’s phones were subsequently jammed with complaints. Ice-T once estimated that Waronker must have received 500 death threats. Even then–Vice President Dan Quayle spoke out against the song: “I am outraged at the fact that Time Warner, a major corporation, is making money off a record called ‘Cop Killer’ that suggests it is OK to kill cops.” Around 1,500 major record stores pulled the album from its shelves.
Ice-T finally made his first statements about the controversy at a music industry event in New York City, on June 18. “At no point do I go out and say, ‘Let’s do it,’” he said. “I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it…. That’s called a poetic license, and obviously these ignorant pigs don’t know nothing about music.”
As printed in Apatoff’s book, Body Count, here’s what happened next.
Despite a growing number of major retailers refusing to sell it, Body Count sales surged. A Hollywood Reporter story noted “a tripling of Body Count album sales in the Lone Star state,” including a reported 370 percent leap in Houston, where CLEAT initiated the boycott. “There were no more returns coming in. Instead, the orders started like spiking like mad,” says [Warner Bros. exec Howie] Klein. “Suddenly a record that had sold about 200,000 doubled in sales and then kept going.”
“Of course sales increased — I bought one myself,” stated DeLord. “We don’t care if they sell a million more copies because of our protest. That’s not the point. You have to speak out against this sometime. If not now, when? How bad will the next album Time Warner produces be?”
On June 25, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled “Why We Won’t Withdraw ‘Cop Killer,’” by [then–Time Warner President] Gerald Levin, calling the song “a shout of pain and protest” that “shares a long history with rock and other forms of urban music” and had “been distorted by politicians on both sides of the aisle into a straw man.” “Cutting and running would be the surest and safest way to put the controversy behind us and get on with our business. But in the long run it would be a destructive precedent. It would be a signal to all the artists and journalists inside and outside Time Warner that if they wish to be heard, then they must tailor their minds and souls to fit the reigning orthodoxies,” wrote Levin. “The future of our country — indeed of our world — is contained in the commitment to truth and free expression, in the refusal to run away.”
Rep. Maxine Waters sent a letter to Levin thanking him for “taking a stand against the right-wing forces that would deny us all our constitutional rights.” Organizations like the ACLU and Norman Lear’s People for the American Way joined in support, and several artists, including Anthrax, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Ministry, and Gwar, supported the group in a Daily Variety ad headlined, “How does Dan Quayle Spell Censorship? I-C-E-T.” Executive Director Ronald Hampton of the Washington-based National Black Police Association, the only police group that denounced the King verdict and the “Cop Killer” boycott, stated that police groups did not show “the same level of outrage when Rodney King was brutally beaten by four Los Angeles police officers.” “Artists have always expressed their opinions about social conditions in music. Ice-T’s work is in the same tradition,” Hampton said. “He’s responding to a very real issue that affects many Americans, especially Blacks and Latinos.”
DeLord remembers the WSJ editorial as Levin’s misstep. “The corporation has no free speech rights. Ice-T does. The corporation is not a person,” says DeLord. “We were not going to be baited into arguing about the right of Ice-T to say whatever in the heck he wants to say…. Time Warner, as big and as smart as they are took the bait, and then they couldn’t sustain that.”
“One cop was telling me that the record scares him. And I’m like, well, maybe you should be scared. Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid because some police are way out of control,” stated Ice-T. “There’s a point where a cop pulls you out of that car and starts abusing you or beating on you and at that moment he is no longer within the law.”
In increasingly divided times, hating Body Count seemed like a rare issue prominent Democrats and Republicans could agree on. In June, 60 congressmen (57 Republicans and three Democrats), including Republican Party leaders Bob Michel and Newt Gingrich, signed a letter to Time Warner Vice President Jeanette Lerman expressing “our deep sense of outrage” over the “vile and despicable” record. “We believe that your decision to disseminate these despicable lyrics advocating the murder of police officers is unconscionable,” read the letter. Senators Alphonse D’Amato [R-NY], Lloyd Bentsen [D-TX], and Daniel Patrick Moynihan [D-NY] all withdrew from appearances in upcoming Warner Bros. political comedy Dave in protest. Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan insisted the Los Angeles “mob” came, in part, “out of rock concerts where rap music celebrates raw lust and cop-killing.” Alabama Governor Guy Hunt called for “an urgent Father’s Day request” statewide ban on the album, in a statement to the press and letters sent to all other U.S. governors calling to ban the record as well. His office denied that the statement was timed to distract from a grand jury considering ethics charges against Hunt the next day. (Hunt was indicted, convicted, and forced to resign by April 1993.)
New York governor Mario Cuomo called Body Count “Ugly, destructive and disgusting.” Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton let spokesperson Avis LaVelle state, “The governor has expressed concerns about the hate and violence that has been articulated in some of this music. That record is not exempt from those concerns…. He is not advocating curtailing free-speech rights but is advocating greater responsibility on the part of the artists.” That summer, Clinton chose Tennessee’s Senator Al Gore, husband of anti-rap advocate Tipper, as his running mate. Tipper’s PMRC co-founder Susan Baker was married to Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker.
On June 29, President George H. W. Bush was in New York campaigning for Senator D’Amato’s reelection, speaking to the New York Drug Enforcement Administration. “I stand against those who use films, or records, or television, or video games to glorify killing law enforcement officers. It is sick,” Bush stated, drawing applause. “It is wrong for any company — I don’t care how noble the name of the company — to issue records that approve of killing law enforcement officers.”
It was the first time in history a sitting U.S. president publicly condemned a music industry artist. Bush, an NRA Life Member at the time (he resigned in 1995), had earlier that year campaigned in New Hampshire with his friend and supporter Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose most famous character had killed and maimed several police officers onscreen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991’s highest grossing film. While promoting the film, director James Cameron liked to note that the tape of the Rodney King beating also contained scenes from the set of Terminator 2, filmed blocks away from taper George Holliday’s Lake View Terrace home. “That, to me, is the most amazing irony considering that the LAPD are strongly represented in Terminator 2 as being a dehumanized force,” said Cameron.
On the night of Bush’s statement, Body Count performed at the Palace in Los Angeles, on tour with Exodus and sharing a bill with Pantera, White Zombie, and Mighty Joe Young, whose debut would hit stores that September under their new band name, Stone Temple Pilots, after Ernie handed their demo tape to eventual STP manager Steve Stewart. Body Count started their show with a pig-masked man in a police uniform (a fan picked by Ice before the show) getting jumped by Ice, [Body Count sampler] Sean E. Sean, and [hype man] Sean E. Mac, while the band broke into “Body Count’s in the House.” Ice slammed Bush and Quayle in “Out in the Parking Lot,” before closing with “Cop Killer.”
“There were police protests everywhere, and you had to walk past a lot of angry cops,” Exodus’ Gary Holt remembers the tour. “But [Body Count] were super awesome guys. We shared a lot of laughs,” he smiles. “I still have my Rhyme Syndicate jacket that Ice-T gave me.”
“I don’t know what Bush and Quayle and the rest of these guys are so upset about,” Ice told the L.A. Times. “Don’t these politicians realize the country was founded on the kind of revolutionary political thought expressed in my song? I mean, haven’t they ever listened to the national anthem? Anybody knows that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is really just a song about a shoot-out between us and the police. Have they forgotten that Paul Revere became a Revolutionary War hero for warning everybody, ‘The police are coming, the police are coming?’” In Rolling Stone, Ice called the Fourth of July “National Fuck the Police Day.”
The FBI added Ice-T to the National Threat list, and the IRS audited his taxes twice. His daughter was pulled out of school and asked if her father was involved with any paramilitary organizations. “The minute the president says your name, the most serious background check of your life happens,” Ice remembered. “He wants a dossier.”
The LAPD, meanwhile, tried rehabilitating its image by hiring their first-ever African American Chief of the LAPD, recruiting Willie L. Williams from Philadelphia. On June 30, the day Williams was sworn in, he condemned “Cop Killer.” “I have major problems with it as an American, as a parent, and as a 30-year police officer,” stated Williams. “I think it’s a disgrace that any singer would use such vulgarity and give the implication that killing an officer is OK.”
“People who ride around all night and use crack cocaine and listen to rap music that talks about killing cops — it’s bound to pump them up,” stated Fraternal Order of the Police President Paul Taylor. “No matter what anybody tells you, this kind of music is dangerous.”
Numerous defenders of Body Count’s First Amendment right to release “Cop Killer” couldn’t bring themselves to do so without trashing the song itself, calling the song “repugnant,” “as bad as anything ever put on a record or disc,” or “the cheapest, most conventional image of rebellion that our culture offers.” “It was always, ‘Well, he has the First Amendment right, I don’t agree with him, but . . . ‘ Fuck that. Back me up on the fact that Ice-T has the grounds to say, ‘Fuck the police,’ ’cause the police have been killing his people,” Ice stated. For lawmakers, it was easier to attack “Cop Killer” and exploit fears of rap than to reform the issues Body Count were writing about, issues lawmakers themselves had the power to change.
The NRA attempted to occupy the protest, over CLEAT’s objections, with their own press conferences and marches, forcing their own pro-gun stealth PAC Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA) into a Time Warner meeting CLEAT had negotiated. LEAA staged their own news conferences and promised to bring maimed police officers to the shareholders’ meeting. NRA Executive VP Wayne LaPierre stated that if Time Warner really cared about reducing violence in America, “They would put an immediate end to distributing this disgusting album.” The NRA also placed full-page newspaper ads in numerous papers, “While Time Warner Counts Its Money, America May Count Its Murdered Cops,” warning of “a Top 40 album banging the brains of millions of youth, marketed by Time Warner,” urging its membership into a letter-writing campaign and threatening legal action.
That week, “Body Count’s in the House” appeared as the end credits theme for Sony sci-fi action flick Universal Soldier. The conglomerate couldn’t risk their multimillion-dollar franchise with an uncensored Body Count song, and the film version carefully edits out the curse words that might have offended the sensibilities of anybody who watched Universal Soldier. But in the corresponding music video, which intercuts band performance footage with scenes from the film, Body Count multitracks the vocals, coming on like an army. At the video’s conclusion, two police officers confront the band backstage. “You think you’re tough, don’t you?” one asks. Ice directs the officers to his bodyguards, who step forward to reveal themselves as Universal Soldier’s stars, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. Ice smiles while the officers sheepishly retreat.
Watching the band thrash through “Body Count’s in the House” amid high-budget action clips, it looks intended as a commercial for Sony Pictures. By the film’s July 10 release date, it was a coup for Body Count.
“My experience with Ice-T was very cool,” recalls Van Damme. “Fantastic, fantastic.”
© Ben Apatoff, 2023. From Body Count’s Body Count by Ben Apatoff published by Bloomsbury Academic on 7 September 2023.