Ice-T Raps Himself in First Amendment : ICE-T “Freedom of Speech ... Just Watch What You Say.” Sire ***: POP STARS ***** Great Balls of Fire **** Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door *** Good Vibrations ** Maybe Baby * Ain’t That a Shame

Ice-T listens hard to N.W.A, toughens the beats and finally makes the awesome hard-core gangster-rap album you always knew he had in him. After all, he invented the genre. And because crime-rhymes are often taken as reports from the front these days rather than invitations to violence--if the media think you’re political, you can get away with almost anything--he pumps up the volume, hard.

Where the L.A. rapper’s beats were once too slick, they’re street-raw and noisy this time, disco-claps and sequenced drums and cheesy synthesizer sounds you haven’t heard since the second Jan Hammer album. The lisping legend in leather attacks what he calls the “punk bourgeois black suckers” at L.A. R&B; radio station KJLH for not playing rap, and all the rappers who didn’t stand up for Public Enemy during its recent controversy. He speculates on the sound a Black & Decker hand drill would make going into somebody’s skull.

And Ice is careful to lard even the most recidivist fantasies with references to the First Amendment, taking the freedom-of-speech high road last traveled by the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, who appears on a couple of cuts here. It’s crude--if this LP didn’t offend you, it wouldn’t be doing its job--but effective. His best one yet.