POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ice-T’s Message Boils Down to Violence in Brutal World

For such a controversial guy, Ice-T certainly puts on a pedestrian show. Performing Sunday evening in the Cal State Fullerton gym, the L.A.-based rapper wouldn’t have let down any Parents Music Resource Center monitors in the audience: His 13 numbers were chock full of expletives and images of violence and crude sex.

Missing from Ice-T’s show, however, were most of his more politically based material and, more crucially, a sense of spontaneity and engagement in his show.

Given that those wanting labels on recordings haven’t targeted, say, country music (and is there any image in music more chilling than Johnny Cash singing “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” to an audience of approving convicts?), it may be that they’re more upset by the way Ice-T and some other rappers place their violent street world in a moral perspective, as on Ice-T’s “This One’s for Me”: “My homie got a year for an ounce of weed, While Bush sells weapons to the enemy.”

But except for the taped opening of “Shut Up, Be Happy”--an ominous vision of a brave new world where “the comfort you demanded is now mandatory”--Ice-T and his five-man Rhyme Syndicate Posse stuck to his well-crafted, if thoroughly predictable, missives on his superiority with a microphone and his evocations of gang violence.

While such numbers as “Drama” and the movie theme “Colors” created a palpable sonic and verbal portrait of that brutal world, along with moralizing on the futility of such a life, they were undercut in concert by the formulaic pre-programmed manner of the show.