Ice-T Critics Miss the Rapper’s Real Target

The first salvo came from that strange alliance--police supporters, Charlton Heston, Oliver North and Time Warner shareholders. Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” readily blaring in millions of young, angry ears, would cause the death of law enforcement officers. Calendar dutifully analyzed the controversy with the help of extensively quoted “experts” (Counterpunch Letters, “ ‘Cop Killer’ Fingers Social Tension,” July 20).

Silly me, I had started to hope that this outcry over Ice-T’s art, an art which gives a grim new meaning to the words “pop” music, would stir those equal values that must lie in the hearts of every good person.

I thought everyone would also see how rap music is really rape music. For, while it is true that “Cop Killer” makes clear what the listeners are supposed to do after they take in the tune, it is also true that the balance of the “Body Count” album is littered with the bodies of women.

Like too much of rap, the cuts before and after “Cop Killer” are an insistent demand, a veritable how-to, of mutilated women, women thrown like garbage in canyons, women whose sole purpose is to provide men with an object for their hatred and violence.

And I don’t want to hear from anyone that this music is “sexually explicit” and, therefore, protectable as free expression. Sure, it’s protectable, but it has as much to do with sex or love as an ax murder.

These are not love songs, these are hate songs. Sexually explicit is Cole Porter writing “. . . ‘til you let me spend my life making love to you” or Bob Seger’s “Everybody Wants to Do the Horizontal Bop,” not this misogynist hate-spew of cut and slash, beat and burn, destroy and discard.

This is about power and the assertion that it is every man’s right, no matter how powerless he may be in the larger social context, to control women through pain and humiliation. Indeed, where law enforcement robs him of his manhood, the message seems to be: this is how he can get it back--easily.

Hello? Mr. Heston? Silence. Ollie?? Somehow I thought the sheer volume of gut-wrenching statistics might have gotten someone’s attention. Law enforcement officers are killed in the line of their most dangerous duty, even though they are armed, partnered and trained to stand some chance out there.

Women, however, are battered in this country with about the same frequency as police officers take breath, and they have not taken on the expectation of damage in their relationship. Or have they?

Battered women’s shelters overflow, emergency rooms find that battered women are more than half of their female clients, the American Medical Assn. finally recognizes that at least one out of every three women seen by any doctor in this country is a battered woman. Surely, Ice-T’s critics will say something about this.

The hope did not seem unrealistic.

All the “experts” recognize the connection between the expression of ideas and the acts those ideas represent. Police will be harmed because the song says to do it. If that fear is legit--and the loud governmental and police league voices believe it is--then the same must be true for women.

Women have long understood that “mere” speech has violent social consequences. If women are “bitches,” they are not human and they can be treated in any way imaginable. Speech, not alcohol, is the great loosener of inhibition. It gives permission for, indeed it demands, violence against women.

So, when Ice-T’s critics demand a sense of social responsibility on the part of record and corporate executives, I agree.

Let there be recognition of the harm their industry is doing to women so that, just as with race, a new community standard is established and this kind of invective doesn’t get distributed in multimillion-dollar packages with no chance (First Amendment fans, take note) for any kind of meaningful answering speech. Ever hear a hit single called “You Can’t Beat a Woman”?

Sadly though, the community standard is not there yet. People are exercised about powerful lyrics demanding violence and revolution against the police, but woman-hating lyrics don’t even break a sweat.

With friends like Heston, the shareholders, Ollie and the Times-published “experts,” battered women just seem to have more enemies.