POP REVIEW : Ice-T Plays It Smart and Peaceable

Performing with his hard-rock band Body Count at the Electric Ballroom in North Hollywood on Friday, Ice-T borrowed a page from those who have called for his artistic head.

For much of the time, he took the moral high ground.

At least 60 police officers and dozens of news reporters (although only a handful of protesters) stood outside the theater before the first Los Angeles-area concert for the group since the now international brouhaha erupted over the song “Cop Killer.” Instead of stirring up the kind of trouble that would further galvanize the “Cop Killer” controversy, Ice-T did the smartest thing he could. He took the moral high ground as the voice of reason.

“People ask me if I’m afraid,” he said on stage. “How could I be afraid? I’m trying to bring people together. I’m on a mission from God.”

A look around the theater--this was the inaugural event at the latest incarnation of the gorgeous, Art Deco El Portal--made it hard to argue with that. The audience, a balanced blend of black, white and Latino, rockers and rappers, grungies and yuppies, was as mixed as Body Count’s heavy-metal-with-black-roots music. And the band gave them what they came for: a dynamic concert of thoughtful entertainment.

Not that Ice-T sidestepped the topic of the day, nor that he was above a little dramatic hyperbole and exploitation of his notoriety. “There has never been so much controversy created around one simple song in the history of music,” he said.

Yes, he was flanked on stage by two men with rifles, an eerie reflection of the police presence outside.

Yes, he said that “if any harm comes to me, whoever did it, their children will murder them in their sleep.”

Yes, he paraphrased the intentionally shocking, expletive-laced introduction of “Cop Killer” from the “Body Count” album: “For every cop that has ever . . . misused that power . . . I would like to take one out there in the middle of Lankershim Boulevard and shoot him in his . . . face.”

But he made a point of noting that “Cop Killer” isn’t targeted at “the cool cops out there” and told his cheering fans, “They think that by listening to the music you guys are so stupid that you would go out and commit a heinous crime. We don’t go out like that.”

And he several times cautioned the crowd, “Don’t give them reason for trouble”--perhaps needlessly, given the peaceful nature of the audience.

He even took his and his fans’ minds off the controversy with a slightly lewd joke about two whales. Mostly, though, he and the four musicians in the increasingly powerful Body Count offered a good, solid rock concert centered on the message that unity breeds peace and hate breeds more hate.

Perhaps Ice-T is guilty of escalating the rhetoric at times, but the characters in his songs are usually the victims of hate, so full of rage that they might actually kill a cop, or, in the case of “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight,” their own racist mother.

The result was that while hot tempers have raged over “Cop Killer,” on Friday cool heads prevailed. As for the fans, they came, they went through the security search at the door, they rocked . . . and they, as well as the police, went home quietly and peacefully.