Artless, Brutal ‘Cop Killer’ Deserved to Be Withdrawn

To fight effectively on the battlefield of politics and cultural values, into which pop music increasingly is drawn in this election year, an artist--especially a would-be protest singer like Ice-T--has to be able to claim the moral high ground.

With “Cop Killer,” the rapper-turned-rocker put himself in a moral swamp, an indefensible position that he was wise to abdicate last week by having the controversial song withdrawn by his label, Sire/Warner Bros.

Instead of wasting his time defending the bad art of his blustering revenge fantasy, maybe Ice-T can devote himself to writing a song that makes a reasoned, emotionally affecting point about the police brutality that “Cop Killer” purportedly was written to condemn.

If you haven’t heard it, “Cop Killer” is a pounding, hard-core metal anthem in which shouted vocals, blasting guitar chords and exploding drum beats are accompanied by a steady barrage of gunfire sound effects. On a purely musical level, it’s an effective piece of high-aggression rock ‘n’ roll. Lyrically, it’s a blind, artless mess.

In the song, a character fed up because “a pig stopped me for nothin’ ” decides to launch a terrorist campaign against cops--not just cops who have committed racially motivated outrages or violently abused their authority, but any cop at all. And, he suggests as he invites the audience to “sing along,” others should take up his cause as well.

Attacked by police groups, politicians and Ollie North, Ice-T tried to defend his song by saying he didn’t mean to advocate the indiscriminate murder of cops. Instead, he held out “Cop Killer” as a cautionary fantasy showing the anger and hatred engendered by chronic police abuse of ghetto blacks.

If that was the sort of song he wanted to write, he should have written it. He could have taken pains to create a fleshed-out protagonist who is more than a nameless, cop-stalking bogey man. He could have alluded to specific incidents that drive the “cop killer” over the edge, building a believable rationale for his hatred and showing it clearly as the consequence of grinding injustice (in “Cop Killer,” Ice-T offers no telling grounds for protest, but only slogans like “F- the police!”).

He could have given us a “cop killer” who is not the Terminator-style cartoon killing machine depicted on the cover of “Body Count,” the debut rock album by Ice-T and his band, but a plausible character who has been driven by anguishing experience to contemplate desperate, immoral and inevitably futile action.

A song of substance might have riled the same interests who attacked Ice-T over “Cop Killer,” but it would have been impossible to label as merely inflammatory. In the cultural debate, Ice-T would have been able to stake out a position as a credible voice calling for police reform, instead of being painted easily as a snarling thug advocating police decimation.

As it was, “Cop Killer” handed defenders of the status quo an opportunity to divert attention from real and crucial questions of police policy and police conduct, and engage Ice-T on the turf of his own sensationalistic fantasy land.

It was an incredible reversal: Those who ought to be on the defensive, given the recent torrent of highly publicized evidence concerning patterns of police failure and abuse in Los Angeles County, were able to go on the moral offensive, thanks to a ridiculous, self-serving song. Voluntarily withdrawing the song was, in the end, the only means Ice-T had to spike the ammunition he had handed them.

It’s important to remember that Ice-T withdrew the song freely. Yes, he and his record company were denounced and threatened with a boycott, both legitimate means of protest in our democracy. But there was none of the improper official coercion that marked the 2 Live Crew obscenity case of a few years ago. Ice-T could have stood by his song and toughed it out--as any artist with a complete faith in his work’s value ought to have done. Evidently, the creator of “Cop Killer” couldn’t see putting himself on the line for such a flimsy piece of work. The song’s withdrawal will not make it easier for foes of rap or rock to shoot down the next controversial song that comes along--not if the song has the armor of thoughtfulness and conviction.

Some apologists for “Cop Killer” have found it hypocritical that Ice-T’s song should come under attack when films depicting the slaughter of police, or such popular songs as Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” go unremarked upon.

The fact is that portrayals of cop killers always have been completely acceptable in our culture, so long as there is an attempt to place the killing within some rational or moral context. In Chapter 2 of Exodus, Moses’ first act as an adult is to kill a cop--or, more specifically, an Egyptian overseer who has been beating an Israelite slave. Had Ice-T given his “cop-killer” the specific rationale that the Bible gives Moses, his song would have had the grounding to withstand any attack.

“I Shot the Sheriff” originally was released by Bob Marley and the Wailers in 1973 and was covered by Eric Clapton, who scored a No. 1 hit with it in 1974. It’s a classic protest song, a model of musical dramatization that tells the anguished tale of a man trapped in a web of malevolent police power. Marley gives the song’s tormenting cop a name and an oppressor’s agenda:

Sheriff John Brown always hated me--for what, I don’t know.

Every time I plant a seed, he said ‘Kill it before it grow.’

In the story’s climax, the hitherto law-abiding narrator is about to escape the sheriff’s stifling jurisdiction, only to be stopped at gunpoint. That’s when the cop-killing occurs--by no means unprovoked, and by no means indiscriminate. Marley’s moral high ground is unassailable. If Ice-T had managed to tell a story like that, a whole battalion of Ollie Norths could have tried mustering an outcry against him, only to wind up looking absurd.

The lack of substance in “Cop Killer” suggests that Ice-T was more concerned with striking a macho, combative pose than in offering incisive commentary.

It’s important to remember that his “Body Count” album represented a risky career turn. Since 1987, Ice-T had built a successful career as a rapper. He dubbed himself “the Original Gangster,” taking pride in being the first rapper to offer the blunt and bloody depictions of gang life in South-Central Los Angeles that later became the common currency of performers like N.W.A. and Ice Cube. Now he was making a stylistic change that some of his fans might view as an abandonment.

His answer was to continue emphasizing issues of race and ghetto life on the “Body Count” album, so that nobody could accuse him of forsaking his roots. And by making most of the songs brutally, crudely confrontational, nobody could accuse him of losing his “gangster” edge.

At the same time, Ice-T was seeking credibility from metal fans, a potentially vast new audience. With “Cop Killer,” he served up a song that observes a heavy metal convention dating back to Black Sabbath’s 20-year-old hit “Iron Man”: the fantasy tale of titanic vengeance.

But Ice-T couldn’t have it both ways. Effective commentary about social issues requires the close, drawn-from-life observation he has put into his better raps. Metal fantasy is just that: Sometimes the fantasy can be symbolic or allegorical, but more often it is merely cartoonish.

Trying to combine the social commentary of serious rap with the imaginary constructs of heavy metal, Ice-T came up with the flimsily drawn “Cop Killer” character. Those who took the song as commentary, not fantasy, had reason to be horrified when they heard its shout-along choruses of “F--- the police . . . cop killer,” which seem to call for (at the least) the audience’s endorsement of the character’s murderous agenda.

Now, there is nothing sinister about offering an audience a shared violent fantasy as a way to work out aggression, so long as the fantasy is understood. That’s a common ploy of heavy metal. But what if you’re asking that your song be taken as social commentary, not fantasy? Then those same shout-alongs can be taken plausibly as frightening calls to join the “Cop Killer” in his campaign--regardless of Ice-T’s after-the-fact denials.

It’s interesting to note that Ice-T has a habit of fantasizing in public about supposed police perfidy. At the Gathering of the Tribes concert two years ago at the Pacific Amphitheatre, he came on stage and announced that the politicized rap group Public Enemy, which had been advertised to appear, was being banned from the show by the Costa Mesa police.

This proved to be an absolute crock; Public Enemy had reasons of its own for not appearing and would have turned the episode into a cause celebre had there been an ounce of truth to the nonsense put forth by Ice-T and several other performers, including event organizer Ian Astbury. When Ice-T played his own set later the same night, he pretended to be performing in defiance of a police attempt to shut him down.

Shenanigans like these served Ice-T’s purpose in building an image as a rebel standing up to repressive authority. Well, the time for shenanigans is past. If rappers and rockers want to criticize police conduct, the field has never been more wide open. But get rid of the careerist calculations and the image-mongering fantasies, and speak honestly to the issues.

The “Body Count” album has other ugly songs. “Smoked Pork” is an album-opening bookend to “Cop Killer,” the closing track. “KKK Bitch” finds the singer reveling in vicious sexual stereotypes about black men, never bothering to deliver the ironic twist or satiric reversal that might explode the stereotypes and justify the song’s coarse fantasies. White supremacists are Ice-T’s ostensible target in the song, but this malignant piece merely caters to the hoary racist conception of the black man as a sexual threat.

It would be wrong, though, to dismiss Ice-T out of hand. In the remarkable “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight,” he shows how brutal, even repulsive means can be used to further thought-provoking artistic ends. The protagonist is again a murderous fantasy figure, but this time, unlike “Cop Killer,” Ice-T offers an in-depth narrative that gives his character dimension, reason, and a measure of moral grounding.

Summoning his actor’s skills (Ice-T has appeared in several films, including “New Jack City” where he played a cop), he opens the song with a tender declaration of love for his mother. But love turns to anguish, and then to hatred, as the singer’s fictional alter ego recognizes how “momma” has poisoned him with racist attitudes toward whites.

In the song’s climax, Ice-T (in a sequence that recalls “the killer woke at dawn” passage from the Doors’ “The End”) explodes into mad, frenzied violence. Cackling insanely, he describes horrific butchery in which he first burns his mother alive, then bludgeons her to finish the job. Then he chops the corpse into pieces and travels the nation, scattering body parts from city to city.

On one level, it’s just an old-line heavy metal revenger’s fantasy, and a particularly gruesome one at that (though no more gruesome than, say, the climactic scene of Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” in which a mother leads a mob of women in tearing her son limb from limb). But by giving the killer a complex makeup and a morally comprehensible motivation--the eradication of racism--Ice-T goes beyond mere sensationalism and invites a deeper interpretation.

The ritualistic nature of the killing suggests that this isn’t just murder, but an act of exorcism. “Momma” can be seen not as a real woman, but as a symbol for a racist heritage passed from one generation to the next. Bloody matricide becomes a metaphor for the wrenching transformation required before an individual or a society can expunge evil ideas handed down by cherished forebears.

“Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight” has come in for criticism as one more example of Ice-T’s blind celebration of violence, but it is no easy target like “Cop Killer.” This time, the song, like all good ones, is its own best defense.