Ice-T Fallout: Signs of Industry Wariness of ‘Gangsta’ Rap : Pop music: MCA ‘rebels’ stop one record; a Time Warner company drops one rap group.

In the wake of last month’s Ice-T “Cop Killer” furor, top executive ranks within the recording industry are re-evaluating their commitments to the marketing of violent and sexually explicit rap music.

At entertainment giant MCA, women employees pressed top corporate management to pull one rap record back from retailers. At a subsidiary of Time Warner, the conglomerate that released and then withdrew “Cop Killer,” management quietly cut its ties to a Boston rap group after a song came under fire from police organizations.

“There is great concern now among officials at Time Warner whether they should even be in the gangsta rap business at all,” said one high-level insider at the entertainment conglomerate. “These guys--as well as executives at other companies--are extremely nervous about how to deal with (three) potentially offensive albums being recorded and delivered to them right now.”

“In many ways, the debate that is taking place inside MCA right now is really just a microcosm of the debate going on within society as a whole,” said Al Teller, chairman of the Japanese-owned entertainment firm’s music division. “This is a very sensitive issue that executives at every record company are going to have to grapple with for many years to come.

“While I strongly believe in the right of free expression, I also believe every record company has to establish boundaries for themselves.”

Elsewhere within the industry, labels have instituted various procedures to deal with potentially troublesome records. So-called informal “lyric review committees” have grown up at all of the major record labels. The committees, which actually grew out of earlier controversies involving record lyrics, have, sources in the business say, been instructed to use more caution since the “Cop Killer” fracas.

MCA Music Entertainment Group withdrew New York rap group FU2’s “No Head, No Backstage Pass” single from retail stores on July 29, barely 24 hours after Time Warner pulled “Cop Killer.”

The next day, Time Warner-owned Tommy Boy Records dropped its contract with rappers Almighty RSO, after the group’s slow-selling single “One in the Chamber” came under fire from police organizations that complained the song, like “Cop Killer,” encouraged violence against law-enforcement officials.

According to Time Warner sources, pressure from stockholders during the Ice-T brouhaha has sparked repeated high-level boardroom discussions at company-owned record labels. The firm is said to be examining its plans to release potentially offensive new rap albums by Ice-T, Juvenile Committee and Apache.

Unlike the “Cop Killer” debate that was instigated by police groups around the country, the attack on MCA’s “No Head, No Backstage Pass” came from outraged employees within MCA itself. The song graphically details the violent sexual assault of an underaged female groupie.

According to company officials, the internal effort to sabotage the project peaked when employees sent copies of the lyrics and anonymous protest letters to Lew Wasserman, chairman and chief executive officer of MCA Inc., and Sidney J. Sheinberg, MCA’s president and chief operating officer, through inner-office mail at the firm’s Universal City headquarters.

Sheinberg, sources say, immediately put in a call to Al Teller, chairman of the MCA Music Entertainment Group, and within hours, “No Head” was history.

Teller, who maintains he had never been notified of the song’s harsh lyrical content nor that the record had been shipped to retailers, took full responsibility for pulling the FU2 single.

“When I read the lyric to this song, it made me feel very uncomfortable,” Teller said. “It was extremely misogynistic. So much so, that I believed it crossed that impossible-to-define line. I felt I had to make a call on it.”

“No Head”--the flip side of FU2’s “Boomin’ in Ya Jeep” single--was released by JDK Records, a New York record label owned by rappers Run DMC and managed by Rush Communications entrepreneur Russell Simmons. JDK is distributed exclusively by MCA, a subsidiary of Japanese electronics giant Matsushita Electrical Industrial Company Ltd.

Some of the lyrics that MCA employees objected to include:

...I’ll drink champagne, she’ll drink Ripple

Scream when I put the safety pins through her nipples

I know it sounds harsh, but the bitch is gonna love it

Hurt me, hurt me, push it harder, shove it . . . .

Members of FU2 were unavailable for comment, but Kijana, president of JDK Records, said he was dissatisfied with MCA’s handling of the matter, claiming that critics were over-reacting to the song.

“The lyric was written tongue in cheek,” Kijana said. “Yeah, it’s a little risque. Yeah, it’s a little controversial. Because hey, we realize that in this business, controversy sells. But it wasn’t meant to offend anyone the least bit.”

In May, dozens of women in several departments within the Universal City office and at distribution plants in Gloversville, N.Y., and Pinkneyville, Ill., refused to work on the project, officials said.

Several male employees joined the revolt in June after MCA marketing executives proposed deleting the corporate name from the record to possibly defuse resistance to the project.

Internal dissension eventually grew so severe that MCA Records president Richard Palmese--who sources say privately detested the FU2 lyric--provided employees the opportunity to not work on the project.

Palmese, however, did nothing to stop the “No Head” project, nor did he notify Teller or other executives above him of the brewing controversy, sources said. He chose instead to defer to the advice of MCA Records Black Music president Ernie Singleton, whose division fought hard for the right to market the FU2 single under free speech principles.

“I can see why women are upset,” said Singleton, who has been credited with the success of such MCA acts as Bobby Brown and Jodeci. “I wouldn’t play this single for my wife or my kids, but I firmly believe in our Constitution and I think a black artist has a First Amendment right to express his own experience. I was the one responsible for putting this record on the street and in my opinion it was a mistake to pull it.”

MCA’s Teller, who says FU2 can take its record to another label, disagrees.

“I know we’re going to get flack saying that what we did was censorship,” he said. “But I don’t see it that way.”