BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Rapper’s Message for the Eyes, Not Ears : THE ICE OPINION, <i> by Ice-T as told to Heidi Siegmund,</i> St. Martin’s Press, $17.9, 199 pages

Few art forms have roused as much controversy in America as rap music.

On the one hand, there are its fans--nearly 8% of the music-buying public, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America.

These include not only gangly suburban teen-agers and cool urban rappers, but leftist politicians and such intellectuals as City University of New York professor Marshall Berman, who has likened the breakthroughs of gangsta rap to “Picasso’s in painting, Eliot’s and Pound’s in poetry, Faulkner’s and Joyce’s in the novel, Parker’s in jazz.”

On the other hand, there are many Americans who, upon witnessing gangsta rap’s seeming glorification of Uzi-brandishing violence and crotch-grabbing misogyny, may feel more inclined to agree with Francis Davis’ observation in a 1993 Atlantic article. He wrote that being subjected to “a drive-by musical attack from a Jeep whose back seat has been torn out and replaced with speakers” is a bit like hearing “the death rattle of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.”

No rapper is arguably more central to this controversy than Ice-T, a 34-year-old musician who grew up in L.A.’s Crenshaw District under the name Tracy Morrow.

In March, 1992, just a month before the Los Angeles riots, Ice-T released an album called “Body Count.” Inspired by rock groups with such names as Cannibal Corpse, Slayer and Megadeth, the album featured such songs as “Cop Killer,” whose lyrics--e.g. “die, die, die, pig, die!”--left nothing to the imagination.

Ice-T’s message grew even more incendiary in the November, 1992, album “Home Invasion,” whose cover depicted hooded black intruders attacking a white man and woman.

In his provocative and candid book, “The Ice Opinion,” written with journalist Heidi Siegmund, Ice-T does his best to carve out an identity as an African American leader and to defend himself against charges that his albums merely exacerbate racial tensions in post-riot Los Angeles.

Readers unruffled by Ice-T’s fondness for four-letter words will be surprised to find a literary persona--witty and even at times judicious--that is far more levelheaded than his rap persona.

Still, his self-defense is largely unpersuasive. He can be grossly unfair, condoning songs such as “Cop Killer,” for instance, by saddling police officers with our whole sorry history of slavery: “When we came here on the slave ships, the police were the ones with the whips.”

And he never resolves the huge contradictions between the high social ideals he espouses in one chapter (“Every life is of equal value and . . . has nothing to do with race or sex”) and the cynical male street behavior he seems to encourage in another: “If you are only out to (expletive), then do not be afraid to lie. Do not be afraid to lie. . . . Tell her what she wants to hear. Lie. Lie. Lie.”

One suspects that he knows he’s being disingenuous when he argues that his frequent use of the word bitch in songs isn’t sexist because “from the ghetto perspective, (it) is a non-gender-specific slang term for anybody who thinks the world revolves around them.”

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Nevertheless, some of Ice-T’s arguments can be quite persuasive. At the same time that “Cop Killer” came out (Ice-T later pulled it from his album), Clint Eastwood released “Unforgiven,” a film in which Eastwood’s character is glorified for gunning down a bad cop and dozens of others with the misfortune of being in the vicinity.

Ice-T effectively argues here that a double standard explains the fact that critics offered near-universal praise for Eastwood’s film but near-universal condemnation of Ice-T’s song.

Ice-T also manages to show those who haven’t been there some of the subtle ways discrimination works in our back yard: “Why can’t you go surfing?” he wonders. “Who says surfing is just for white kids? That’s your wave, too. That’s your snow mountain up there in Big Bear.”

Ice-T argues convincingly that his recordings give voice to this feeling of exclusion and to the feelings of powerlessness and helplessness that come from growing up in ghettos drained of hope.

But because the gang members who inspire his raps do not enjoy being told that they are devoid of hope (for if there’s anything Ice-T knows about, it is the fragility of male pride), he creates fantasy characters whose powerful posturing soothes his audience’s numbing feeling of powerlessness.

It is, of course, debatable whether the homeboys for whom Ice-T raps see that he is inventing not role models but characters, whether they understand that underlying his music are mainstream values (here he eschews everything from racism and sexism to violence).

The only sure thing is that the hopeful word that is Ice-T’s sign-off in this book-- peace --will not, in itself, be enough to help us get along.

On Jan. 14, 1994, not long after this book went to press, Tony Thomas, the founder and leader of Hands Across Watts, the organization Ice-T has worked with in order to “see the gang truce through,” was gunned down in front of the Imperial Courts Housing Project.

Thomas had survived an earlier attack in which he was hit by eight AK-47 bullets. But this one proved fatal.