The Ice-T Interview (Part 2 of 2)

SOHH Eighty: It seems like the first lesson that you taught those kids -- to draw from their own life and not make shit up -- is something a lot of people in the game these days missed out on.

Ice T: Yeah, well, you can only lie for so long, you know? And if you get out here and portray being a thug or a gangsta or whatever and you ain’t one, the streets are gonna walk up and touch you. It ain’t the smartest thing in the world to do... you gonna have to live with it. Like when Jamie Kennedy did Malibu’s Most Wanted -- it’s not something you want to portray if you’re not ready to live it. On my new album, the Gangsta Rap album, it’s more of an overview from an O.G.’s standpoint, like this is where it’s been, this is how I see it. My boys say, ‘This is your grown man album.’ This is for people who have been through the cycle, are over 25, understand what’s going on, and don’t really wanna hear a 19-year-old kid rap, ‘cause he can’t really give ‘em any information. And the whole hip hop style of, you know, ‘get ya grown man on and ya grown woman on’ comes from, when we first started makin’ rap, we was all kids. Nobody had no jobs, nobody had no kids, so you could just be seriously partyin’ all the time, gettin’ high, drinkin’, trippin’, fuckin’ girls, ya know? But now, I might ask you what you did this weekend and you’d say, ‘Ah man, I took my kids and my girl out to the park’ or whatever, I’d say, ‘you done got ya grown man on.’ It’s okay though, ‘cause right now if you’s a O.G. hip hopper and you ain’t gettin’ ya grown man on, you bullshittin’. So hip hop has to mature or some of us have to mature. If I make the same album I made twenty years ago, that’s wack.

‘Cause there’s no progression involved.

There’s no progression. You ain’t tryin’ to hear Ice-T, forty-somethin’ up here talkin’ that same shit. It’s gotta be different. But at the same time, I’m still the same cat. People say, ‘oh well you should mellow out.’ Well I’m like, at the same time the mob boss, he’s sittin’ in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank still callin’ hits.

Definitely. I mean, there’s different forms of gangsta shit, and as far as living in a mansion with a shark tank in your office and an indoor pool that turns into an outdoor pool on some Transformers shit, it doesn’t really get more gangsta than that.

You know, for me man, gangsta’s just bein’ real about it and being honest and havin’ enough guts to say you play Playstation and you love your girl and all that too, ya dig? I’ve hung around some of the most dangerous cats and they’re the most nice people... until you take ‘em left. So all that posturin’ and posin’ and ‘all I do is get high and drink,’ and all that bullshit, that’s corny. You not gonna be able to do that forever. So, it has to be redefined and it has to be explained like that by the people who are really livin’ it. I’ve always been held accountable for my music. I got real friends doin’ real things and I got boys in the pen, and they not gonna let me make no record lyin’. They like, ‘Ice, c’mon nigga, you didn’t do that.’ You know, they gon’ check me. A lot of these cats, they just go in the studio and whatever comes into they mind, they just say, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

So what was your mindframe going in to record the new album?

I’m in New York now, I’m in New York doin’ Law & Order, so I been working with Smooth Da Hustla and Trigga Da Gambla, the whole SMG crew -- we did an underground album called Repossession: Sex, Money and Guns. We put it out in Europe and it did pretty well -- never released it in the United States. And everybody was just tellin’ me, ‘Ice, man, do another record, do an album.’ So then one of my boys had a producer out of Virginia and he brought over all this music and said, “I’ma sit in front of you ‘til you pick some tracks.’ So I started pickin music, and once I had the music, I just started writin’. And we just put the album together, you know? It is what it is. I mean, at this point in my career, my agenda’s not to sell no million records, I don’t really care about that. It’s just really to make another statement.

And the thing is, you’re already eatin’, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. That probably opens it up a little.

Well fortunately for me, I never really counted on my records or rap music to really eat. I mean, I never really said, ‘If I don’t get played on the radio, I’m not gon’ live.’ I was very smart with my money. I knew how to take my advance budget and if they was givin’ me a half a million dollars, I was makin’ my record for fifty grand. And I would take the difference and double that and triple that and by the time the record came out, I could give a fuck what it sold. But you right though, layin’ back now, just makin’ a calm record ‘cause I want to, there is a kind of calmness in the album.

That’s what I’m sayin’. It wasn’t like you were lazy or anything, but there wasn’t a crazed urgency behind it like there was on Rhyme Pays or Power.

People say ‘Ice, what’s the difference in you between now and then?’ and the old Ice-T was, ‘I’ll kill everybody, motha, AAAGGHH!’ And the new Ice-T is, ‘By the way... you know I kill you, right?’

So other than Smooth and Trig, who by the way were really slept on, who else out there right now are you feelin’?

Hmmm... I like Young Jeezy. I like how he rhymes, it just sound like he in pain -- ‘Lord don’t let me go to jail tonight!’ I like T.I. T.I.’s young, but he sound like he’s about 60. I mean, he got like a old soul to him. Of course, Ghostface Killah and the Fishscale album. I mean, c’mon, lyrically, when you dealin’ with Ghostface and Raekwon and them cats, that’s top of the game. And you know, I’m a Mobb Deep fan. That’s like one of my favorite groups. I mean, I don’t know if I like the Blood Money album as much; I don’t really know if they fit into 50 Cent’s program, I like it when they’re just real grimey and stuff. But those are another couple of my favorite lyricists right there.

Go holler at Ice T's website at www.icet.com