He compresses and expands the story where necessary, as the first verse takes place over the span of a minute, while his and his crew’s further attempts to escape a botched sneak attack unfold over three more verses. Ice captures the most minute details of a harrowing brush with death. Ice-T makes use of his impeccable storytelling skills on “Midnight,” a grim tale of surviving violence on the streets of Los Angeles. The song features one of the finest pure lyrical displays of his career, as he raps, “Imma hit you with an overload of bottomless thought / Reversing all the shit you’re taught / Then throw words at you syl-la-ble-at-a-time / Your brain recites the rhyme.” However, on “Mind Over Matter,” he’s almost soft-spoken, his calm tone masking the intensity of his content. He moves with precision on the fast-paced “Mic Contract,” stalking wack emcees while rapping over the guitar from Dyke and the Blazers’ “Runaway People.” Though the pace slows considerably on “Pulse of the Rhyme,” he raps with stern authority, weaponizing his lyrics to inflict pain on his adversaries. features some of his best pure emcee material of his career and showcases his underappreciated ability to use different rhyme styles, always matching the mood of the track. Ice-T has always been an exceptional and multi-faceted lyricist. “You had everything, and you flaunted it / Turned the needy into the greedy / With cocaine, my success came speedy.” He presents his lifestyle as a logical extension of the capitalist ideal, pondering, “Is this a nightmare or the American dream?” “I had nothing, and I wanted it,” he raps. With “New Jack Hustler,” Ice-T slips easily into the mentality of a drug kingpin shaped by poverty and desolation. Through his lyrics, he exposes how a life without means can make this path a tragic, but logical, outcome. Ice excels when delving into the criminal mentality, exploring the ruthlessness required to live beyond the law. “New Jack Hustler” is one of the greatest songs that Ice-T ever recorded and one his all-time strongest performances. Here, however, “New Jack Hustler” is perfectly integrated into the flow of the album, matching many of the themes that Ice-T addresses throughout the expanse of the album. All too often, they’re placed at the beginning or end of a side, acting as a separate statement to an otherwise complete project. Incorporating tracks recorded specifically for a soundtrack on a separate album usually doesn’t work. “Dazed by the game in a quest for extreme wealth.” He describes the evolution of his musical approach, as he went from recording electro-rap party jams to vivid depictions of street reality. “I rap for brothers just like myself,” he asserts. The song’s second verse serves as Ice-T’s career mission statement. As a “hardcore player from the streets, rapping ’bout hardcore topics over hardcore drum beats,” he stakes his claim as even more than gangsta rap’s godfather. On the album’s title track and the first official single from the album, Ice-T perfectly articulates his role within the hip-hop landscape at the time. It’s an album that he delivered during one of the biggest periods of his career, as it was released just months after his star-turn in New Jack City, which marked the formal beginning of his acting career. It’s sprawling and ambitious, where Ice works hard to demonstrate his versatility as an artist willing to take some chances. might not be the peak of Ice-T’s career, but it’s an exclamation point, capping a great four-album run. Thirty years later, the album’s themes and ideas are still pertinent in our current climate, and its lyricism and musicality are timeless. Original Gangster, his attempt to reclaim his throne as the Don of Gangsta Rap. A little over a year-and-a-half after he released Iceberg, where he grappled with the PMRC and various other organizations looking to censor rap music, he released O.G. Ice-T channeled this reality on albums like Rhyme Pays (1987), Power (1988), and The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech…Just Watch What You Say! (1989). Ice-T has admitted that he had gotten into hip-hop, at least partially, as a means to “launder” the money he received from various illicit activities that he’d participated in and his experiences gave his music an unshakable foundation in a raw reality. By the time N.W.A essentially coined the phrase, Ice-T already had a few gold records to his name, where he dropped a whole lot of “gangsta” shit. Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow was a gangsta rapper before “gangsta rap” was a thing. Original Gangster, originally released May 14, 1991. Happy 30th Anniversary to Ice-T’s fourth studio album O.G.
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