These two albums are shocking not simply for their brutal language and violent imagery but because of the real-life circumstances they describe. Slapping a parental-guidance warning on O.G. Original Gangster or the New Jack City soundtrack compilation is like sticking a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. "In my brain, I got a capitalist migraine," Ice-T raps on "New Jack Hustler."
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Articulating the thought processes of a teenage drug dealer – one of the tough, young, high-style new jacks now dominating ghetto life – this jazzy, bracing track appears on both albums and sets their agendas. Ice-T, who made his film debut playing a police officer in
New Jack City, draws startling connections and poses troubling questions: "Is this a nightmare or the American Dream?" The answer, for a man "jammed in a paradox": both of the above.
O.G. Original Gangster and New Jack City meet at the crossroads traversed by hip-hop, traditional R&B and rock & roll – a juncture that represents perhaps the most exciting development in popular music since rap itself. New Jack City offers a compelling survey course in this hybrid mix of styles, while Ice-T's fourth album collects vivid personal testimony and blistering case histories, extraordinarily raw data from "L.A. – home of the body bag."
For all his immediacy, Ice-T also plugs into a legend that's as old as African-American culture. Stagger Lee – the flamboyant murderer turned folk hero whose various incarnations have cropped up in dozens of songs since the turn of the century – would appear to be the original new jack. Just like "The Iceberg" – "the dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player hard-core motherfucker living today" – Stagger Lee always looms larger than life. In his 1975 book Mystery Train, Greil Marcus tracks the Stagger Lee archetype from its New Orleans roots through to the mercurial career of Sly Stone and the then-raging Superfly phenomenon. On its own terms, O.G. Original Gangster serves as the 1991 equivalent of There's a Riot Going On: It's a bleak, prophetic and savagely funny dispatch from the front lines of the war at home.
Combining his own narrative approach to rapping with the freestyle boasting of New York's "old school," Ice-T has forged a flexible, hyperliterate style that sacrifices none of hip-hop's rhythmic momentum. In the frank manner of black pulp-paperback writers like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, his slice-of-street-life stories and badass parables offer a fascinating glimpse into a half-hidden world. And even when he's cracking his raunchiest jokes, Ice-T retains the same relentless self-awareness that Richard Pryor displayed on groundbreaking "comedy" albums like That Nigger's Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger.
Just like Pryor in his manic Seventies heyday, Ice-T explodes black stereotypes with cuts like "Straight Up
