With part-time roles as writer, broadcaster and actor to add to his full-time job as Scourge Of Conservative America, Ice-T's considerable merits as a hip hop musician frequently get overlooked. So 'The Evidence', a strong 17-track summation of his recording career, provides an infrequent opportunity to right this wrong.
Although he began making records much earlier - 12"s of disco-fied, party rhymes such as 'Cold-Wind Madness' or 'The Beach' turn up in collectors' shops every once in a while - it wasn't until he signed to Sire and released the 'Rhyme Pays' album in 1986 that Tracy Marrow found his vocation. Ice started spinning tales about the life he knew, that of the drug dealers, pimps and "players" of Los Angeles, and in so doing helped to give birth to the gangsta rap genre.
'6 'N Tha Morning', an early b-side released as a single in 1986, wasn't the first gangsta rap record, but it was the first on a major label and it sparked a fire. Within weeks NWA were on their way to global notoriety, the realities of the Beirut-like urban warfare of the South Central districts of LA were being discussed and analysed by b-boys and intellectuals from
Watts to Winchester and Ice was a spokesman for a hitherto unknown underclass.
He followed the debut with a series of albums that gradually established a keen, storytelling style and which, with their crisp, clean production values, sounded as different to the then dominant New York rap style as was possible.
The best tracks here are from the fourth LP, 'O.G.: Original Gangster', the 1991 magnum opus that validated Ice's career, and was instrumental in ensuring that at best nihilist, at worst hate-filled music was taken seriously as both art and social commentary.
The title track may be the finest thing he's recorded, while 'New Jack Hustler', used as the theme tune for New Jack City, Ice's big screen acting debut, is a definitive first-person dissection of the politics behind the life he describes so vividly. That album also saw the launch of Ice's metal group, Body Count, whose two tracks here show his well-developed flair for goading America's censorious establishment.
A fine writer, possessed of a honeyed, deep, richly expressive voice, Ice-T may have been the rapper of choice for white suburban teens in big shorts, but that doesn't mean he or his music have ever been anything less than grippingly authentic. He might not have always walked hip hop's artistic frontline, but 'The Evidence' proves he should always be ranked among the music's great practitioners.
