ice t – shares how Entertainment Saved His Life
the highlife
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photo by steed media service |
Ice T was a teenage renegade who detoured from his father’s upbringing into a life of crime. Born into the world as Tracy Marrow, Ice T regaled the throng of admirers at the Philadelphia International Art Expo recently with tales of how his father marched during the Civil Rights Movement and frequently spoke to him about overcoming racism in America.
But the young Ice T wasn’t trying to hear that at the time. He peered into the streets, eyed the bountiful opportunities to stack his paper, and plunged headfirst into that cesspool of illicit activities. “I decided that at one point in my life, that I was going to outsmart the system, and try to hustle and stuff like that. But at the end of the day that life catches up with you … all of my friends, they are dead or in prison right now,” he says. “I don’t really like breaking the law, never did. I just thought that was the only option available to me. And I know that people have issues with cops. [But] they don’t [really] have issues with cops. They have issues with rogue cops.”
Ice T once had major problems with the police, which is why he penned the nuclear “Cop Killer” that, along with NWA’s “F— the Police,” became a lightning rod for the anti-rap crusade that stormed across the country in the early- and mid-1990s. Ice T admitted he got drenched in the thundershowers of criticism from that record and the life he portrayed on wax. But he says music gave him an outlet to vent his frustrations and simmering rage in a constructive — and legal way.
“Basically when you come out of the street, you are hustling, you are trying to find a way to get paid. I don’t think that people come out of the ‘hood and want to break the law, so to speak. I have no allegiance to crime. That was just an option that was available to me back in the day. Now if you told a big drug dealer here in Philly that he could get paid $10,000 a week being a schoolteacher, he’d take it. People take the options that are available to them,” Ice T continues. His first acting option was, ironically, playing a streetwise undercover cop who takes down a criminal kingpin in the Wesley Snipes-classic New Jack City. That role prepped him for his role in as an investigator on the seminal TV drama “Law & Order.”
“I never thought that I would be playing the police on TV. But it’s a good look. When the option came that I could act and be legitimate and not have to worry about jail and things like that — ooh! — I took that as quick as I could,” he says. “I don’t turn down nothing that gets me paid and I’m keeping that up. There’s nothing but love for my role right now. They love me and I love them right back. I’m just lucky that I could make that transition out of the streets.”
–terry shropshire
