Ice-T doesn't get the credit he deserves as a writer. Yes, he's recognized as a gangsta rap pioneer & a West Coast legend, but people sleep on the conceptual richness of his early albums, particularly the stretch from Power to O.G. Original Gangster. This album falls in the middle but is, to my ears, the weakest of that run, thanks to ragged production (vocals are too forward & plosives are popping all over the place) & a glut of uninteresting subject matter. Still, when he hits, he hits hard, & there's no shortage of knockout punches on The Iceberg.
Ice-T's lyricism was never about punchlines, metaphors or wordplay, assonance or crazy multis or internal rhyme. His lyricism was rooted in the concepts, his writerly style of observation & eye for detail & irony. It's in the vivid details of his storytelling on the ominous street revenge tale "Peel their Caps Back," with the ending gut-punch of "all the papers gonna read is 'gang murder,'" reminding us how little mainstream media cares about his community & how necessary the alternative narratives of rap music are. Similarly in "The Hunted Child," Afrika Islam's stab at making a Bomb Squad-style noisy collage beat complete with Public Enemy sample, Ice explains the thought process of a teenager on the run after committing an impulsive murder, interspersed with omniscient spoken-word segments: "The science of capitalism which you teach to the youth on the streets today with the 'ends justifying the means' mentality ain't happenin'." On "Freedom of Speech" Ice tells an interesting anecdote about choosing not to perform in Georgia after being threatened with arrest if he used explicit language in his show. He takes on Tipper Gore & the PMRC with worries about witch hunts & book burning--like I said in reference to Paris, I miss the days when being anti-censorship was a solidly left-wing stance. I also love "This One's For Me," where Ice takes on the "bourgeois Blacks" who objected to his subject matter & tried to squeeze him out of the recording industry, then goes on to indict the CIA for supplying drugs to the ghettos. In his best moments, you could always count on Ice-T to kick well-articulated knowledge.
The flipside to that is that when Ice isn't trying to be conceptual & instead is just rapping to rap, his bars are so unimpressive that it usually falls flat. Sadly, The Iceberg is shorter on conceptual tracks than the albums surrounding it. Instead, we have a few too many snores like "Lethal Weapon" & "Hit the Deck" where he tries to keep up with East Coast spitters on uptempo, sample-thick beats. The title track is another misfire, which features embarrassingly immature women-objectifying lyrics & is conceptually dead in the water. Then there's "What Ya Wanna Do" featuring the Rhyme Syndicate, an excruciating 9 minutes of much increasingly less interesting emcees repeating themselves. Instead, the album is at its best when Ice is rhyming with purpose over Afrika Islam's sparse sample & drum machine beats like "You Played Yourself," one of the 1st rap songs to sample James Brown's "The Boss."
Musically, this album is also distinguished by the emerging importance of Ice-T's love of hard rock & heavy metal. There were a few heavy guitars on Power, but here we have entire songs like "The Girl Tried to Kill Me" with future Body Count members Ernie C & Beat Master V shredding on their respective instruments. Ice's flow on that song is heavily influenced by the rock-inflected stylings of Run-DMC--you can ever hear where the 2-emcee back & forth was supposed to happen. Thankfully, by the time Body Count fully emerged Ice's vocal delivery was more influenced by West Coast hardcore like Black Flag & The Dead Kennedys. Speaking of which, Jello Biafra himself shows up on 2 tracks, including the intro that samples Black Sabbath's self-titled track, nicely sewing together the growing punk & metal influences on Ice's music. Jello paints a spoken-word picture of a dystopian nightmare of government overreach, & if I'm grateful for 1 thing about this album it's that Ice & Jello got to link up & make some noise together.
Another thing I like about Ice-T albums from this era is that every song is 1 of a kind. Nothing blends together; every track is unique & inhabits its own little artistic world. They aren't records you put on to vibe to--they are meant to be listened to & absorbed. The Iceberg might not be as good as the albums on either side of it, but it's entirely its own beast, & manages to stand out even in the classics-crowded hiphop year of 1989.
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