Rapper, Writer, Pop-Cultural Player Ice-T and the Politics of Black Cultural Production

This collection of essays critically engages with factors relating to black urban life and cultural representation in the post-civil rights era, using Ice-T and his myriad roles as musician, actor, writer, celebrity, and industrialist as a vehicle through which to interpret and understand the African American experience. Over the past three decades, African Americans have faced a number of new challenges brought about by changes in the political, economic and social structure of America. Furthermore, this vastly changed social landscape has produced a number of resonant pop-cultural trends that have proved to be both innovative and admired on the one hand, and contentious and divisive on the other. Ice-T’s iconic and multifarious career maps these shifts. This is the first book that, taken as a whole, looks at a black cultural icon's manipulation of (or manipulation by?) so many different forms simultaneously. The result is a fascinating series of tensions arising from Ice-T’s ability to inhabit conflicting pop-cultural roles including: ’hardcore’ gangsta rapper and dedicated philanthropist; author of controversial song Cop Killer and network television cop; self-proclaimed ’pimp’ and reality television house husband. As the essays in this collection detail, Ice-T’s chameleonic public image consistently tests the accepted parameters of black cultural production, and in doing so illuminates the contradictions of a society erroneously dubbed ’post-racial’.

Introduction “It’s got to feel real but not be real” (Ice-T), Josephine Metcalf, Will Turner; Part 1 Hip-Hop Contexts; Chapter 1 Ice/Age: Experience, Achievement, and Transformations of an OG, Murray Forman; Chapter 2 Ice-T at the Movies: The Hip-Hop Film Cycle and the On-Screen Gangsta in Flux, Keith Corson; Chapter 3 Voices of the Gods: Definition, Diegesis, and Discourse in Ice-T’s The Art of Rap, James Braxton Peterson; Part 2 Genre Hustling; Chapter 4 Crossing Police Lines: Body Count and the Politics of Intercultural Miscommunication, Will Turner; Chapter 5 Member of an Elite Squad: Ice-T and the Imagining of “Fin” Tutuola, Mark D. Cunningham; Chapter 6 Ice Loves Coco: Reality TV, Hip-Hop, and the Articulation of Neo-Liberal Family Values, Barry Shanahan; Chapter 7 Writing “on the Rilla” with Ice-T: from Autobiography to Avatar in Kings of Vice, Jonathan Munby; Part 3 Activist, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur; Chapter 8 Gaming the System: Ice-T as Neoliberal Hustler and Entrepreneurial Philanthropist, Greg Dimitriadis, Justin De Senso; Chapter 9 The Peacemaking Producer of LA: Negotiating and Representing Gangs on Reality TV, Josephine Metcalf; Chapter 10 Ice-T’s Sense of Redemption and the Gangbanger Autobiography, H. David Brumble; Chapter 11 Getting “A Message Through to the Red, White, and Blue”: Ice-T in the Age of Obama, Halifu Osumare; Part 4 Interview; Chapter 12 Living by Your Word: An Interview with Ice-T; afterword Afterword Ice-T’s “-ish” and The Power of Street Knowledge, Travis L. Gosa;

Josephine Metcalf is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull, UK. Will Turner is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester, UK.