Kurt

When I read this piece, my first impression was that it was odd that this song “Cop Killer�, one of many other “offensive� rap songs, was singled out to take the blame for the problems with rap music at that time. After I read the part, however, about how the album had sold over 100,000 copies since the time that the entire debate had arisen, it occurred to me that Time Warner and Ice-T could’ve been making the whole thing out to seem like a bigger deal than it should’ve been. That didn’t seem like a logical conclusion to me because, even though so many albums were sold, Ice-T eventually pulled his album off the shelves to make a more appropriate version.
As Ice-T himself mentioned, the lyrics were not to be taken in the sense that he wanted to go out and physically kill a cop, but the lyrics were meant to be “fighting words,� which is what so many white people didn’t understand. This seems more like the logical explanation as to why Ice-T’s album caused so much hype. Since people didn’t understand that Ice-T’s lyrics were more cathartic rather than a literal depiction of what he wanted to do to a cop.
It also seems, to me, that the whole issue was blown way out of proportion. This type of debate has been seen in the past with artists like Prince and Frank Zappa, who both basically said that the lyrics in the song were “just words,� which brings to mind the old child’s saying “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.� Looks like that’s not the case this time.