Rapper Writer Pop-Cultural Player

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’.