Ice-T

The rapper who took his name from Iceberg Slim, put pimping on a 1987 rap album, and later produced the author's documentary.

Ice-T is the clearest bridge between the pimp literature of the 1960s and the pimp rap of the decades that followed. The connection begins with his name. Born Tracy Marrow, he discovered the novels of Robert Beck, published as Iceberg Slim, as a teenager in Los Angeles; the books, he told Collider at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, were "part of the wardrobe" among the older kids he admired. He memorised passages and recited them, and friends would ask him to "say some more of that Iceberg stuff, T." The nickname stuck. In a 2011 NPR interview with Neal Conan promoting his memoir Ice, co-written with Douglas Century, he explained the second step: if he really idolised Slim, he decided, then "instead of worrying about really living it out, let me document the game."

By his own account he did try the life first. He told theGrio's Courtney Garcia in 2013 that he and his friends "robbed banks, we robbed jewelry stores, we tried to pimp, we couldn't get that down pat." Time Out's Sam Adams, reviewing the documentary the same year, noted that Ice-T admits on camera that he tried to use Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life as a guide to starting his own operation. The archive records these as his statements; no arrest or court record connected to pimping has ever been reported for him.

The documentation came instead on record. Rhyme Pays, released by Sire Records on July 28, 1987, and produced by Afrika Islam, carried the track "Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!)," a first-person pimp narrative in the Slim register delivered before the genre had a name for it. The album reached number 93 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold by the RIAA on December 12, 1991. Ice-T has said it was the first rap album to carry a parental warning sticker, a claim that predates the industry's standardised label and is therefore hard to verify. The pimp-talk voice recurred through his catalogue, and his 1989 album was titled The Iceberg.

The circle closed in 2012 with Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, directed by his longtime manager Jorge Hinojosa with Ice-T and Hinojosa as executive producers. Premiering at Toronto in September 2012 and released theatrically by Phase 4 Films on July 19, 2013, the ninety-minute film interviews Beck's widow and daughters alongside Chris Rock, Snoop Dogg, Quincy Jones, Bill Duke and Henry Rollins, and does not spare the violence in Beck's own account of how he controlled women. Reviews were mixed; Metacritic's aggregate was 56, with Variety's Joe Leydon positive and the Village Voice dismissive. What the film established, and what Ice-T's whole arc illustrates, is a line running from Beck's typewriter through a Crenshaw teenager's memory to the pimp persona that gangsta rap would carry into the mainstream. Ice-T has drawn that line himself, telling Collider that Slim "took a street story and put it in literature," and that he simply moved it to music.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Tracy Lauren Marrow

BORN
Newark, New Jersey, February 16, 1958

STATUS
Living

ERA
1983–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Los Angeles; Crenshaw; Sire Records; Rhyme Syndicate; Iceberg Slim; Body Count

STANDING
Documented