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It was 1990 when 32-year-old American rapper Ice-T (real name Tracy Lauren Marrow) and his one-year-younger friend Ernie C (Ernie Cunnigan) decided to form a heavy metal band.
The two met very young, at school, in Los Angeles, but only several years later did they begin a real collaboration.
Ice-T's career took a turn when, in 1987, he released his first solo album, "Rhyme Pays", quickly becoming a major artist in hip-hop.
Two more albums then saw the light in the second half of the 1980s which consolidated the initial success of the artist originally from Newark, New Jersey.
On the next studio effort, 1991's "O.G. Original Gangster," Ice-T included a track titled "Body Count," which would later appear on the band's debut album.
1991 is also the year of the group's first live performance, on the occasion of the first edition of Lollapalooza, a festival in which names of the caliber of Jane's Addiction, Living Color, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Nine Inch Nails took part.
This brings us to 1992 and the release of the album "Body Count" on behalf of Sire Records/Warner Bros; the initial lineup included, in addition to Ice-T and Ernie C, D-Roc the Executioner (Dennis Miles) on rhythm guitar, Mooseman (Lloyd Roberts III) on bass and Beatmaster V (Victor Ray Wilson) on drums (all three came missing between 1996 and 2004).
Body Count's music can be understood as the union of apparently very distant genres and deals with important issues such as racism, violence and abuse (both of drugs and physical ones).
And it is precisely on these themes that Body Count lays the foundations for their lyrics.
"Cop Killer", the last track of the album, generated a long debate that also touched the highest echelons of US politics due to a somewhat controversial text that instigated physical violence against police forces, even if Ice-T he tried to contain the criticisms and free himself from the accusations by defining the song as a protest song and stating that the text should be interpreted from another point of view.
But censorship prevailed and Body Count were forced to re-release the album without that track. They replaced it with a piece from an Ice-T solo album entitled "Freedom of Speech", re-edited for the occasion with the addition of a sample of Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" looped.
The album, in its original version, consists of eighteen tracks, divided between real songs and spoken interludes, useful for the full understanding of certain themes.
The beginning with "Smoked Pork" already makes us understand the tones of the album, constantly veiled by a common thread of irony and black humor: Ice-T and Mooseman, who play two gangsters, driving their car approach that of a policeman pretending to be stranded motorists; Mooseman would like to "handle it" himself, but Ice-T orders him to stay in the car; at that point, approaching the policeman, he asks him if he can help them with the car, but he refuses, insulting him and saying that it's not his job, because his job is to eat donuts ... at that point he recognizes who is in front of him, but it's too late: a gunshot closes the scene.
Body Count's debut album certainly isn't an easy listen and shouldn't be taken lightly; listening to it without having the lyrics in front of it can lead to misunderstanding certain songs, their irony, their real meaning.
Body Count are not a band like many others, their musical style is not classifiable within generic "labels": theirs is not rap but neither is it properly metal; hardcore is perhaps the most appropriate term, but it still doesn't fully capture the style and attitude of the Los Angeles group.
In any case, it remains a unique band of its kind, which deserves more than any other to be rediscovered and re-analysed with each passing year … a slice of reality that can still teach us something today.

00:00 Smoked pork
00:47 Body Count's in the house
04:11 Now sports
04:16 Body Count
09:34 A statistic
09:40 Bowels of the devil
13:23 The real problem
13:35 KKK bitch
16:28 C note
18:04 Voodoo
23:05 The winner loses
29:37 There goes the neighborhood
35:27 Oprah
35:34 Evil dick
39:33 Body Count anthem
42:19 Momma's gotta die tonight
48:31 Ice-T/Freedom of speech
53:12 Cop killer (bonus track)

Ice-T – lead vocals
Ernie C – lead guitar, acoustic guitar
D-Roc the Executioner – rhythm guitar
Beatmaster V – drums
Mooseman – bass
Sean E Sean – sampler, backing vocals
Sean E. Mac – hype man, backing vocals
Jello Biafra – spoken word on "Freedom of speech"

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