Rolling Stone Magazine

Ice-T’s (born Tracy Marrow) 1987 debut album Rhyme Pays included the track “6 in the Morning,” a groundbreaking and definitive example of West Coast gangsta rap that paved the way for the genre and artists like N.W.A. “Cop Killer,” a 1992 song recorded by Ice-T’s heavy metal band Body Count, was a protest song about police brutality recorded in the wake of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers and released shortly before the officers’ acquittal and the subsequent uprisings in South Central Los Angeles.