Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lyrics to Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T on the album Body Count. The album is released by Warner Bros. Records, part of the Time Warner media and entertainment conglomerate...
Menacing as it sounds, the fantasy in Cop Killer is the fantasy of the powerless and beaten down -- the black man who's been hassled once too often ("A pig stopped me for nothin'!"), spread-eagled against a police car, pushed around. It's not a "responsible" fantasy (fantasies seldom are). It's not even a very creative one. In fact, the sad thing about Cop Killer is that it falls for the cheapest, most conventional image of rebellion that our culture offers: the lone gunman spraying fire from his AK-47. This is not "sedition"; it's the familiar...
Which is why Ice-T is right to say he's no more dangerous than George Bush's pal Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wasted an army of cops in Terminator 2. Images of extraordinary cruelty and violence are marketed every day, many of far less artistic merit than Cop Killer. This is our free market of ideas and images, and it shouldn't be any less free for a black man than for other purveyors of "irresponsible" sentiments, from David Duke to Andrew Dice Clay...
Just, please, don't dignify Ice-T's contribution with the word sedition. The past masters of sedition -- men like George Washington, Toussaint-Louverture, Fidel Castro or Mao Zedong, all of whom led and won armed insurrections -- would be unimpressed by Cop Killer and probably saddened. They would shake their heads and mutter words like "infantile" and "adventurism." They might point out that the cops are hardly a noble target, being, for the most part, honest working stiffs who've got stuck with the job of patrolling ghettos ravaged by economic decline and official neglect...
...Yeah, I just don't believe that he doesn't know about it. He could stop this stuff in a heartbeat. You know, this is the good cop-bad cop thing they % always do. They feel they've got a personal destruction machine over at the Republican Committee that rivals the KGB. That's what they do. I don't mind if they want to run down Arkansas because it's always been a poor state, or go after my record on the issues, but they believe that the press is giving them leave to go beyond what has ever...