Transcriber: Thierry de Carvalho Banhete Reviewer: Denise RQ
People always ask me, they say: "Ice, why you're always up at Sing-Sing,
why do you go to prisons all the time?"
This is really, like, their beef with me.
Some of you all might have just seen me show up on SVU in your life recently.
I'm far from a cop. (Laughter)
There's a term they call "victim of circumstances."
A lot of people won't understand the circumstances.
They get people in trouble, or where you start.
I always think about it, what started me down that road?
And I think what happens is, at some point, you lose hope.
Like a kid or somebody with no hope, they got nothing to lose,
so it's so easy to make bad decisions, your brain just says: "So what?
I have no dad at home, I have no mom at home,
I have no money, I'm not going to make it,
so let me take this chance."
Now, as I've actually moved up in my life,
I have a lot more to lose, so you start to weigh out these things.
But when you're dealing with most of these gentlemen
- and they're in this institution - I ask them every time I get here,
I say, "When?" "17, 18, 19,"
that's when they go in, that's how old they are.
This is even before your brain is capable of making great decisions.
Anybody in this audience, if I ask you,
compare what you thought about at 18 to how you feel now,
you'll say: "I was out of my fucking mind at 18."
(Laughter)
"Everything I thought at 18 was wrong.
Everything."
So now, you take a kid and let's put him into a situation.
he doesn't have a lot. He's stuck.
His decision-making process is going to be terrible.
Add a gun, add the pressure of the hood...
When you come from the hood...
I come from the ghetto, I come from South Central Los Angeles,
and manhood is at a premium.
Everyone is pushing on you, you know?
I'm a light-skin dude, I got green eyes, hazel eyes, my name is fucking Tracy.
(Laughter)
You ever heard that song "A boy named Sue"?
I was under pressure; I'm an orphan, I have no brothers, no mother.
I'm either going to be predator or prey.
There's pressure, you don't understand...
There's predators, you have to be tough.
You have to start lifting weights,
you have to get ready for every day, going to school.
I mean, I don't know if a lot of you all ever had to deal with that,
but sometimes, it's terrifying just leaving the house.
So what am I going to do? Am I going to be prey?
No, I'm going to be the bad guy.
I'm going to be crazier than everybody else.
50 Cent said in one of his records:
"This ain't how my momma raised me, this how the hood made me."
So, you get caught up into this mental,
and then you turn into this weird kind of monster,
but it's a security device.
You're trying to just stay alive. You want to keep people off your back.
People look at me today, they say:
"Why is your face like that? You seem angry."
I say, my face is fucked up and stuck like this from growing up.
(Laughter)
This look you see, is: "Nigga', do not fuck with me right now."
(Laughter)
But I don't really want you messing with me,
because I'm the nicest guy you'll ever meet, I'm nice,
I don't want any problem, but this is a defense mechanism.
So, I didn't know I was coming to a musical event;
I didn't know, they just said:
"They want you to come up to Sing Sing and talk,"
I'm like: "Hell yeah, I have the day off, I'll come."
But, you know, in my music, what I did was I tried to give you
the mindset of the street kid.
You know, I did a song, "New Jack Hustler,"
for the movie New Jack City,
where, in some of the lyrics I say:
"Well, here I come, so you better break North.
As I stride, my gold chain slides back and forth.
I care nothing 'bout you, and that's evident,
all I love is my dope and dead presidents.
Sound crazy? Well, it isn't,
the end justifies the means, that's the system.
I learned that in school, then I dropped out,
hit the streets, checked a grip and now I've got clout.
I had nothing, and I wanted it. You had everything, and you flaunted it.
Turned the needy into the greedy. With cocaine, my success came speedy.
Got me twisted, jammed into a paradox. Every dollar I get, another brother drops.
Maybe that's the plan, and I don't understand.
Goddamn, you got me sinking in quicksand.
But since I don't know, and I never learn, I gotta get paid, I got money to earn.
With my posse, out in the ave,
bumping my sounds, crack a forty and laugh.
Cool out and watch my new Benz gleam,
is this a nightmare, or the American Dream?
So think twice if you're coming down my block.
You want a journey through hell? Well, shit gets hot.
Pregnant teens, children's screams,
life is weighed on the scales of a triple beam.
You don't come here much, and you better not,
wrong move, ambulance cot.
I gotta get more money than you got, so what if some motherfucker gets shot?
That's how the game is played, another brother slayed, the wound is deep,
but y'all giving us a Band-Aid.
The education's low, but I got long dough,
I am raised like a pitbull, my heart pumps nitro.
I sleep on silk, lie like a politician,
my Uzi's my best friend, cold as a mortician.
Lock me up, that's genocidal catastrophe,
there'll be another one after me, a hustler."
Now, when you lock these people up, and you don't deal with the problem,
it's never going to stop, so now you have to think,
what puts kids into this mental mindset?
That's the issue.
What puts people in this mindset, where they don't have any hope?
And they go, "Maybe this is an option."
You don't find kids that are going to Harvard robbing liquor stores.
Not racial. It's because they have hope.
They see a future.
But when I don't see a future,
and, like they say, I'm touchy and I'm hungry,
anything can happen at any moment.
So I try to tell the brothers when I come in here:
"Look, man, there's no reason you can't make that change,
there's no reason you can't change your way of thinking,"
I was worse or just as bad as anybody in here,
now, I'm a cop. I've been on TV... (Laughter)
...16 years, playing a cop, and there's people:
"Oh, Ice-T, he's such a great and wonderful person,
he's such a great, wonderful person."
And their daughters are like: "You really know who Ice-T is?
Ice-T is crazy, right? You don't know that?"
But I'm a cop. It was funny when I got the job for Law & Order.
Dick Wolf, great man, he said to me:
"Ice, you're not too fond of the police, are you?"
I said: "Well, I was a criminal, so...
when I was a criminal, I never hated the cops,
because I knew I was breaking the law.
A real criminal never hates the cops, the cops are the opponent."
I don't hate you. You told me I can't do it,
but I'm going to do it anyway, so if you catch me, I cuff up,
I'm busted, you did it, but I never hate them.
I just thought I was smarter than them.
So he said: "But you agree we need police, right?"
(Laughter)
I'm like: "Yeah, I got some friends they need to find right now."
And he says, "Well, play the cop we need."
So when you watch me on SVU,
you're dealing with a character I'm playing with my sensibility.
If I, somehow, magically, had a badge, and I had to go out
and go after the, you know...
The cats that we chase on my show are rapists and child molesters,
and they're not even respected in these facilities,
so there's no gray area in SVU, you know, we just go after them.
But, me, on a daily basis, I deal with the same dilemmas
these brothers deal with on a daily basis.
Just because I'm on TV, don't think people don't pressure me,
threaten me.
You know, I go out, people want to test me.
I've got a beautiful wife, they want to test that.
Don't think those old triggers aren't still there.
Like, you cross me? People don't cross me.
But, fortunately, I have a support group of friends that say,
"Ice, calm down. That's nothing."
I don't think anybody in here has ever hit a point
where they had not thought that payback was valid.
These guys in here were 18 and 17 trying to make these decisions;
when you're an adult, hopefully somebody'll grab you
and say, "Man, listen, forget about that right now."
I'm talking about being ready to go do some really bad things.
Because my manhood is a certain way,
I've been bred this way, you know, so I had to learn
that every bit of disrespect does not deserve reprimand from me.
God will deal with that. I found that a sucker is a sucker,
and eventually, he'll see somebody, doesn't have to be me.
(Applause)
But I had to learn that.
And I learned that by coming here and talking to these inmates,
and, like I said, this is their beef with me.
Because, I'm not like you, I'm more like them.
And people have this sole theory: "Oh, you're on TV now, you got some money"
and it gets worse, it gets worse, you know.
You got people saying: "or else?" and this, that, and third,
and you're like, who? what? to what?
Crazy. I mean, we don't use lawyers, I don't use the police,
I'm from another era, where if we got a problem,
we'd go talk to you personally and it's different.
(Laughter)
I never use police, if I feel there's a problem,
I go knock on your door, I come see you,
we'll go talk, you'll say, "I'm going to do something."
That all can end up terrible, so I just had to learn to calm down,
but I got nothing but love for what, especially, this institution,
the warden and everybody is doing here, it's unique.
I'm from California. They believe in crime and punishment.
There's no rehabilitation. They warehouse people out there.
My boys who are in Pelican's Bay, CMC, my friends,
the crew I grew up with, most got what the call LWOPP.
You know what LWOPP is? It's Life WithOut Possibility of Parole.
That's the level of characters I hung out with.
When they all went to prison, they said, "Ice, do not come to jail.
You got action, do not come, this is not where you belong."
So, no square kept me out of jail.
My friends in prison kept me out of jail,
the guys I admired, that I thought was cooler than me,
they said: "Ice, fool, you better be on TV, man.
They told me: "Ice, you're the only the police
that they'd cheer for up in the penitentiary."
(Laughter)
So the truth for the matter is, why I'm here is not so much for you,
it's for me, to say, when I come up and I see those gates,
I just know one split decision, prior or tomorrow, could put me here.
I'm cut like that, and thank God for all my close friends,
and everybody to keep me grounded,
but, you know, I just want to give a round of applause
to this particular facility, for even letting me in, because, like
(Laughter)
"Ice-T? Who is he? He's a problem."
But this warden sees past that,
and like what I think the man was saying with TED,
could the problem become the solution?
Well, I got news for you.
When you talk to the kids, they don't want to hear from no squares,
they want to hear it from somebody who's been through it,
they only respect the cat that carried a gun.
I carried a gun so long, I had a bruise in my leg for, like, a year.
You know what I'm saying?
I know what that is, to sleep like that.
I was talking to some of the guys over there a minute ago,
and I was like: "The better thing when you get to the other side,
you're legit, this is gone;" they know what that is.
It's like, who's going be the next person to come get me or something.
So thank God for Sing Sing, and all the inmates,
and the fact you can get a...
You all have master's degrees in here, I had no fucking master degree, man.
(Laughter) What the fuck? (Applause)
There's some Sing-Sing Shakespeares in here...
Do I need to come here to get educated? No!
(Laughter)
There's another way. You can get it online.
(Laughter)
Let me end it with a song, with some lyrics and stuff,
because a lot of people don't like rap music,
but if it's done correctly, it's poetry.
I don't know what they're doing right now, you know, "Shake your booty" music.
That's OK, but I did something different.
This one starts like this...
If I mess up... I can't because this ain't a concert.
Because I didn't know! I didn't come up here to rap!
So let's see...
"I spent my life between the light, blue lines of loose leaf,
I split my time between impressionable minds and true beef.
I spend my days up, nights up. It's too hard to sleep.
Look at my face. It's not the one of someone in peace.
I carry guns when I don't need to,
but my mind's so fucked, I see assassins jumping out of the rough.
I keep my doors shut, windows shut, shades down, fo' pound,
waiting on some Satans who may think of invading me.
When I do sleep, I dream about pain and unrest,
about gunfights and dum-dums exploding my chest.
I see my boys who had died sitting with me again.
But when I wake, I realize I lost most of my friends.
When my past come back to get me,
when the niggas that we shot come back to wet me, I'm paranoid.
It ain't easy when your lifestyle was grimy and greasy.
I'm trying to make peace with the karma or drama.
God, please believe me.
Sometimes, I even think I'd be better off dead,
I went to doctors, they stuck probes on the sides of my head.
They said "you're fine," they said "you're well,"
they said "you're on TV."
I said: "I know, but I think somebody is coming for me."
But if they'd seen what they've seen, and been where I've been,
they'd know I've committed the evilest sins.
If they knew what I knew, and they've done what I done,
they'd lay awake at night, they would trust no one.
I got the cars, girls, crib, jewels, cash to the max,
but my brain's playing war games, I can't relax.
It ain't easy when your lifestyle was grimy and greasy.
I'm trying to make peace with the karma and drama.
God, please believe me.
So I tried to get my life right and teach the youth,
I did my days at gangbanging, so I worked on the truce.
I spit game to the little niggas all that I can,
'cuz they admire my style, they like the way that I am.
They like the cars, the gold, the big rock rings,
I try to teach them about the pain that the fast cash brings.
But no matter what I say, they see the game every day,
and the richest are the ones they have the courage to play.
"Get rich or die trying," that's what all of them say.
What can I do? I lived my fucking life that way.
I'm not your role model, my road's too dirty to follow.
Every phone call's another case of death and life.
I'm trying to struggle with the paradox of wrong and right.
And since I lived by the gun, well, I die by the knife."
Thank you. (Applause)