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The Godfather of Gangsta Rap turns 50 this week. In the summer of 1991 the O.G. talked to Andy Gill about gangs, censorship, white teenagers, and a whole lot more. Here's an excerpt from the interview. Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Here he is, halfway up a hill above Sunset Strip, enveloped in the cool plush of the enormous black leather sofa that dominates his LA-moderne living room. Two slim, six-foot speakers flank the fireplace. Large and rather characterless artworks, typical California abstracts, adorn the walls, along with a framed poster for Ice's film New Jack City. Bonsai and sundry objets dot the available horizontal surfaces. Picture windows look out on to a sun-deck, and beyond, over a perfect LA basin vista. Below the sun deck, parked outside the garage, sits a sleek black turbo Porsche and a souped-up, customized vintage Ford. A Model T, naturally.

The only outward signs of conformity to the stereotypical hardcore rapper image are the jogging sweats, Air Jordans and baseball cap, and Ice's pet pit bull, Felony, who pads around the house's internal courtyard, just another pane of glass away. Mind you, a pit bull doesn't signify anything out of the ordinary in territory where even modest dwellings boast polite little signs promising "Armed Response" from one private security company or another.

Not that Ice needs to hire uniforms to do his armed response for him, of course. Listening to albums like 1988's Power--the cover of which featured Ice, his scantily-clad wife Darlene, and deck-man Evil E toting vicious-looking Uzis and pump shotguns--you get the distinct impression it might be his idea of a fun night out. Ice-T was the first recording artist to have stickers put on his albums, and it wasn't just because they routinely cruised beyond the bounds of sexual propriety: as he reminds listeners on his new album, O.G. Original Gangster, Ice was the inventor of the gangster rap, the first to romanticize violent street crime and make its appeal to young black kids understandable.

Ice-T is a social worker's nightmare, because he deals in desires rather than ideals. But then, that's what Hollywood's been doing for decades.

"Well, violence is glamorous," he says in answer to the question which, it's clear, he's pretty sick of hearing. "That's like asking me, 'You was in a gang? How was it?' Aah, it was a terrible situation, it was bad--truth of the matter is, it was fun! It was one of the greatest times of my life, bein' in a gang, havin' fun, doin' what you want. I know what the intoxicating value of being a criminal is. Without showing you that, how can I come at you on a real level?

"One thing about me that might bother people is that I have a morbid fascination with violent actions. It doesn't mean I want to do it. I'm really sprung on Jason movies, Freddy Kreuger and sh*t like that. I can't help it, I just dig it. So lyrics like 'Shoot you in your face' turn me on. I get a rush off 'em. Now, is that wrong? I don't know. If you've got both your feet on the ground, you should be able to swallow this sh*t. I like The Terminator, I seen it a hundred times, but I don't want to go and shoot up no restaurant.

"In the song 'Pulse Of The Rhyme' (from O.G.), I say that, during the course of a rhyme, you can't tell whether I'm telling the truth or not--am I dealing with fact, or fiction? In the midst of a rhyme, I have the power to control the horizontal and the vertical: sit down, put on the headphones, and trip! Now if you are unstable, keep my tape out of your hands! But if you've got your feet on the ground, and you want to go for a drive-by shooting, let's go."

Ice has himself, it's claimed, been injured in drive-bys before, though he declines to talk about "battle wounds." "You end up soundin' like Vanilla Ice," he sneers, adopting a whiney little voice: "Yeah, I got stabbed in the butt, let me show you." Jorge Hinojosa, Ice-T's manager, scoffs in agreement: "Who's going to stab somebody in the butt? That's some bullsh*t!" Ice also refuses to reveal which of LA's numerous gangs he ran with in his gang-banging youth, when the various branches of the Crips and Bloods staked out the South-Central LA turf among themselves.

In Ice's opinion, it's his following among white kids that has brought the wrath of would-be censors down on his head, rather than the words or the graphic nature of his raps. "The problem is not that the white kids are sayin' the words, the problem is white kids liking Ice-T," he says. "The white kid's mom'll say, you shouldn't like those black kids, they'll take your money, they're not good; and the white kid's listening to Brand Nubian or someone, hearing about black problems, and he's sayin', 'Wait a minute ma, is this true what he's saying?' Now, in the '90s, the white kids are so intelligent they're saying, 'F**k you, ma, Ice-T's got a point, and I ain't carrying yo' luggage no more, all that bigotry--I'm here to make a change.' So they run it under the cloak of censorship.

"Rhyme Pays was the first album to get stickered in the United States, and there had been people swearing on records long before us. The sticker itself don't bother me, but it's like a step--that sticker is a way for record stores to say: We won't carry stickered records. And it moves on and on--eventually they'll have adult record stores, the way they have adult book stores. Freedom Of Speech is a great concept, it sounds good, but it has never applied and will never apply." Ice warms to a topic which obsesses him in much the same way it obsessed Lenny Bruce, as he traces the derivation of the term "profanity" to its original meaning of "irreverent." "I've spoken to ministers, and none of them can tell me why the word 'sh*t' is irreverent, or the word 'f**k.' I can see why 'goddamn' might be irreverent if used in its original meaning of 'God be damned', but when your dad says 'Get out of the goddam car', he's just using it as a kind of exclamation mark."

To some people, Ice-T's stance on censorship, while noble, is entirely brought down on his own head. They point to a new breed of rap artist--the De La Souls, Tribe Called Quests, X-Clans and Jungle Brothers--who disdain what they consider the demeaning stereotypes for black people in the work of such as Ice-T, Ice Cube and 2 Live Crew. Ice-T doesn't consider himself superseded yet, though. Not by a long chalk.

"People ask me where rap's goin'. If I knew where it was goin'. I'd go there and wait on it! To me, hip hop has many different styles: you got the Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince style, which is very pop and fun; Hammer, which is goin' off into some dance realm; the Afrocentrics; Public Enemy with the black nationalist get-up; my format, which is very street, urban politics. I think that, rap being the hub, these are different spokes on the rim: I don't think one will play out to the next, I think each style will rise, show itself off, and drop back into its format.

"It's kinda like jazz: where is jazz going? It's not going anywhere, but it's here. Rap's at a stage where it's matured, dropped in--there'll be little branches on the tree that go this way or that, but not a whole revolutionary new style. Meaning: I'm not gonna take my rap anywhere. Ice-T is Ice-T. I get real ticked off when people say, Oh, you didn't take it anywhere. Where the f**k is it supposed to go? I don't think my fans want nothing new, I think my fans just want to hear that good ol' Ice-T: Kick that sh*t the way you kick it!"

Read the whole piece – and more classic hip hop interviews – at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.