Ice T

Havre de Grace. -- Let's begin with a little song.Die, nigger, it's better you than me. Die, nigger, f racial animosity! Die, nigger, I know your family's grievin' Die, nigger, but still I'm gettin' even.That's vicious, sickening, putrid stuff, right? If you heard it on the radio, you'd be shocked and appalled. If you heard people you knew singing it, even if they were drunk, it would change your opinion of them forever. If your children brought a tape of it home from school and put it on your new sound system, you'd put a stop to it in a hurry and explain to them why it's disgusting.

Ten years ago, Delray Richardson was peddling $5 cassette tapes of his rap music that was produced in his best friend's Harbor House bedroom for the underground market. Today, the Los Angeles-based rap and R&B artist has written and produced his own compact disc, on his own record label, and is coming home next week to introduce the East Coast to "Delray the Album." "It was a love thing," the 25-year-old who grew up in the Robinwood public housing community in Annapolis said of his first serious musical venture.

The Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police had every right to be outraged by Ice-T's rap song "Cop Killer" even though its protest at the stadium Monday appeared to be both late and fruitless.I'm outraged, too.This isn't a cop thing, a black-white thing or even a freedom of speech thing.This is a question of values, of right vs. wrong, of truth vs. falsehood, of responsibility vs. a blatant disregard for the public good.I don't believe in censorship. But screaming loud and long when something offends our sensibilities is not censorship.

LOS ANGELES -- Ice Cube settled into a contemporary leather chair in his spacious Encino office recently and immediately dug into a stack of papers.They were report cards, so to speak, from test audiences who had seen "The Player's Club," a movie Ice Cube wrote, co-produced, directed and appears in."They liked it," he said, letting go of his trademark scowl for just a few second. "All excellents and goods. No poors."He wanted to eyeball the documents before jetting off the following morning to Houston for a couple of gigs with his rap combo, Westside Connection.

If notoriety really does translate into record sales, then Ice-T's "Home Invasion" (Rhyme Syndicate/Priority 53858, in stores Tuesday) ought to go quintuple platinum.This is the album Ice-T promised would be more provocative than "Cop Killer" or anything on "O.G. Original Gangster," and it started raising a ruckus even before it was released. Its content provoked Warner Bros. into terminating Ice-T's contract, and its cover has generated more complaints than any album art since Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction."

He's known as the Ice-T of Annapolis.Delray Richardson, a brash, young rapper who grew up amid drug dealing and sporadic violence in one of the city's public housing projects, doesn't flinch from confronting the tough issues of the times.But even though his outspoken music has attracted fans and angered at least one Annapolis police officer, the 19-year-old rapper known as M.C. Delphonic says he strives to be more educational than hard-core.He listens to funk artist George Clinton and rapper Ice Cube, not Ice-T, who was condemned by police organizations and conservative politicians for his song "Cop Killer."

Rap star Ice-T announced yesterday that he would delete the controversial track "Cop Killer" from his speed-metal album "Body Count." But the rapper insisted this withdrawal was not in response to police protests against his song, but due to death threats made against employees at Warner Bros. Records, the album's manufacturer. Ice-T blamed those threats on police officers."At the moment the cops are in a criminal mode," he said at press conference in Los Angeles yesterday. "They've raised a lot of death threats against Warner Brothers Records."

When Ice-T's third album hit the streets in 1989, most people took the title -- "Freedom of Speech . . . Just Watch What You Say" -- for sarcasm. But lately, it has begun to seem an awful lot like prophecy.Over the past couple months, the rapper has become the focus of a massive protest, as police groups and conservative politicians demanded the withdrawal of "Cop Killer," a song on his heavy metal album "Body Count."In no time at all, Ice-T had become America's Most Unwanted. Dan Quayle denounced him, as did President Bush and actor Charlton Heston.

"I'd like to take a pig out into the parking lot," singer Ice T chants on his controversial "Cop Killer" rap, "and shoot him in his m face."It's a line particularly upsetting to Police Agent Eugene Cassidy, a Baltimore officer who has been shot twice in the face while trying to arrest a wanted man. He's permanently blind, with a bullet still lodged in his brain.And last week, Ice T actually encountered Gene Cassidy, who was standing with his seeing-eye dog at the corner of Beverly and Wilshire in Los Angeles.

Does the name Body Count ring a bell?It should. A few months ago, this L.A.-based thrash act was the most notorious band in rock and roll. Thanks to "Cop Killer," the last song on Body Count's self-titled debut album, the group was condemned by law enforcement associations, denounced by Vice President Dan Quayle and reviled by actor Charlton Heston.By mid-summer, sentiment was running so high that complaints over "Cop Killer" dominated the annual stockholders meeting at Time/Warner, the media conglomerate distributing the Body Count album.

A 42-year-old Oakland Mills man says icy ground nearly foiled gunman's attempt to rob him at an automated teller machine early Wednesday.Herbert Haywood, an employee at the Potomac River Commission in Rockville, said he was on his way to work when he stopped his car a block from his home at the Oakland Mills Village Center to make a cash withdrawal at 5:50 a.m. Wednesday.As he walked to the machine, he heard a noise in the parking lot behind him. A man in a ski mask and armed with a sawed-off shotgun ran toward him, slipped on the ice, regained his balance and continued charging.

The ice is pristine again. Tonya Harding is in exile. Nancy Kerrigan is skating professionally. Time has smoothed over the rough spots like some cosmic Zamboni, but that has left the once-regal sport of figure skating to ponder an uncertain future.The Tonya/Nancy affair may have given it a black eye, but the scandal also created an attention glut that put figure skating at the center of the sporting universe for several months.Now, as a new season begins with the Sudafed Skate America competition at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, the sport -- and the U.S. Figure Skating Association that controls it in this country -- must fashion a new identity.

It was when I fell hard on the ice for the second time last Thursday that I screamed, "I'm so sick of winter!"In my mind I heard the response, a collective sigh and scream from everyone in our area who has had it with this weather, too. I told my sister, Connie, who skis with her family near their home in Pennsylvania each weekend, that at least it was good weather for the skiers. That is when she told me her husband had broken his thumb skiing last Sunday. I guess his fall was worse than mine.

It takes a lot more than a week of ice and snow to keep Crofton residents down.Saturday night lots of our neighbors put on their dancing shoes and kicked off the first party to celebrate Crofton's 30th birthday.The band Impressions played past 1 a.m. to give everyone the chance to dance away the winter blues. Sue Bents, the community recreation assistant, pronounced the evening a success, and plans are being made for a country-western dance at the end of February.For information about all birthday events, call Town Hall: 721-2301 or 261-6021.

They're trying to make hardcore rap disappear," says rapper Chuck D. in "The 13th Message." This track, which he describes as a "P.E.S.A. -- Public Enemy Service Announcement," is the first thing heard on the "CB4" soundtrack. But unlike the movie, which pokes fun at much of the rap industry, Chuck D. isn't kidding at all.By "they," he doesn't mean some amorphous specter of establishment disapproval. He blames black radio, which is "trying to make hardcore rap disappear by making the rap DJs obsolete.

If notoriety really does translate into record sales, then Ice-T's "Home Invasion" (Rhyme Syndicate/Priority 53858, in stores Tuesday) ought to go quintuple platinum.This is the album Ice-T promised would be more provocative than "Cop Killer" or anything on "O.G. Original Gangster," and it started raising a ruckus even before it was released. Its content provoked Warner Bros. into terminating Ice-T's contract, and its cover has generated more complaints than any album art since Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction."

You don't have to be a fan of rap music or of rapper Ice-T to be disturbed by Time-Warner's decision last week to withdraw the "Body Count" album after police groups and conservative politicians objected to the song "Cop Killer," which critics charge glorifies the murder of police. Once self-appointed censors, no matter how well-intentioned, are allowed to dictate what other Americans can see, read or listen to, the right of all Americans to make up their own minds is threatened.We say this fully aware of the fact that many people who are not police officers also deplore Ice-T's lyrics, along with much else that goes with the culture of rap music.

Washington. -- Here's one cheer for Vice President Quayle and the 60 mostly Republican members of Congress who called for a boycott of rapper Ice-T's incendiary rock tune ''Cop Killer.''Just one.They don't deserve any more until they begin to match their outrage over Ice-T's tune with some heartfelt outrage over the deplorable problem of police brutality and harassment it tries to portray.And they'll deserve three outstanding cheers when they match their outrage with action.Don't hold your breath waiting.

"Cop Killer,'' that invidious record by that mediocre rap star,Ice T, continues to cause controversy. A recent appearance by Ice T at College Park brought out the usual band of police, their families and supporters to protest the rap musician's effete effort at social commentary. Though he didn't perform ''Cop Killer,'' Ice T did excoriate the police for protesting ''when they should be out catching criminals.'' Ice T would probably look genuinely confused if someone were to suggest that police officers have the same rights of free speech he seems to think belong exclusively to rap musicians.

Gilding the lily A page of the earliest known draft of Abraham Lincoln's famous "house divided" speech sold for a record $1.54 million at Sotheby's auction house yesterday. The draft of the speech, believed to have been written in 1857 or 1858, contains the lines: "A house divided against itself can not stand. I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave, and half free."The document was bought by New York businessmen Louis Lehrman and Richard Gilder, who have the Gilder-Lehrman collection on deposit at the J. Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York.