Never a dynamic poet, never a west coast Rakim, nor a freewheeling master rap stylist a la Busta or Slick Rick, his name tends to get left out when true-school heads or rock-crit listmakers gather to anoint and appoint the approved membership list of the all-time hip hop canon. Without wishing to disrespect the Overweight Lover, even he would surely agree that that doesn't sound quite fair.
Ice's intermittent involvement in hip hop music-making from onwards meant he was absent from the fray as hip hop took over - and morphed into - mainstream pop.
His public profile today is dominated by his small-screen acting career and his evident enjoyment of the life of a modern celebrity: his latest vehicle is a reality TV show with his former underwear model wife.
A natural adept at social media, even the Twitter feed ostensibly written by his dog now has over 16, followers. It's easy to see how he's become a kind of sideshow, but that doesn't mean we have to accept that he should be denied his place at hip hop history's high table.
Yet his fourth LP - a masterpiece, though usually only acknowledged as a personal milestone in the Ice-T discography rather than as a high-water mark for the genre as a whole - goes some way to explaining why. The people buying his records were still primarily hip hop fans, not the disaffected rock audience in need of some new sources of righteous rage he'd begun to court and would successfully cultivate over the next couple of years.
Nor was he yet the cause celebre of the anti-censorship left - he didn't really end up in the eye of that particular storm until the beginning of Yet both those future paths are, in retrospect, clearly mapped out here. It's an album that ought therefore to feel transitional, but O.
And it's here that the first clue can be unearthed as to Ice's mysterious omission from the pantheon of the GOATs. He was among the first rappers signed to a major - and definitely the first from LA though born in New Jersey, he moved West as a pre-teen , and his records always sounded Even when he was using the standard rap sample source palette - and there's as much James Brown and P-Funk on this album as on any late-Golden Age New York elpee - there's a sheen and a gloss to the production that set it apart.
Where New York rap was dark and grimy, Ice and his long-time production cohort Afrika Islam took the same sonic elements and dragged them out into the bright light of the California day. It's hip hop, but there's no place to hide: the sounds are all clearly defined, starkly illuminated, clean and distinct, almost separated in the mix as if being held up for examination using forceps and surgical gloves.
This approach would prove profoundly, hugely influential - you can hear its echoes in Dr Dre's search for sonic perfection, and the crispness of O. Just like the music, Ice's raps favoured clarity - both aural and intellectual. Just as their sound was crisp and precise, so their meanings were never meant to be hidden.
The listener wasn't supposed to have to work at getting to the crux of what an Ice-T song was about. The conventional measures of a great emcee aren't much help when assessing these raps' success or failure: Kool Mo Dee gives his lowest scores to Ice in the categories of Battle Skills, Freestyle Ability and Flow, and in his notes on Poetic Value, Mo Dee kills with kindness.
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