Laying down 24 tracks across 73 minutes, it’s easy to argue that Ice-T’s fourth album tries too hard to be a magnum opus. There are too many short tracks and skits, but the actual songs are among his strongest material. Displaying real gravitas as he delivers detailed exegeses of the West Coast criminal lifestyle (it’s genuinely shocking he never wrote a novel), he dips into trenchant social analysis on “Escape From The Killing Fields,” “Straight Up Nigga” and “Bitches 2,” and paints a grim portrait of prison life in “The Tower,” while delineating the realities of show business on “Lifestyles Of The Rich And Infamous.” He also introduces his metal band, Body Count, and rhymes over Black Sabbath on “Midnight” and early Funkadelic on “Mind Over Matter.”