Ice-T Says 'Hip-Hop Has Gray Hair' as He Reflects on 50th Anniversary: 'We Knew It Was a Culture' (Exclusive)
Ice-T tells PEOPLE about checking out hip-hop memorabilia on A&E's "Hip-Hop Treasures" and opens up about some of the changes he's observed over decades
A&E
Ice-T has enjoyed the pleasure of watching the rich culture around hip-hop grow and flourish.
Speaking with PEOPLE about his involvement in A&E's Hip Hop Treasures — which provides a behind-the-scenes look at the people and items that gave birth to hip-hop and helps artists retrieve them, with some archived in put on display at The Universal Hip-Hop Museum — the rapper/actor is eager to celebrate the "huge milestone" that is hip hop turning 50.
"Considering when we got involved with it, it was supposed to be a fad," the rapper, 65, says with a laugh. "It's a huge milestone. They said hip-hop wouldn't last, but we knew it was a culture, just like the rock era. It was a moment in time when new music was born."
"Now, I say hip-hop has gray hair. When you meet somebody that says, 'I grew up on rap,' they could be in their 60s, they could be in their 70s. You can meet a lady looking like my grandma, and she says, ‘I used to break dance,'" he notes.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Jai Lennard
Ice-TRelated: 50 Years of Hip-Hop, According to Slick Rick, Latto, Pusha-T and Over 30 Other Musicians (Exclusive)
"Now, I say hip-hop has gray hair. When you meet somebody that says, 'I grew up on rap,' they could be in their 60s, they could be in their 70s. You can meet a lady looking like my grandma, and she says, ‘I used to break dance,'" he notes.
"It's been around long enough that you really cannot put your finger on a hip-hop fan. You can't tell, you have no idea who grew up on Beastie Boys or Run DMC. There's no way of telling."
Along with fellow industry vet LL Cool J, Ice-T helps field collectors and museum curators as they track down missing hip-hop memorabilia and tell the stories of the icons that the items came from.
For Ice, it's his "lost gold chain with the pistols" from his early career that remains the one piece of memorabilia he can't track down.
Raymond Boyd/Getty Images
Ice-T in 1988"When me and my ex split up, I think it got left there. It may have ended up in an ex-girlfriend black hole. But it's interesting, on the show you see how my stuff, most of it comes from Afrika Islam, my producer of many years. He's kind of like a hoarder; he has all these big storage containers that he pulls all kind of different types of things from," he shares.
"There are machines we used to make my early music. I never really looked at all that stuff, I never thought it would be valuable. Now it only takes 20 years for something to become an antique, so a lot of the things we kept around not have value — not just style, but value."
While he's been part of many moments in hip-hop history himself, Ice's biggest moment personally was "When I saw Run DMC do the Los Angeles sports arena. That was when they had their Adidas sponsorship and they made everybody hold their Adidas up over their heads."
"I remember being like, 'Wow.' It was the first time I saw hip-hop really done in a full production, arena-type setting because hip-hop had always been done in basements or roller skating rinks, you know, small venues."
"When I saw there was overproduction and lasers, I was like, 'This is gonna be really big,' And Run DMC was the group to take it to that level."
In his own career, Ice took things to another level when he added acting to his résumé, and while today it seems common for artists to explore different mediums, back then he thought "it was suicide."
"I was the first rapper to take a dramatic role, but they had movies where rappers played themselves," he explains. "But to actually do New Jack City and play a character, that hadn't been done yet and I was scared to death."
"I thought it was going to ruin my musical career, but that was also the year I dropped "O.G. Original Gangster," and they wanted me to play the police. So, but I also knew acting was an opportunity that very few people get, and I couldn't turn down that opportunity. So I took a chance and then you look around and you got Pac acting, Cube acting, Will Smith acting. It's the norm now, but if you really look at hip-hop and see how many thousands of rappers there are, there are still only about 10 rapped that have pulled off acting."
Between music and acting, Ice says this stage of his life is "the most active I've ever been."
"I'm doing commercials, I do television. I’m doing Body Count, my metal band. I’m doing Ice-T. This is really my most active moment because earlier, I was just getting started, so I only had one thing. I was just pushing rap but now I've got something."
He continues, "And if you look at somebody like Snoop Dogg, he's everywhere. I think what happened is really for me and Snoop, people like ourselves, is that the gatekeepers changed — the people who are in charge now, the shot callers are like 35, 40-year-old CEOS."
"They're like, 'Yeah I love Ice-T, put him on a Cheerios box,'" he laughs. "All those boundaries that we had, as rappers starting out, they're gone. That's how you were able to see Dr. Dre and Eminem at the Super Bowl. Because the new people that are in charge, are hip-hop. They grew up with it. They're not afraid of it. Now, we live in a full-grown hip-hop culture, where the president of any big Fortune 500 company probably had a Run DMC record."
Hip Hop Treasures premieres Saturday, Aug. 12 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on A&E.
For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!
Read the original article on People.
