Speech Impediment

Dan Quayle denounced it as ''a record that is suggesting it's all right to kill cops''; Ice-T, the rapper who sang the song in question, ''Cop Killer,'' with his hardcore rock band, Body Count, said he was just acting out the fantasy of a psychopath. In the end, Ice-T voluntarily took the song off Body Count's eponymous album, and police organizations that had protested backed off.

Ice-T wasn't alone; from Sister Souljah to Tupac Shakur to Paris (''Bush Killa''), rappers took the heat this year by taking on the heat itself. As the | uproar mounted, a few major record labels asked a number of artists to delete tracks with violent anti-police lyrics from their albums. ''Cop Killer'' may be gone, but the questions it raised remain unresolved: Why should songs — and not cop-killing film fantasies like The Terminator — be taken literally? And how far should record companies go in supporting rappers' freedom of enraged expression? Ice-T's response: ''Wait until the people who didn't like Body Count hear my new album.''