Photo: Michael Buckner/Getty
Ice-Tbelieves in sharing his place and his knowledge of hip-hop culture with his family.
The rapper/actor, 65, tells PEOPLE that both his older children — son Tracy Marrow Jr., 31, and daughter LeTesha Morrow, 47 — as well as youngest daughter Chanel, 7, all hear about his hip-hop memories as he talks about his involvement inA&E’sHip Hop Treasures.
“The thing about hip-hop is beside being 50, it’s one of the few musics where parents are almost in the same culture as their kids,” the rapper says.
Laughing, he adds, “The only thing is our generation, the early generations, we refused to let our kids be cooler than us. We’re like, ‘You think you understand hip-hop, but you’re not from that golden era.”
As a rapper who caught flack from parents for his own controversial lyrics, Ice-T often faces the question, “Does your kid listen to you? Because you do hardcore rap.”
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Ice-T.Jai Lennard
Jai Lennard
“The key to having kids is having parental guidance — not necessarily parental control, but guidance to help them understand what it is,” he explains.
“My daughter was listening to 2 Live Crew and whatnot. My son used to sing Wu-Tang Clan without saying motherf—er, and it was amazing,” theHip-Hop Treasuresco-host shares. “He’d sing, ‘Bring the ruckus, bring the mother-mother ruckus.'”
He continues, “I just felt like it’s all rock. And when you talk, it’s kind of like they grow up with you and you share that common bond which is beautiful. It’s beautiful.”
Today, Ice-T’s parenting is still raising eyebrows, which doesn’t faze the rapper or wifeCoco Austin,
Coco/Instagram
“You have to be out of your mind to care with someone else has to say,” he shares. “I guess the thing is that to become successful, you can’t pay attention to anybody but yourself. I think the trick is you take that like this: I don’t know you personally, so I can’t take anything personally. The only thing that would bother me is if somebody I cared about said something.”
“It’s fun and she likes doing it. If she didn’t, we definitely wouldn’t do it,” he says. “When Chanel was born, we got her social media because we knew that we were gonna be the parents that were gonna show a hundred pictures of their kid because we were proud.”
“I didn’t want to put it all on my page, because then I’d be that dad that’s always showing pictures of his kids,” he laughs. “So we said got her a page that way if people want to watch our child grow, they can. We’re not afraid of anything happening. People will say, ‘don’t show her face.’ We’re not concerned with that.”
“We just feel like we’re sharing something that makes us happy,” he levels. “Now, at some point, Chanel might say Daddy or Mommy, I don’t want to be on social media and we’ll stop. But she’s a normal kid. She wants to do her TikToks and her Reels.”
Even when Ice-T and Coco aren’t appearing in the clips, “we watch everything and post everything.”
“We do our parenting,” he says. " I think the thing of it is, it’s Ice-T and Coco. Our parenting is a lot different than the normal, square couple from Oklahoma. I’m a f—ing rock star, it’s different."
“We’re like the Osbournes,” he levels. “We have a different dynamic in our house. But it’s not harmful. That’s the main thing. It’s us.”
Watch Ice-T go behind the scenes to give fans a look at the people and items that gave birth to hip-hop and help artists retrieve them — with some archived to be put on display atThe Universal Hip-Hop Museum— whenHip Hop Treasurespremieres on Saturday, Aug. 12 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on A&E.
source: people.com
