In compiling his greatest-hits package, Ice T set a simple standard for songs he was considering for the album. “The criteria was, if I say the name of the song, you should remember it and know where you were when you heard it, and know I did it. If I say, ‘Colors,’ you say, ‘I remember when I heard that.’ If I say, 'Let’s Get Butt Naked and F***,' you should say, ‘Oh, that’s Ice T.'”

Speaking from his Coroner Records office, Ice T is completely at home in a room that includes two elongated black leather couches, a massive TV and a book labeled "Pimptionary" propped up against the wall. The 16-track “Greatest Hits: The Evidence” (Atomic Pop/Coroner) is due in stores on August 8 and will include Ice T standards “O.G. Original Gangster,” “I’m Your Pusher,” and “6 ‘N The Mornin’.” Prominent by its absence is “Cop Killer,” a track recorded by his rock band Body Count that got him unwanted attention from Capitol Hill and dropped from Warner Bros.

“’Cop Killer’ is included on the European version of this album…. I had mixed emotions about putting ‘Cop Killer’ on an Ice T greatest-hits album, but Europe said, 'It would help the record sell, and you are in a business, and you’re trying to get money.' And we were like, ‘OK, we’ll do it.’ Because it’s a Body Count record and Body Count is a different thing from Ice T.”

Among the songs included is a new track, “Money, Power, Women” and “The Tower,” a song that Ice T collaborated on with a buddy’s brother who was fresh out of prison. “His name’s Daeboe and he’d just come out of the pen, and he sat in front of me one day and he said, ‘I can rap.’ He started saying it, but... he wasn’t a rapper, really. But the whole vibe of what he was saying--‘Seen a brother kill another because they said he was gay/that’s the way it’s been/it’s been that way for years/the body hit the ground/I heard a couple of cheers.’--the way he wrote kind of hurt me inside that they were glad he died. And that’s kind of thing Ice T tries to deal with, the complexities of situations--not just the situation but the complexity of the situation. It’s about the fact that I’m about to rob a store, but I don’t even want to rob the motherf***er, but I gotta, and therefore I’m angry, and therefore this is going to be a very violent situation. That’s the guts of the s***.”

'Acting is the easiest thing in the world'

Ice T has acted in movies since his 1984 appearance in “Breakin.’” He just finished a role in director Abel Ferrara’s upcoming flick "RXMAS."

Writing music requires building something out of nothing, while acting, Ice T contends, is just a matter of reading some lines. “Acting is the easiest thing in the world. You get the job, they wake you up in the morning, they come pick you up, they take you to the place, they put you in a room, they tell you what to wear, they give you a piece of paper that tells you what to say, they tell you where to stand, they put make-up on you, they shoot you, they tell you it’s time to go home and they drive you home. It’s easy.”

As head of Coroner Records, Ice T said his philosophy revolves around developing artists and using the Internet as a way to reach fans with music they might otherwise not hear.

“Right now, what we’re doing with Coroner, we’re trying to sign artists I think are talented, truthfully, and have a chance at longevity. We’re starting out with hip-hop because…I know what I’m talking about. We got about 20 groups right now that I think are really good. We’ll be dropping a compilation called ‘The Game of Death’ in late August or September…All the groups are working on their own albums, and I use the Internet because it allows me to get a lot more material out there into the public eye, cheaper.”

The subject of a VH-1 ‘Behind the Music’ set to air in September, Ice T said the jury’s still out on his opinion of the show but laughingly said the producers of the program earned their paycheck in filming his story. “I know they spent a lot of time on the pre-music s***. I think people are going to get a real good glimpse of my crime history and s*** that I went through. But the lady who was doing the interview got jacked--one of my buddies threatened to kill her…She got a mouthful of it. Then she got the job to do Snoop Dogg and I was like, ‘Well, you had basic training with me. My friends are a lot mellower than Snoop’s friends.’”