"I own my own label, put my own shit out," Ice raps on "It's On," Home Invasion's first song, "so no one tells me what the fuck to talk about." "It's On" was a last-minute addition to Home Invasion. A commentary on Ice's grim, determined frame of mind after the "Cop Killer" debacle, it's one of the most arresting tracks he's ever recorded. Over an itchy guitar figure, an eerie keyboard sample and relentless gunfire, Ice tears off staccato lines, insisting that "you're best to let me rap/Ice back on the streets? You don't want that/Cause I'll break ill/And you'll really have to body-count the cops I'll kill/It's on."

The voice of "It's On" is the voice of undeniable experience, and for all its topical immediacy and outrageous gangbanging, Home Invasion is a curiously mature work, the sort of album you could make only after fully establishing a successful, multifaceted career. Having penetrated deep into the white community, become a movie star and ventured into thrash rock with his band Body Count, Ice-T is now making a back-to-basics roots move, issuing a call to "real motherfuckers" of whatever color. Its bass tracks cranked up far into the red zone, Home Invasion is made to boom out of Jeeps and blasters, to solidify Ice's street cred, to crush any doubters among the hard-core.

Prominent among Ice-T's targets are that noted defender of corporate morality Charlton Heston ("I might cut his head off") and rappers who cross over to pop. Reporters who criticize him are gleefully blown away – should journalists start harassing Priority's executives? And perhaps most significant of all, on "Watch the Ice Break," upstart rappers nipping at Ice-T's heels get a stern history lesson: "In case you forgot, I invented this gangsta shit/You wanna step to me, new jack? Walk/Come back in five LPs, then we can talk/You're just new, kid – you got a hit out/In interviews you talk a lot of shit out/You got paid, you really made out/You went broke when your one jam played out."

Beyond conventional rap boasting, Ice-T seems to understand that he has earned the right to look past the streets and take himself as his subject, which he does to chilling effect on "That's How I'm Livin'." A piano drones, a flute phrase drops, and a bone-dry percussion pattern beats hypnotically as Ice-T intones his life story in virtual spoken-word style. The tale is tense and affecting – "I speak on this with hesitation/Even though we're past the statute of limitations" – as introspective and personal a track as rap has ever seen.

Unfortunately, not everything on Home Invasion rises to this level – and at close to eighty minutes, it would have been astounding if the album had maintained that standard. On "Pimp Behind the Wheels," Ice-T takes over the turntables and passes the mike to his DJ, Evil E, for a track that's fun but inessential. Ice also gives over the nearly five minutes of "Funky Gribsta" to Grib, a fourteen-year-old female rapper; her caterwauling is unlistenable. And Brother Marquis from the 2 Live Crew shows up for the pointless, if guiltily pleasurable, bitch catalog "99 Problems."

Home Invasion goes out on a note of extreme strength, though. On "Message to the Soldier," an atmospheric midtempo track spiked by a jazzy saxophone sample, Ice-T kicks a first-rate definition of hard-core rap and its cultural meaning: "But rap hit the streets/Black rage amplified over dope beats/Now they wanna shut us down/And they don't fuck around/Check the history books, son/Black leaders die young/They tell us that our words are scary/They're revolutionary."

Ice-T knows that – to use his phrase – he's "trapped in a paradox." If he hadn't attracted a large audience among young whites, he would still be a Warner Bros. recording artist – even though his potential to pull that audience is what got him on the label in the first place. To his credit, he hasn't distanced himself from those fans – in fact, he's embraced them. Home Invasion's title track describes this original gangsta's crime as stealing America's children, "so they know the noise you talk is lies."

As militant as Home Invasion is, as fully as it is the product of an artist undersiege, it is still driven by an imagined ideal of racial harmony. Track after track – "Home Invasion," "Gotta Lotta Love" and, despite its title, "Racewar" – asserts that. It's a harmony in which people are judged not by their color but by their willingness to treat others with respect. That's the vision on which America claims to have been founded but that it never has come close to achieving. It's also what makes Time Warner's refusal to stand behind Ice-T so shameful and what makes his work so admirable and important.