By LOUIS B. HOBSON --

BEVERLY HILLS -- With the gun wars and recent assassinations, it's becoming a jungle out there for America's rap artists.

On Sept. 7 last year, Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas.

He died a week later. Just last month, Christopher Wallace, who went by the stage name Notorious B.I.G., was shot as he was leaving the Soul Train music awards in New York.

Rapper Ice Cube, a founding member of the seminal West Coast gangsta rap group N.W.A., whose real name is O'Shea Jackson, travels with bodyguards he call his posse.

"They're not with me 24 hours a day, or every day of the week for that matter. They've been with me for years. It's not something I've initiated since the deaths of Tupac and B.I.G.," insisted Ice Cube, during a recent interview for his role in Anaconda (opening today).

"I don't watch my back any more or any less than I ever did. A violent death isn't something you can dodge easily."

Ice Cube's nonchalance doesn't mean he was unaffected by the deaths of Shakur and Wallace.

"They were good friends and great artists. Their deaths are hard to take.

"I'm not over them yet.

"A lot of brothers know only too well that you don't have to sell a million records to get murdered. It's a fact of life in the ghettos."

Ice Cube defends gangsta rap insisting, "it's here to stay and that's an important thing. It's down-and-dirty but it's socially conscious.

"That's why it is so necessary."

Ice Cube, who counts himself as one of the godfathers of gangsta rap, is juggling his recording career with a busy acting career.

He has five platinum records including AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, Death Certificate and The Predator and has starred in such films as Boyz N the Hood, Higher Learning, Trespass and Dangerous Ground.

He is currently starring as a documentary cameraman on a doomed expedition to the Amazon in the horror-thriller Anaconda.

The boat Cube and his co-stars are on is stalked by a giant anaconda.

"The attendants at our hotel in the Brazilian jungle caught an anaconda under the porch. While they were wrestling with it, the thing spit up an alligator it had swallowed," recalls Ice Cube.

"I love Los Angeles. I'm not a nature person. Cell phones and traffic I can deal with. Snakes, spiders and monkeys are another thing altogether."

Despite his aversions, Ice Cube honored his contract and stayed in the jungle.

"I am a great fan of movies like Jaws and Indiana Jones. I saw doing Anaconda as a chance to be in one of those kind of movies."

Ice Cube is not only starring in but directing his next movie.

It's a $7-million independent film called The Players' Club and deals with organized crime's stranglehold on a strip club.

"My movies and my music are two different worlds. In movies, I'm part of a team. The movie is somebody else's vision so, as an actor, you have to put your ego aside.

"When I cut an album or direct a music video, it's pretty much my show.

"It's my vision so it's done my way.

"By directing a movie, I'm putting a little of my approach to music into my film career."