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LIVING COMFORTABLY NUMB

Ice-T talks classic rock, guns, collaborating with David Gilmour, and, of course, Body Count.

December 1, 2024
J. Bennett

The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.

David Gilmour and Roger Waters may not agree on much, but they agree on Ice-T. Not only did the perpetually bickering Pink Floyd duo approve Body Count’s version of Floyd’s dope-addled 1979 dreamscape “Comfortably Numb,” but Gilmour decided he wanted to play on it. “You got two guys with different opinions about life, but they agree on my song,” Ice tells CREEM. “That’s pretty cool. ”

And who can blame them? As a rapper, actor, and provocateur, Ice-T is a renaissance man for our disgruntled age. As writer and performer of indelible movie themes “Colors” (from 1988’s Colors) and “New Jack Hustler” (from 1991’s

New Jack City) and rap classics “6 ’N the Mornin’” and “O.G. Original Gangster,” his CV reads like a hit list. Never mind his 20-plus-year run as Det. Fin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and memorable turns in early-’90s crime flicks Trespass, Ricochet and—again— New Jack City.

With three decades of distance—not to mention collaborations with Slayer, Megadeth, and Motörhead, among others—it’s easy to forget that Ice may have left his biggest mark on the cultural landscape with a metal band. After forming Body Count in 1990 with his former Crenshaw High running mates Ernie C, Beatmaster V, D-Roc, and Mooseman, the all-Black group dropped their first song on Ice’s O.G. Original Gangster, one of the greatest rap albums ever made.

After the LAPD’s savage beating of Rodney King in ’91, Body Count dropped “Cop Killer,” a track that managed to piss off everyone from then president George H.W. Bush and future NRA puppet Chuck Heston to, predictably, cops and police organizations everywhere. Ice proceeded to fan the flames by appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in a police uniform. That he’d already played Det. Scotty Appleton in New Jack City—and would later spend more than two decades (and counting) playing a cop on TV—became the ultimate irony.

Fast-forward to right about now: Body Count’s last album, Carnivore, features one of the final recordings by fallen Power Trip frontman Riley Gale and won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance. Their latest, Merciless, features guest shots from Max Cavalera, Cannibal Corpse vocalist George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, and— yeah—Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. But for all its rock and metal trappings, Ice refers to Body Count’s music as “grindhouse.”

“I named it that because Body Count is a Tarantino movie,” he says. “Body Count is bitches with big titties and one leg. Body Count is a motherfucker that goes to his trunk to get a gun and pulls out a rocket launcher. Body Count is so outrageous that if you don’t get the humor, it’ll scare the shit out of you.”

In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss Ice’s lifelong love of classic rock—including his sampling of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Heart as far back as the ’80s—his brief feud with EL Cool J, and his views on America’s gun addiction. The man does not disappoint.

How did you get into rock music?

I lost my mother and father early. My mother died when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh. I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with my aunt, and I had a cousin named Earl who was out of high school, and he thought he was Jimi Hendrix. He kept the radio tuned to KLOS and KMET, and I couldn’t touch the radio.

Music is an acquired taste. You might not like reggae, but if you worked at a Jamaican restaurant, you’d be able to pick out songs you like a week in. Two weeks in, you’d be able to sing the hooks. So, before I knew it, I was listening to everybody from Leon Russell to Mott the Hoople to the J. Ceils Band to Edgar Winter to Traffic to Blue Oyster Cult to Boston to ELO. I’m listening to all this music, and I start to lean toward the darker shit, like Deep Purple and of course Black Sabbath—to me, they invented metal. That was the kind of shit I liked. But I was also there with punk. I listened to a lot of Black Flag and X and groups like that. Really it was because it was forced I upon me, but I started to learn all the songs. As far as Black music went, you had Parliament Funkadelic—they’re playing “Maggot Brain” and things like that. That’s how I learned a lot about rock.

I know Sabbath is a big one for you. I remember when “Midnight” came out on Original Gangster, hearing that Sabbath sample and thinking it was so cool that you had figured out a way to incorporate their music into your own. That album also had the first Body Count track on it, so it seems like you were moving in a specific direction.

If you go back to [Ice’s 1987 full-length debut] Rhyme Pays, my first song had a “War Pigs” hook. Later, when we introduced Body Count, people were like, “Oh, you posing.’’ Why would I be posing? If I was posing, why would the title song of my first rap album have a metal hook? If you listen to “Midnight,” it’s the Black Sabbath riff, but the beat comes from Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks.” So, there’s two rock records on top of each other. That’s part of the fun of hip-hop.

You did it again in ’89: “Shut Up, Be Happy” samples Sabbath and features Jello Biafra.

And I did a Heart loop on a song called “Personal” [from 1988’s Power], which Kirk Hammett said he took to do a breakdown in “Enter Sandman.” Hiphop is always about cutting and pasting and finding beats. I used to rap over a Black Sabbath beat that [Ice’s longtime DJ Afrika] Islam used to play—it was “Wasp” off the first album. In early hip-hop, the object was to find a beat that no one knew where it came from so you could be the cooler DJ, like, “What’s he spinning?” So, yeah, I’ve been fuckin’ around with rock for a while. When I started making music, it just felt right. It was cool, and I knew that hip-hop people wouldn’t know where it came from.

And I always try to make the lyrical content match the sound of the music. I was never into gangster shit over happy music. That didn’t make any fuckin’ sense. I want you to hear the music and get a feel for where I’m gonna take you. “Midnight—time for a homicide.” With Black Sabbath behind it, it was like, “Oh, shit.” It matched.

The title track on Merciless is based around a single note from a Black Sabbath riff—the bent note in “Iron Man.” Was that your idea?

Yeah, one note. You know, Rick Rubin was always about reducing. Everyone wants to produce, but he wanted to reduce. With that song, some people pick it out, but other people just think it sounds good. I just wanted to set the tone for the album, to let people know what it’s about.

You did your own version of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd. Body Count have done rock covers in the past—there’s one on each of your last few records—but why did you choose that particular song?

The song is dope, but what I love the most is the bass line. It reminded me of Giorgio Moroder, the end of Scarface. And the title of the song: I honestly feel that we, as humans, are comfortably numb. We can sit here and watch a couple of wars—you got Ukraine and the Gaza Strip—and then we turn it off and watch sports because the bombs aren’t going off here. It’s like walking by a homeless person. You got a roof, some food, a TV, a computer, so you don’t care. Lock yourself in your house and try to forget about it. None of us really wanna deal with reality. Reality is fucked up, but we got our little house and stuff.

So I wanted to do the song and stick to the script: where we are right now. I only wanted part of the song, though, so we did that and then we gotta get it cleared. We call over there and the management says no, Pink Floyd does not do samples, Pink Floyd does not do duets. It’s fucking Pink Floyd. So I’m like, “Fuck, we gotta trash this whole song.” I’m not gonna use these lyrics on nothing else—it just goes in the dumpster. But I don’t have a problem discarding shit. To build, you must be willing to destroy.

Then my manager, somehow, someway, got the song to David Gilmour. He heard it and thought it was dope. Not only did he approve it, he wanted to play on it. So, we went from zero to a hundred. Now, Roger Waters and him ain’t on the best terms, but Roger heard it and all he wanted to know was, “Who’s singing?” They told him it was Ice-T, and he signed off.

We should point out that this isn’t really a cover. It’s your own version of the song, with a different arrangement and mostly your own lyrics. Why did you want to do it that way?

We covered Slayer, “Raining Blood,” and I might’ve changed one or two words. When we did “Institutionalized” [by Suicidal Tendencies], we switched the words up. With this one, I just wanted to use the bass line as a bed for some real lyrics about my life, how I feel about things, how the world is. I knew that bass line would be a good pad for me—not to yell, but to just talk to the listeners. But the hook was perfect: “Hello, is there anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?” We used enough of the real song and added our vibe to it, and we did it in a way that Pink Floyd approved of. That’s the key. I couldn’t have done “Comfortable Buns” or some shit. [Laughs] That shit ain’t gonna fly. But when you got one of the biggest groups in the world saying yes, you feel good about it.

You’ve got George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher from Cannibal Corpse making a cameo on “Purge,” which is a tribute to the horror franchise. Why those movies and why George?

“Purge” is something I would yell during the breakdowns at shows when people would mosh. That was just my thing I would say, but then I wanted to make a record called “Purge.” So we came up with the concept for the song, and the franchise should buy the record because I break down what the Purge is. When we started putting it together, I knew we needed somebody on the track, and I thought of Corpsegrinder. We needed that brutal voice.

All the people that do features on Body Count records have kind of already put their vote in. When we see them on the road, they’re like, “When you do your record, call me.” That’s how we got Jamey Jasta and all these cats on previous albums. And we never got charged for a feature. People are just jumping on the record. Music is a community, you know? If somebody’s charging you an arm and a leg, they must not like you.

I imagine that being asked to do a feature on a Body Count record is a badge of honor at this point.

We’ve become friends with all these cats. We’ve got Max Cavalera on “Drug Lords,” and he did “All Love Is Lost” on the last record. The fact that these guys would consider it a badge of honor is an honor to us. But we try to pick the right person for the right song—and we make the records without features first. We make the records cold. Because when I play you the record, I want you to want to be on it. When Randy [Blythe] from Lamb of God jumped on [2017’s “Walk With Me...”], he was stoked. I don’t want people to be on a record they think sucks. I want to show them what it sounds like without them, you know? That takes you to the next level.

On Merciless, you redid “Mic Contract” from the Original Gangster album. You’ve done this before with “Colors” and “6 ’N the Mornin’”—you adapted your rap songs to the Body Count world. Why did you want to do it with this particular track?

I believe that once you make an album that’s good, you have an outline of how your records should sound. With an Ice-T album, I have a format for what I do. With Body Count, we’ll get a lot of heavy Ice-T fans in the audience. They might start yelling out songs. So I’ll fuck ’em up by doing “Colors” with Body Count. It’s kinda like loading my chamber. I’ve got this song in the chamber, you know? When we headline, we play 90 minutes, sometimes two hours, so there’s a lot of music. With “Mic Contract,” I wanted to do it because it’s fast, it’s off the O.G. album, and it’s still one of my favorite records. But it’s like an Easter egg. I think it’s something that people who’ve bought the last three albums expect: What’s the cover gonna be? What’s the rap record gonna be?

When I was a kid, Zeppelin and Sabbath were already classic rock. For your generation, it was Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. As time goes by, the younger bands age and—if they’re good enough—become considered classics. Given that the first Body Count track came out in 1991, can we consider you classic rock?

Absolutely. It’s classic rock. It’s original, it’s O.G. It’s the first of its kind. It’s from the era of Rage Against the Machine, early Korn, all of that. It was a movement. That’s the wave that hit then. When people come see us, they’re not looking at a new band. They’re looking at a 30-year-old band. But the beauty of rock is that you don’t really age out. Mick Jagger’s 81. You can have a gray-haired motherfucker in a wheelchair—as long as he can still play his guitar, motherfuckers rock with him. The rock audience goes back to the ’50s and ’60s. Hip-hop hasn’t done that. I’m the oldest rapper. Will we ever hit a point where I stop rapping? I don’t think so. I just came off tour with LL Cool J, you know? Until it’s been done, nobody knows what the top is. I think I’m gonna drop my next rap album when I hit 70.

I love that you toured with LL. I remember when you guys had beef for a minute about 30 years ago.

It’s not beef if it’s just music. Saying, “I can rap better than you,” isn’t beef. Beef is when you start shooting motherfuckers. [Laughs] It never got to that with us. LL was the number-one rapper, and I was coming out of L.A., so I had to take off on him. That’s the rules. You gotta go after the big guy if you tryin’ to show your stripes. So I had to say, “Fuck you. I don’t really think you’re all that.” That’s what put the West Coast on my back. They said, “If Ice don’t think so, we don’t think so.’’ But that’s part of hip-hop. It’s always been competitive. We made a couple records talking shit, but it was never like, “I’m gonna drag your little sister out in the street and pitchfork her.” [Laughs]

Speaking of shooting motherfuckers, you’ve got the song “Do or Die” on Merciless. In it, you’re saying you’re not pro-gun or anti-gun. You’re pro-staying alive. Which I think is a sentiment many folks can relate to.

Look, I’m ex-military, right? I think a lot of people get off on guns, like they’re these gadgets that give ’em some kinda hard-on. My attitude is this: If nobody had guns, I don’t need a gun. I have guns, but I don’t even fuck with ’em. They don’t do nothing for me. I see some guys on the internet, their lives revolve around guns: “I got this silencer; I bought this clip." [Ice’s wife] Coco’s dad is like that. He lives for his guns. He’s gun-crazy. I’m like, “If shit pops off, you only gonna be able to grab one of ’em.” But he’s got enough to arm a militia.

I’m not that guy. I carried guns in the street. I carried a gun for so long I had a bruise on my leg. When you’re in the streets and you got enemies and you got people saying, “When I see you, it’s going down,” you need to be armed. That’s that life. But I'm past that life. Everybody who ever had a problem with me is no longer around. But if we’re all going into a room and you’re gonna have a gun and I’m not? [Laughs] Fuck that.

It’s not that I like ’em, it’s that y’all got ’em. If a motherfucker comes running up in my house, I don’t wanna grab a kitchen knife. Now, as far as having to sign up and get all your paperwork, what’s the problem with that? I was down in the South at the gun shows, and them motherfuckers were handing us all kindsa shit—AK-47s, whatever—no license, no nothing. There’s some other shit about the people that are so pro-gun that’s not always so nice and cool.

I’m able to talk about this shit without alienating nobody because I'm just being honest how I feel about it. People might hear the record and say, “Oh, he’s pro-gun,” but it’s not like that. It goes back to what I was saying with “Cop Killer”: The minute you put me in the street and start to abuse me, you’re no longer a cop. Now we’re just two men in the street fighting for their lives. So, I don’t know, man. Call me what you will. I’m just trying to stay alive.