By https://www.rollingstone.com
Over the past few years, David Gilmour and Roger Waters have beefed about everything from control of the Pink Floyd Facebook page to the war in Ukraine. They communicate primarily through lawyers and extremely caustic Tweets. But they finally found something they could agree on when Ice-T approached them this year about the possibility of his heavy-metal band Body Count cutting a version of “Comfortably Numb” with new lyrics for their upcoming LP Merciless.
“When we originally contacted their publisher, they said ‘no,’” Ice-T tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from his home in New Jersey during a day off from shooting Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. “It was not a diss, but kind of like ‘Pink Floyd doesn’t do samples. They don’t do ads, either.’ We were fucked. I wasn’t going to take the lyrics and put it on another track. I was just going to burn it.”
The situation changed once Ice-T’s team circumvented the publishers and took the proposed track directly to Waters and Gilmour via their managers. “Once we got to David, he was like, ‘Fuck, yeah. I love this song. I approve it,’” says Ice-T. “And then Roger listened to it and his only comment was, ‘Who’s singing?’ When he heard it was Ice-T, he approved it.’ To have two people who sit on two opposite sides of the fence agree on a song, that means it must be good.”
Ice-T wasn’t overly familiar with Pink Floyd’s catalog growing up, but he was always drawn to the power of “Comfortably Numb,” especially the haunting bassline, which reminded him of Giorgio Moroder’s score for Scarface. And after putting Body Count’s spin on everything from Slayer’s “Raining Blood” to Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” over the past few years, he started thinking about how he could redo “Comfortably Numb” and use it to reflect the numbness many feel when watching the world descend into chaos from the comfort of our living rooms.
“I can turn on and watch the war in Ukraine, or I can watch the Israel situation, and then click off and then start watching sports,” he says. “Or I could watch a kid get murdered by a cop or somebody come out and shoot their old lady, and then play my video game. We are just kind of numb to everything that’s going on, the starvation in the world, everything. It must have struck a nerve in both of those guys. I don’t think they would have approved it had I made a record like ‘Comfortable Buns’ or some shit.”
Ice-T wasn’t overly familiar with Pink Floyd’s catalog growing up, but he was always drawn to the power of “Comfortably Numb,” especially the haunting bassline, which reminded him of Giorgio Moroder’s score for Scarface. And after putting Body Count’s spin on everything from Slayer’s “Raining Blood” to Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” over the past few years, he started thinking about how he could redo “Comfortably Numb” and use it to reflect the numbness many feel when watching the world descend into chaos from the comfort of our living rooms.
“I can turn on and watch the war in Ukraine, or I can watch the Israel situation, and then click off and then start watching sports,” he says. “Or I could watch a kid get murdered by a cop or somebody come out and shoot their old lady, and then play my video game. We are just kind of numb to everything that’s going on, the starvation in the world, everything. It must have struck a nerve in both of those guys. I don’t think they would have approved it had I made a record like ‘Comfortable Buns’ or some shit.”