THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The title of Body Count’s latest album sums up Ice-T and his Grammy-grabbing crew. They’ve persevered over social opposition, personal tragedies, and an army of naysayers to emerge bloody but unbroken. In fact, they’re stronger than ever for it.
“We had a string of one-word albums,” says Ice-T. “We had Bloodlust, we had Carnivore and that word, Merciless, just bumped into my head. It’s really about that point where you can’t take any more and you’re done. Like the song says, ‘I got no more fucks to give.’ When you push a person to that point, it’s too late to ask for mercy. I was watching a lot of movies like Hostel; a lot of cruel torture movies when I was writing the album, and I was like, ‘These people are cold-blooded.’ That’s what triggered that whole energy.”
The ride to Merciless wasn’t an easy one. Just as Body Count were about t release their last album Carnivore, with North American and European dates and TV appearances booked, the world shut down — literally a week after the album’s March 6, 2020, arrival. That left a lot of unfinished business for BC. “This was difficult,” says Ice. “We got to do maybe one show and then had a full, global shutdown. We had 30 shows in Europe. Carnivore was received well but we never actually got to play it. Then we got a second Grammy nomination, we won it and then we went back to the label, and they said, ‘Give us another album.’ Basically, go shit out another one when we were fresh out of ideas. Cool. I had to give myself a little time to figure it out because even when the label was ready for another record, I wasn’t.”
In the middle of Ice-T’s grueling schedule on Law & Order (“I act for the money, I do the music to stay sane,” he admits), Body Count teamed once again with producer Will Putney (Knocked Loose, The Ghost Inside) to begin the grind of piecing riffs and ideas together. “I start with tracks first,” Ice reveals. “I challenged Will Putney, Vince (Price – bass) and Ernie (C. – guitar) to make instrumental tracks so good that I don’t have to sing on them. That’s my agenda. Give me some grooves. It’s about catching a vibe. When you hear a band like Six Feet Under, you can’t understand what the vocals are — you’re catching a vibe. Then the tracks tell me what the song is about.”
No question, the tracks on Merciless speak for themselves. “My band has to have a pretty thick skin!” Ice smiles. “We went through a lot of ideas and a lot of material — and riffs and songs that made it to the record were just the ones we kept.” From the grindhouse-style interrogation scenario that opens the record, the mood is set. Says Ice: “Merciless is made off one note which is basically, the bent note from (Black Sabbath’s) Iron Man.” Psychopath, featuring Fit for An Autopsy vocalist Joe Bad, is BC on maximum killing overdrive. The pissed-off aggression of Lying Motherfucker; or The Purge, an homage to the ultra-violent film series which also features George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher from Cannibal Corpse, makes no bones about it. Start to finish, with Merciless, Body Count are back for an even bloodier murder spree than anything they’ve done before.
When asked if the Grammy win for Carnivore’s Bum-Rush, inspired Ice to go harder, the rap legend and hardcore growler pulls no punches. “To win a Grammy is a weird thing,” he admits. “To win a Grammy, you’re getting voted on by people in an academy. It’s not fans. It doesn’t have anything to do with record sales. It has to do with people in the industry looking at a record for artistic merit. (Bum-Rush) was Body Count’s second Grammy nomination (the first was for Black Hoodie from 2018’s Bloodlust), and I think with both records that got picked, it had a lot to do with the timing of what was going on in the country. On the other album, I felt No Lives Matter was better than Black Hoodie, but I think Black Hoodie struck a nerve. During the time we made Bum-Rush, the turmoil was there, and it seemed current to what was going on. I was happy with the accolade but it’s a weird accolade.”
On Merciless, Fuck What You Heard, with its looping mantra of: ‘Democrips and Bloodpublicans…’ is Ice-T unloading a round of lyrical bullets at the state of the nation and the presidential election. “In my crowd I have Democrats and I have Republicans,” he admits. “I’ve always been independent in my thinking and a lot of the things I think are straight down the line.”
Meanwhile, Body Count’s unexpected take on Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, is career milestone that Ice says “dould potentially be my masterpiece.” BC’s long-gestating take on the ’70s classic came to fruition during the recording of Merciless, and grabbed the ear of none other than Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour — who joined Body Count on the track.
“I’ve always wanted to cover that song,” says Ice. “I loved the bassline. It reminds me of the end of Scarface. We did it and for a minute we didn’t think we were going to get approval from Pink Floyd. Everybody said, ‘No, it’s not going to happen.’ Then, Jorge, our manager, makes a call straight to David Gilmour and he goes crazy over the record! Not only does David Gilmour go crazy over the record, but he also immediately says, ‘I want to play on the record!’ It went from almost, ‘No’ to, ‘Oh hell yes! ‘ I know he listened to the words, he heard what I was saying and that’s a real heavy record where I’m basically saying that the world is fucked up and as long as we got a roof and we go a TV we’re numb to the wars, to what’s happening right in front of our eyes — and if God is watching us, he’s probably sick of us as a species.”
For Body Count, it’s been a history of being both respected and feared — a barbed-wire thread that stretches from Merciless back to the band’s origins as a project between Ice and Crenshaw High friend Ernie. Their first shot, the song Body Count, was a mission statement on Ice-T’s 1991 O.G. – Original Gangster. That’s the blueprint that BC have been running on for 35-plus years. They touched a nerve with their self-titled 1991 debut and its divisive track, Cop Killer, a song that inspired hatred, fear, and paranoia, but also inspired generations of bands to follow. What they took from growing up with Black Sabbath and then being inspired by fellow L.A. legends like Slayer and Suicidal Tendencies has only upped the ante.
“I think Body Count is a band that turned the corner for a whole new style of metal,” says Ice. “When I started listening to metal, no disrespect, but Pantera was wearing spandex! We came out and said, ‘We’re gonna look the way we look — L.A. cats in khakis — but we’re gonna play metal.’ When we hit the first Lollapalooza stage in 1991, nobody had ever seen that. This is pre- Rage, this is pre-Limp Bizkit, a lot of the bands that came behind us that looked like skaters than heavy metal artists. Korn, all of them.
“When I did Body Count, I was intentionally trying not to do the thing they called rap-rock. I didn’t need to do rap rock because I’m a rapper. I’m listening to New York hardcore, Sick of It All, Biohazard-type shit. They weren’t singing, they were barking the lyrics. We broke the mold 30 years ago for what metal looked like and I think we brought together a lot of people — metal, at that point, was pure white. We came out and said, ‘Fuck that.’ “The first groups we went out with were D.R.I. and Exodus,” Ice recalls. “We played to a room a full of skinheads and before we went on, they were throwing up the ‘Fuck you’ signs. By the time we went into the first song, a big pit opened and I’m like, OK, we can pull this shit off. We knew we were jumping into an uphill battle, but we did it anyway.”
Make no mistake: Body Count are better now than they’ve ever been and Merciless makes no bones about that. “You gotta remember that for about 10 years, Body Count was gone — but nobody took our place.” The current line-up — surviving OG’s Ice, Ernie and Sean E Sean joined by bassist Vincent Price, drummer Will “Ill Will” Dorsey, Juan “Juan of the Dead” Garcia and backing vocalist Little Ice — has been locked in since BC returned with 2014’s Manslaughter. After the death of three original members — two to cancer and one to a drive-by — Ice put the band on lockdown. When he assembled a new squad, it was with more firepower.
“The rebirth of Body Count was Manslaughter and when we first got with Will,” says Ice. “Early Body Count records, we were producing ourselves, we didn’t have a metal producer. Then, Body Count started taking hits. The hits were real, they were deaths. We went into mourning, but once Vince and Juan and those guys got into the band, we had a cohesive team to make records. Trying to get better with every record isn’t that easy but I think we’ve got our momentum. Body Count hasn’t felt this good in years. I think Merciless says it all.”
