Ice-T may be the one person on Earth capable of brokering a detente between David Gilmour and Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd bandmates who have been embroiled in a cold war for the better part of two decades. The cause for a brief cooling of tensions is Ice-T’s rewrite of “Comfortably Numb,” a revision that transforms the soaring arena-rock ballad into churning doom. Despairing the current state of “this spinning sphere,” Ice-T sings “We’re in perpetual war, and that’s the only law,” a lyric ambiguous enough to appeal to Waters — a vociferous critic of Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Gaza — and Gilmour, who is such a big supporter of Ukraine that he re-convened with Floyd drummer Nick Mason to record “ Hey Hey Rise Up ,” a charity single for Ukraine Humanitarian Relief Fund, in 2022.
Gilmour’s intentions were good but “Hey Hey Rise Up” ironically reignited the feud between him and Waters, when the latter dismissed the single as “content-less...
flag waving” , prompting Gilmour’s wife and lyricist Polly Samson to respond with a tweet calling the former Floyd bassist “antisemitic” and “a Putin apologist.” (Gilmour concurred , claiming “Every word demonstrably true.”) Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core.
Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching,misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense. None of this was likely on the mind of Ice-T when he dredged up the old Floyd tune for his long-running metal band Body Count to cover.
Unsettled by how images of atrocities get diminished as just another picture in our hyper-kinetic culture, the rapper/actor wrote a new set of verses to accompany the keening chorus from the original song. It’s a move Body Count has performed in the recent past, having revised Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” and Slayer’s “Raining Blood” to suit their own purposes. But this reworking of “Comfortably Numb” is drastic, abandoning the original lyrical conceit of emotional paralysis while retaining the song’s basic melodic bones.
Waters wonders “Is there anybody in there?” on the Floyd original, where the Body Count version asks if there’s anybody outside of their digital bubble. Such a dramatic change needed approval from Pink Floyd. As a matter of course, the band’s publisher dismissed the request, prompting Ice-T to contact the managements of Gilmour and Waters directly.
Remarkably, the two parties separately approved the rewrite . Waters only had one inquiry, asking “Who’s singing?,” and granting permission once he learned it was Ice-T. Gilmour went quite a bit further, asking if he could play guitar on the heavy dirge.
Gilmour’s presence on Body Count’s “Comfortably Numb” shifts the tenor of his approval of the adaptation into something resembling enthusiastic endorsement. It also recasts Ice-T’s anti-war angst into a volley in the ongoing Floyd feud. When he sings, “Nobody is free from stress, not him, or me, or you / But still we judge each other, we want to pick a fight,” it can sound like a swipe between former bandmates.
It helps that Gilmour sounds unusually pugnacious on Body Count’s “Comfortably Numb.” Having his guitar coursing through a version of the song that entirely dismisses Waters’s lyrics could also be seen as a retort at his former bandmate — particularly when seen in tandem with Waters’s The Dark Side of the Moon Redux , a recent re-recording of Floyd’s deathless album that found the bassist layering poetry in the spaces previously reserved for guitar solos. With a feud this prolonged and nasty, anything is possible.
Throughout his promotional push for Luck and Strange Gilmour has been vocal about his desire to sever ties with Floyd’s past. He’s walking away from the songs associated with Waters, claiming he will no longer play “Run Like Hell,” “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Money.” He’s said that his “dream” is “to be rid of the decision-making and the arguments” concerning the maintenance of Floyd’s catalog, preferring to concentrate on the music that he’s making now.
In light of these reports, it’s hard not to view his participation in Body Count’s cover as another sign that he’s ready to let Floyd go and enjoy his fulfilling present..
