Ice-T says his decision to rechristen the Body Count track “Cop Killer” as “ICE Killer” was a spur-of-the-moment choice, warning that the U.S. is headed toward “some very ugly terrain.”
During an appearance on The Breakfast Club this week, the Body Count frontman and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actor was asked about the timely update, which he first put in motion during a Warped Tour anniversary show last year. In the months since, ICE agents have fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were recently mentioned by name in the Bruce Springsteen protest track “Streets of Minneapolis.”
As Ice-T pointed out, the Body Count performance recently resurfaced in the wake of Good’s killing.
“When I did that, that did’t happen just recently,” he said, as seen below. “That happened when we played in L.A. at the Warped Tour. When I was there, ICE was active out there. So it’s like, I’m in the midst of ICE raids and stuff like that and I’m in front of an L.A. audience. It just came out. I didn’t know I was gon’ do it.”
Ice-T continued: “It’s time to play ‘Cop Killer,’ and then my brain just said, do ‘ICE Killer.’ And it went over. But, of course, when the girl got killed, they bring that press to the front. They had me in the news fighting with the police. It was two years old. When a cop pulled me over and I got a ticket, it made it to the news. That was two years old. So anything you see on the internet, you don’t really know how it’s being sent to you.”
In footage from the band’s Warped Tour performance, Ice-T let the crowd know that the forthcoming set closer was going out to “all the ICE agents running up [on] motherfuckers.” He also offered a firm “Fuck ‘em,” adding that he had “changed the word” to “ICE Killer.” Looking back on the moment, he connected it to the 1992 track’s original intention of serving as a form of protest.
“‘ICE Killer,’ ‘Cop Killer.’ It’s really a protest,” he said. “I’m just protesting. Like I said, man, I think that we’re headed [to] some very ugly terrain, and Black people really ain’t got nothing to do with it. This is, you know, it’s bad. I think the moment somebody shoots an ICE agent, it’s gon’ get bad.”
Ice-T isn’t the only artist to have offered updates to songs from their catalog in recent years. In a similar move, Green Day has repeatedly tweaked lyrics to their Bush-era hit “American Idiot” in live performances to reference Trump and the rise of a “MAGA agenda.”