Rapper Ice-T says no one else holds a Grammy in both metal and rap

Ice-T sat down with the YouTube channel METALSHOP alongside Body Count guitarist Ernie C and, at the end of a story about losing at the Grammys, made a claim about himself: that he is the only person holding a Grammy in both heavy metal and rap. Metal Injection carried the interview on 24 August 2026 and put the line in its headline. It is worth being precise about what that is. It is his assertion, delivered as a boast at the end of an anecdote, and this site does not fetch the awarding body's own records, so nothing here confirms or contradicts it.

The anecdote underneath it is more interesting than the claim. Body Count were nominated for Black Hoodie and performed at the ceremony in New York, at the early show. Being asked to play read to them as a signal, so the band was put at the side of the stage with cameras on them for the announcement. Mastodon won. Ice-T described the camera operator packing up and walking off while they stood there, and the band then finding its dressing room locked. He called it the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, which is a joke about how completely the evening reversed on them.

The second nomination came with no expectations attached, which is how it went the other way. It fell in a pandemic year, so he watched from a laptop at home rather than a seat in a hall, and heard the band's name read out. His summary of his own relationship with the institution is that it swings between contempt and interest depending entirely on whether he is nominated that year, a position most working musicians would recognise.

The awards backdrop has been unusually noisy this year without him. BTS said they would not submit music after a new Asian Pop category was announced, and the organisers then signalled a rethink. Ice-T's complaint is older and simpler than a category dispute: he has been on both sides of the same envelope. We track nominations and results in award watch, and both halves of his career sit on the metal and hip-hop rails.

The band is in the early stage of a new record and Ice-T has set a bar for it. "If we can't make a better album than Merciless, we shouldn't make another record," he said he told the group at a meeting. His argument for why the standard keeps rising is festival exposure: playing alongside harder bands makes you want to compete, you hear where the music is going, and you carry those influences into the studio whether you meant to or not.

He writes the lyrics himself and has decided against pointing the next record at politics. He has done that before, in a line from the last album about both wings being on the same bird, and his view is that the argument does not need restating. The state of the United States is obvious enough to the rest of the world, he said, that singing about it would be redundant. So he is hunting for subjects that sit at more of an angle to it.