The Rise and Fall of Vanilla Ice, As Told by Vanilla Ice

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The Rise and Fall of Vanilla Ice, As

Told by Vanilla Ice
Jeff Weiss
56-71 minutes
I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
—Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”
“Robby Van Winkle and Vanilla Ice are the American dream
come true.” —Vanilla Ice, Ice by Ice
I. Something Grabs a Hold of Me Tightly
Vanilla Ice was discovered on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

It was the winter of 1987-88 in South Dallas, or maybe it was
the following summer. All exact dates have dissolved into a
haze of liquor, hair spray, and the tinnitus caused by long-gone
808 claps. The only thing anyone can agree on is that at the
height of hip-hop’s first Golden Age, all the action in the Triple D
went down at a club called City Lights.
The property had already weathered several boom-and-bust
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cycles. Originally a segregated postwar movie palace christened

the Forest Theater, it was alternately transformed into a jazz
cellar, a recording studio, and the stage for legendary seances
by B.B. King, Wilson Pickett, and Prince. By the end of
Reagan’s second term, a local entrepreneur named Tommy
Quon had resurrected it as the hip-hop epicenter of North
Texas. From Thursday night until the break of dawn Sunday
morning, the dance floor rumbled with a thousand rowdy but
chic revelers. They freaked and hit pop locks, the Roger Rabbit,
and the wop. The walls shook from Whodini, LL Cool J, Too
Short, N.W.A, and the DFW’s own Fila Fresh Crew. Late at
night, when you could feel the bass deep in your sternum, the
spot would erupt to the seismic shake of Nemesis’s regional
anthem “Oak Cliff.”
The ballers, hustlers, and dope dealers of South Dallas

coexisted in uneasy communion. B-boys and D-boys
intermingled with models and around-the-way girls. No evidence
exists that Roy Tarpley was ever in attendance, but I’d bet on it.
This was the heart of South Dallas, the trenches. Tussles were
frequent, and being Texas, half the club came strapped. It was
no place for the meek, but without risk, there is no reward. In the
DJ booth was the surgical turntablist Floyd “Earthquake” Brown,
who spotted something out of the ordinary one Saturday
evening.
“I noticed this white guy dancing in the crowd,” Brown says.

“City Lights was all Black, so at first I was like, ‘What does he
think he’s doing?’ He could dance his ass off, and we’d never
seen a white guy do that. The women was loving it and getting
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all up on him like, ‘Oooh, look at him.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not
finna stop. I’m gonna make y’all love me.’”
In about two years, in September 1990, the anonymous white

dancer in the crowd would drop To the Extreme, which would
sell 15 million copies worldwide, faster than any album since
Purple Rain six years earlier. Its inescapable lead single, “Ice
Ice Baby,” became the first rap song to top the Billboard Hot 100
and accelerated the genre’s crossover into the American
mainstream. There were Vanilla Ice dolls, a ghostwritten
autobiography, a Scholastic book with MC Hammer, rock ’n’ roll
comics, and a board game that came with a toy boom box; a
Vanilla Ice movie and cameos in both Madonna’s Sex book and
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel. The first white solo
rapper to become a pop star would have one of the most
dizzying ascents and precipitous downfalls in music history. At
23, he was briefly the biggest rapper in the world and the public
enemy of hip-hop purists—the subject of (still ongoing) debates
about appropriation and authenticity. But before any of that
could transpire, he had to win over the doubters in South Dallas.
The story of Vanilla Ice has long been shrouded in a fog of

shoddy reporting, breathless tall tales, and harmless self-
deception. A white rap Rashomon, if the bandit battled Bebop
and Rocksteady. Everyone’s narrative is slightly askew, which
adds to the charm. You would just print the legend if you could
figure out exactly what it is.
Here are the basics: Vanilla Ice was born on Halloween in 1967,
most likely in Dallas, though the first chapter (“Ice Formations”)
from his quickie Avon Books memoir, Ice by Ice, claims he
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entered the world in a Miami suburb. His biological father was

never in the picture. The unfortunate last name, Van Winkle,
was bequeathed by the man his mother was married to at the
time of birth. By the time the future Ice was 4, the elder Van
Winkle had departed, leaving Ice’s single mom, a piano teacher,
to raise him and his older half-brother. For the next dozen years,
the family shuttled between diverse neighborhoods in Dallas
and Dade County, where his new stepfather, Ecuadorian
immigrant Byron Mino, worked at a Chevrolet dealership.
After fame hit, Ice was attacked for claiming Miami as his
hometown. But that was only slightly different from the approach
taken by fellow Dallas native the D.O.C., who wore Raiders hats
while signed to Ruthless Records. In late-’80s rap, modern-day
capitals like Houston and Atlanta were considered provincial
backwaters. Claiming Dallas was a commercially fatal
proposition. “Respected” rap came from New York and maybe
Philly. Few took L.A. seriously until The Source put N.W.A on
the cover in 1989, and even then, they shared the honor with
Oakland’s Too Short, largely considered a profane novelty east
of Kansas City. The lone exception was Miami, home of the
banned-in-the-USA Uncle Luke and the bass sound that owned
the Southeast until Outkast debuted.
“I lived in Miami and wrote ‘Ice Ice Baby’ about it. I didn’t think
about where I was from at the time. That only became a thing
after I was famous,” Ice tells me. “I was like, ‘Where I’m from?
Who fucking cares where I’m from?’ I was embarrassed to tell
people I was from Farmers Branch [an inner-ring suburb of
Dallas]. I didn’t tell them I was from Miami. I didn’t tell them I
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was from anywhere. I was just like, ‘Listen, I’m from around the
corner, man. I’m from around the fucking way.’ I actually tried to
detour people.”
Photo by Acey Harper/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty

Images/Getty Images
Ice and I speak during a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom call in

September. He dials in from the private theater inside his
massive Florida rococo mansion, near Palm Beach. The estate
contains 24-karat chandeliers, a lounge with platinum plaques,
and a life-size Raphael from the Ninja Turtles; there are gilded
ceilings, a quarter-million dollars’ worth of marble, and a
custom-made pool designed to channel the turquoise waters of
the Bahamas. It is exactly the house that you’d expect Vanilla
Ice to have. He shrewdly invested his “Ice Ice Baby” money,
parlayed it into a fortune flipping real estate, and capitalized on
that via The Vanilla Ice Project, a reality show that has aired for
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nine seasons on the DIY Network and turned him into hip-hop’s
Bob Vila.
When you talk to Vanilla Ice, you quickly realize that it was more
than just privilege and luck that led him to stardom. He’s a
master storyteller: charismatic, generous, and perceptive. The
work ethic, self-belief, and sense of humor that allowed him to
survive the withering backlash were there from the start. There
is also the endearing charm of a lifelong hip-hop and funk
obsessive. His eyes light up at the mention of onetime
labelmate Willie D of the Geto Boys, and he starts reflexively
rapping the hook to the flagrantly obscene “Bald Headed Hoes.”
Ice rhapsodizes about the genius of L.A. electro-rap pharaoh
the Egyptian Lover and describes his first concert, Roger
Troutman at City Lights, with apostolic fervor. But his epiphany
arrived in 1984, when Breakin’ converted him to the fluorescent
gospel of the four elements.
“I can’t tell you how many sleepless nights I’d stay up and mimic
the moves from Breakin’ and Beat Street,” Ice says. “Watching
them dance with the broom, the fishing line, doing the robot, and
then throwing in my own moves. My mentality was always, ‘No
matter what it is, you have to prove yourself.’”
Forming a crew, the kid nicknamed Vanilla made $40 a day

breakdancing, beatboxing, and freestyling over Mantronix beats
at local malls, a form of hip-hop busking that seemed exotic to
well-heeled Dallasites buying loafers at Neiman Marcus.
“I had my big ghetto blaster sitting there and a microphone

connected to it. It was all distorted because I had it cranked to
10, and I’m like, ‘This is my dancer E-Rock. Give it up, he’s
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going to do the windmill. Bam!’ Then he’d bust it out,” Ice says.
“Eventually, I started to rap like, ‘Aye, you heard me write a
rhyme / You heard me bust a beat / Now check this out /
Because I’ma move my feet.’ Next thing you know, I didn’t want
to put that microphone down.”
Hip-hop is now the nucleus of modern pop culture and

everything is accessible via Google, so it’s difficult to remember
when it was an underground subculture accessible only via
hard-to-find 12-inches, “How do you do fellow kids” trend
reports, and a handful of rapsploitation films. Until Yo! MTV
Raps premiered in 1988, it was rarely seen on TV; urban radio
station programmers largely dismissed it as an unmusical fad.
In Dallas, a nascent hip-hop culture began to flourish in the late

’80s. Everything revolved around the DJ, and the Mount
Rushmore of the old school were DJ Ushy Epon (“Mr. Funk ’n’
Roll”), Earthquake, DJ Rock of the Fila Fresh Crew, and DJ
Snake, the producer who weaponized Nemesis. By the time
Vanilla Ice first electric-boogaloo’d into City Lights, heads in the
Metroplex were already locked into the city’s first all hip-hop
show, The All Hardy Def Party on KNON-FM. The West Dallas
Rockets had begun to build their legend as the South’s version
of the Rock Steady Crew. The conditions seemed ripe for the
city to become the mecca of Texas hip-hop.
At least that was Tommy Quon’s plan. Raised in the Mississippi

Delta around blues and soul musicians, the son of Chinese
immigrants naturally segued into the world of club ownership,
music management, and eventually, the Ultrax label—his
attempt to tap into the vibrant Dallas scene. Quon began
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holding talent competitions to boost business at the club on slow

nights. Rock bands, comedians, singers, rappers, and dancers
turned out, lured not just by the free gear that went to the
winner, but also the grander promise of being spotted by talent
scouts and A&Rs—a huge deal in the pre-digital world.
By this point, “Vanilla” had built a rep around Dallas. He’d won
regional motocross contests, battled at parties, and become
certified on Forest Lane in South Dallas, a place where guys
named Robbie Van Winkle did not historically tread. He’d even
had a near-death experience after being stabbed five times,
causing him to lose four pints of blood and spend several days
hospitalized. The attack occurred in relatively safe Richardson,
Texas, where Ice went in search of retaliation after someone
had jumped his friend. A few years later, he famously pulled
down his pants on Rick Dees to reveal the battle scars. In an
interview with The Washington Post, Ice alleged that the
assailant was a member of a “devil-worshipping posse.” But
some of the stories may have appeared slightly … embroidered:
At the height of Icemania, he was served with an outstanding
warrant for failing to pay fines related to an incident in 1988 in
which he “maced a kid in the eyes and beat him over the head
in a parking lot.”
“If there was a knock-down, drag-out fight, Ice was right there,
ready to go,” Earthquake says. “He wasn’t perpetrating
anything.”
Ice was a high school dropout abandoned by his real father, and
whose mother was married several times. He grew up lower
middle class and toiled away at menial jobs while chasing his
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dreams—the lone white boy battling in an almost entirely Black

environment. The plot of 8 Mile was Vanilla Ice’s story first.
“I had no crystal ball about the future,” Ice recalls. “I just knew
that there was an energy around me, and I was going to do
something with this. I knew it. There were too many people who
liked what I was doing.”
Enter the biopic moment. Too young to legally be in City Lights,

the 20-year-old was dared by his friend Squirrel to enter the
club’s talent contest. Despite his avowed bad streak, the young
Ice loved poetry and says he never drank or did drugs—at least
until Squirrel got him wasted on a concoction called the Runny
Nose. The liquid courage was all it took. Naturally, it wasn’t like
everyone was about to widely embrace him, which means that
he had to overcome enough skepticism for a thousand player
hater’s balls.
In Ice’s recollection, Earthquake was having none of it. The

Vanilla Ice book purports that they nearly came to blows after
Ice served him with some freestyle rhymes. The crowd gawked
in disbelief. Snickers and laughter rang out; then he went in.
“At first, it was very quiet; you could hear a pin drop. ‘Oh God,
what’s this dude going to do?’” Ice says. “I had a little set, and
didn’t need much. I could beatbox like a motherfucker, rhyme,
and dance.”
He kicked a few bars and segued into a beatbox routine: the

Freddy Krueger, the Popeye, and the Sanford and Son, which
he described as a drum sound underwater. The crowd started
chanting, “Go white boy!” Then he told Earthquake to spin
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Rodney O and Joe Cooley’s “Yeah Boy,” and busted out a

series of dance moves that weren’t replicated by another white
person in Dallas until the night that this photo of Steve Nash and
Dirk Nowitzki was taken.
“From then on out, all they wanted was more,” Ice says. “I
remember this guy laughing his ass off, shocked and
entertained that this white boy could do this. Others were like,
‘Damn, I can’t do that. That dude’s killing it.’”
After the show, A&Rs from several major labels handed Ice their
business cards. Another audience member was John Bush, the
manager of City Lights, who saw something special in the kid
from Farmers Branch. Bush eventually became Ice’s road
manager and brought him to Quon. Within days, Ice signed a
management deal with Quon and became the City Lights
resident act, performing nightly five-to-10-minute routines for the
packed crowds.
“Ice captivated everybody in the room,” Bush said several years

later. “He owned that stage.”
II. I’m on a Roll; It’s Time to Go Solo
With hip-hop growing exponentially, the club had Ice opening up

for the hottest acts coming through Dallas: 2 Live Crew, Rob
Base, and MC Hammer. In a year, Hammer would have the no.
1 album in the country and invite Ice on the sold-out Please
Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em arena tour. When they first met, though,
he was freshly signed to Capitol and yet to release the life-
altering “U Can’t Touch This.”
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The Oakland rapper was wowed by his future tour mate:
“I was shocked [to see] a white kid who was, no. 1, rapping, and
no. 2, dancing,” Hammer said in Ice’s VH1 Behind the Music.
“He was playing for a 100 percent Black club, the only white kid
in [there]. But that didn’t deter him. He wasn’t trying to emulate
dance moves, he was dancing.”
Before signing to a major label, Ice says that he was the

“opening act for the opening act for the opener” on the 1989
Public Enemy, Ice-T, N.W.A, and EPMD tour. Backstage, Ice-T
told him he was going to make it. In a bizarro “what-if” scenario,
Chuck D was so impressed that he attempted to sign him too.
Photo by Walter Iooss Jr./Getty Images
“Ice-T was finishing up with his sound check and was like,
‘What’s this white boy doing out here? Wait, this motherfucker
can dance,’” Vanilla Ice remembers. “The next night on tour,
Ice-T told Chuck D, ‘Listen, come check out this white boy.
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You’re going to freak out. This kid can dance.’ It was the
dancing that really caught their attention. Even though I was
rapping, I don’t think they really heard what I was rapping about.
They saw the whole entertainment thing of me onstage and the
crowd response—because the crowd loved it.”
At that point, Ice had never seen a white audience. That

wouldn’t come until he was already an established mainstream
phenomenon. Apart from the Beastie Boys and maybe 3rd
Bass, no white rappers had ever performed in front of anything
bigger than a keg party—and this one was dancing like he’d
personally learned the cabbage patch from the Gucci Crew.
Earthquake remembers when Public Enemy first saw Ice:

“Chuck D looked at me and goes, ‘I can make a lot of money off
that white boy.’ That’s when it all hit me. Did Chuck D just say
what I think he just said?”
The hip-hop world was relatively small back then. Anyone

seriously trying to make it invariably crossed paths with
everyone else on the circuit. Ice remembers dodging bullets with
a pre–“Baby Got Back” Sir Mix-A-Lot after a South Dallas show.
The shooter was barefoot, clutching a musket, blasting out the
back window of a car. Houston was only a few hours away, so
Ice frequently trekked down to rap battles at warehouses in the
Fifth Ward, where he befriended Willie D and Rap-A-Lot founder
J. Prince.
But until Ice could record a hit, local notoriety could take him
only so far. Quon—who declined multiple requests for an
interview—had a plan to remedy that, and only had to turn to the
DJ booth at City Lights. The East Dallas Earthquake got his
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start toting records for the groundbreaking Ushy, and quickly

graduated to spinning at block parties and long-vanished
clubs—as well as making beats for a pre-N.W.A D.O.C. After
becoming the resident DJ at City Lights, he signed a
management deal with Quon and formed a rap duo with Mario
“MC Smooth” Johnson. According to Earthquake, Quon asked
whether he and Johnson would help create songs for Vanilla,
now rebranded as Vanilla Ice for marketing purposes.
“Mario was like, ‘It ain’t happening. I’m not doing that,’”
Earthquake recalls. “‘I was like, ‘[Quon] is putting a lot of money
behind [Ice]. I’ll do the music, you write.’ He refused.”
When he made “Ice Ice Baby,” Earthquake was homeless and

couch surfing. The introduction of the SP-1200 and the Akai
MPC had recently allowed for a quantum leap in sampling. No
longer were producers restricted to snatching a guitar squeal or
a kick drum—they could loop entire songs. Suddenly, record
collections became fossil fuel, and Earthquake immediately
turned to the most obvious riff imaginable for a white rapper,
Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Unbeknownst to him, it
had already been sampled the year before by a group called
B.M.O.C., two other white rappers who released a little-heard,
Nile Rodgers–produced single on Sire Records.
Trawling through a garage full of dusty records, Earthquake

stumbled onto Queen’s Greatest Hits. Nicking “Under Pressure,”
Earthquake messed around with the loop for a few weeks
before finally laying down drums. The hook was his too—“Ice
Ice baby, too cold, too cold”—an interpolation of the Alpha Phi
Alpha chant from Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. According
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to Earthquake, Ice went crazy the first time he heard the beat
and hook in its skeletal form, and asked the producer to dub him
a tape to ride around with. Earthquake countered that Ice
needed to finish the song first. Ice refused. Indignant,
Earthquake demanded that Quon erase the beats for “Ice Ice
Baby” and “Play That Funky Music.” Earthquake says that a
month later he heard the full version of “Ice Ice Baby” on the
radio and confronted Quon, to which the manager threw his
hands up, apologized, and promised to take care of the enraged
producer.
Ice’s memory is slightly different. He claims that he initially wrote

the lyrics circa 1988. After moving out on his own, the 20-year-
old was broke and back living with his mom. Inspired by a
recent weekend trip to Miami, Ice says he wrote it in a half-hour
between 12:30 and 1 a.m. Earthquake had sent him a bunch of
instrumentals, but he never actually let Earthquake know that he
planned on writing to them.
It was the age of fibula-snapping bass, 5.0 Mustangs with the

backseats ripped out and replaced by a thundering arsenal of
15-inch Cerwin Vega speakers and dual-voice coil subwoofers.
Ice had a 1,000-watt Rockford Fosgate sub stashed in the trunk
that made the license plate rattle. Studio time was prohibitively
expensive, so he says he started making homemade lo-fi
cassettes to sell on Forest Lane, which included a proto version
of “Ice Ice Baby” and the never officially released “My Car Goes
Boom.” Quon finessed a few free late-night hours in a spot
primarily known for car jingles.
“People started liking it, even old people and white people who
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had never considered listening to rap music,” Ice says. “They’d

be like, ‘I know that “Under Pressure,” I used to listen to
Queen.’”
From the Bay Area, Quon flew in Vallejo’s Khayree, soon to

become a West Coast legend for his production work with Mac
Dre, Mac Mall, and Young Lay. The same year that he dropped
“Too Hard for the Fuckin’ Radio,” Khayree gave Ice “Hooked”
and “It’s a Party.” But no labels wanted to sign a solo white
rapper, especially not one from Dallas. After several months of
persistence, Quon and Ice procured a deal to release his album,
also titled Hooked, on Atlanta’s Ichiban Records, which had
quietly released some of the best underground rap records of
the era, including ones by Willie D, MC Breed, and Atlanta bass
progenitor Kilo Ali.
It’s bizarre to consider that barely a year before becoming a

cultural piñata, Ice was a certified South Dallas club
phenomenon with the cosign of Chuck D and Ice-T, rhyming
over beats from Mac Dre’s producer on one of the most
respected independent hip-hop labels. But this was a distinctly
different image of Vanilla Ice from the one about to become
ludicrously famous, the one rocking shiny suits and parachute
pants. Released in late 1989, the cover of Hooked finds Ice
crouched on chunks of fake ice, throwing up the set in white
jeans, a beeper, and a pink crew neck sweater—predating Killa
Cam’s wardrobe by a good dozen years. Behind him, a naked
blond throws her head back seductively. He looks like a
cocaine-trafficking rapper who Crockett and Tubbs are trying to
catch.
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“He had a charisma that you don’t see very often,” says John
Abbey, the founder of Ichiban, who also helped A&R Hooked.
“He was very confident, extremely polite, and had an angle that
you didn’t see anyone else doing. It was that simple.”
Except that initially it failed. For four months, the first single,
“Play That Funky Music,” was moribund. Without social media to
make a song go viral, if radio ignored your first salvo, it often
meant your career was over. So Ice, a DJ, and three backup
dancers packed into a small van to play a series of promo
shows across the South at record stores and sweatbox dives.
But it was serendipity that ultimately saved him from the
chopping block: A DJ named Darrell Jaye in Columbus,
Georgia, flipped over the 12-inch to discover “Ice Ice Baby.” The
request lines immediately blew up. Dallas radio ignored it, but it
caught fire across the region when Dave Morales in Jackson,
Mississippi, threw his full weight behind it.
“We didn’t have a video, so when people heard the song,

everyone figured he was Black,” Earthquake says. “Almost no
one knew he wasn’t until the video came out. The first million
copies must’ve been sold to Black people.”
A million is an overstatement, but Ice says that they sold 48,000

copies on Ichiban in two months, making them an underground
success before he ever wore his first pair of harem pants. Yet
the madness didn’t really begin until Quon footed the $8,000
budget for the now-immortal video—in which Dallas’s Deep
Ellum historic neighborhood stood in for Miami, undoubtedly
helping it earn regular rotation on the Box, the Florida-centric
video request channel. BET’s Rap City lent early support too.
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Offers rushed in from Atlantic Records and Def Jam. But Ice
says that as soon as he was about to sign with the latter, a $1.5
million payday arrived from SBK Records, the nascent EMI
subsidiary newly flush with Wilson Phillips and Technotronic
money. The deal reportedly came about after a young A&R
executive, Monte Lipman, discovered “Ice Ice Baby” on a visit to
the Jackson radio station and then played it for SBK CEO
Charles Koppelman over the phone. Koppelman was so certain
that it would be a worldwide smash that he tendered the seven-
figure advance before even meeting the rapper.
“Chuck D and Hank Shocklee had told Def Jam about me and
I’d landed in New York City ready to sign with them,” Ice says.
“Then I got a phone call from [Quon]. He says, ‘Don’t sign with
Def Jam.’ I said, ‘Fuck that, I’m signing. This is my dream, this is
the greatest thing ever.’ Because they were ready to buy my
contract from Ichiban. He said, ‘Don’t sign. I’m on my way to
New York and I’ll give you millions and millions of reasons why
you shouldn’t sign.’ I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to hold off.’ I
understood that one.”
“All right stop, collaborate, and listen.” It’s one of the most
ingratiatingly bizarre opening lines of all time. I wouldn’t
necessarily rate “Ice Ice Baby” alongside rarefied icebreakers
like “I break bread, ribs, and hundred-dollar bills” or even “The
government tried to ban me from the dark web,” but it remains
as seared into memory as my first phone number. Nothing about
it really makes sense. Are you being invited to collaborate with
the VIP Posse? Are these the instructions to a junior high group
science project? Pay no mind. Step into the cinematic free-for-
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all of “Ice Ice Baby,” a flamboyant exercise in flamingo-pink

color schemes and Lamborghini dreams.
Ice cruises A1A in South Beach looking like a Miami Hurricanes

fixer, moussed hair blowing in the wind, steady as a rampart.
His cheekbones are scythe sharp and James Dean sunken, but
the zigzag lines razored into his hair are strictly Dallas. In the
next shot, he and the crew hit a synchronized running man in a
warehouse, dressed like the world’s most dangerous valet
attendants. A sultry woman wearing a little more than a bikini
takes a break from eating an ice cream cone to spray-paint “Ice”
in lavender.
Laugh at what it became, but “Ice Ice Baby” remains a perfect

debut rap single. It’s an ingenious exercise of self-branding
almost up there with Method Man calling his first single “Method
Man.” Half the battle is getting people to remember you. Vanilla
Ice has only one song that your average music fan can name,
but nearly every music fan can name that one song. That is
power. That is waxing chumps like a candle. The hook might as
well be a subliminal brainwashing koan. Earthquake’s voice
whispering “Ice Ice Baby … Vanilla Ice Ice Baby … Too cold”
and hitting the boombox in the back of your hippocampus.
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He’s certainly no Guru, but the lyrics are nonsensical and

memorable in the same way that “lemonade was a popular drink
and it still is” is. Ice is back with a new invention, but this is his
first major song. He’s flowing like a harpoon, glowing in the
dark, going crazy when he hears a cymbal. There are a
sideways diss at Kid N’ Play, rhymes sold by the gram, and a
12-bar mini-story rap about clutching a 9 millimeter on Collins
Avenue, getting into a shootout with dope dealers, and trying to
escape through the clotted traffic. The cops pass him and his
friend D-Shay by to confront the dope fiends. Of course they do.
Ice looks like Ice. This is part of the problem. But then the bass
line from Queen’s John Deacon and David Bowie does its “ding-
ding-ding diddle ing-ding,” the sleigh bells shake, and all is
temporarily forgiven.
At 8 years old, I considered “Ice Ice Baby” one of the best rap
songs ever made. To be fair, it had ferocious competition from
“Bust a Move,” “U Can’t Touch This,” “The Humpty Dance,”
“Pump Up the Jam,” “Groove Is in the Heart,” and “Parents Just
Don’t Understand.” This was third grade; I was far too young
and absent an older sibling to be into Public Enemy and N.W.A.
There was no understanding of what was pop and what was
considered “real hip-hop.” I vaguely intuited that Shock G and
Humpty Hump might be the same person after all, but I had no
clue what either of them were doing in the Burger King
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bathroom.
There is a tendency to disregard music loved in childhood as

profoundly uncool—at least prior to TikTok, where now even
nominally cool things exist in an amniotic state of theatrical
sadness. But the ideal judge of a song’s quality is actually that
blank-slate condition. There are no expectations, biases, or
anything deeper than the dim awareness of “I like this.” I’d never
heard of Queen or David Bowie. Had someone patiently
explained that, well, actually, the “Under Pressure” loop is rather
obvious, and Ice’s flow is rudimentary and stilted compared to
stylistically inventive MCs like Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, and Kool
G Rap, my eyes would’ve glazed over. How were you supposed
to lip-synch to them?
I wasn’t the only one. In 2018, Nipsey Hussle was asked about
“Ice Ice Baby” and answered, “I can’t lie to you. I liked that song
when I was little. I can’t hate on Vanilla Ice. How you going to
hate on ‘Ice Ice Baby’? That’s a classic.” And Houston rapper
Riff Raff, once the subject of a Hot 97 debate about whether he
was the “next Vanilla Ice,” has repeatedly expressed his
admiration for his fellow Texan: “Vanilla Ice is cool as shit. …
Why would you talk down to someone who sold 11 million
copies of their first album?”
The wave kept cresting. The most influential hip-hop station on

the West Coast, the Bay Area’s KMEL, played “Ice Ice Baby”
almost every hour. Every other station soon followed, save for
Dallas’s KNON-FM, which scorned him. In a rush to capitalize
on the hysteria, SBK repackaged Hooked with a new name, To
the Extreme, adding three new cuts and some interludes. By
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releasing “Ice Ice Baby” on 7-inch, 12-inch, cassingle, and CD

single, the label cannily maximized its sales potential. In
October 1990, both single and album cracked the top 10. At the
top of the next month, “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap song
to reach no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Only a week later, To
the Extreme supplanted MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t
Hurt ’Em at the top of the album charts. In response, SBK
reportedly stopped pressing up the single to force consumers to
buy the full-length. The gambit worked: To the Extreme spent
the next four months at no. 1.
Koppelman, the archetypal old-school, cigar-chomping mogul,

estimated that Ice created $100 million worth of business in four
months, claiming that “Vanilla Ice isn’t merely a musical
phenomenon or a rap phenomenon, he’s an economic
phenomenon.”
III. Will It Ever Stop? Yo, I Don’t Know
A newspaper article triggered the eventual crash. Ice had only

one week to savor his reign as the world’s most popular artist.
This time, the knives didn’t come from a devil-worshiping posse,
but a November front-page story in the Dallas Morning News
that alleged significant falsehoods in his press biography. Ice’s
one-sheet claimed that he was a Team Honda national
motocross champion with thousands of trophies, and had
attended Palmetto High School alongside Luther Campbell of 2
Live Crew. His Dallas origins were completely omitted. The
wider coverage seized on even minor discrepancies like his
mother teaching music at a small college and not a major
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university. Most damningly, they uncovered his government

name, Robert Van Winkle.
In retrospect, the scandal was laughably trifling. At the time, Ice

admitted to “bending the truth,” but swore that he was briefly
enrolled at Palmetto High, one of many schools that he barely
attended. He was a Texas motocross champion, but on a
smaller regional circuit. For all the derision he received for
attending middle-class R.L. Turner High in suburban Dallas,
there was barely any digging into his Southside roots. It was an
elaborate game of gotcha. Bob Dylan pulled the same move,
even writing in his autobiography that he figured that the press
was something “you lied to,” but he was Bob Dylan so people
considered it part of the enigma. But as Ice rocketed to stardom,
the Milli Vanilli lip-synching scandal unfolded in the background.
It was a time of intense press scrutiny and obsession with
authenticity, magnified by Ice being the first solo white rap star
in a Black art form.
To Ice, there were never any lies, per se. He maintains the
press bio was concocted without his permission; the rest were
purposeful omissions to protect his family’s identity.
“When the press showed up at my door, I got scared,” Ice says.

“You’ve got to understand, here’s a kid who had seen people get
murdered at 16 years old, shot right in front of me, with bullet
holes in their face, and I vomited. I saw shit I shouldn’t see. I’m
not going to go out like, ‘Here’s my name, here’s my address.
Come on over and kill me.’ Fame scares the fuck out of
somebody. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen in the streets, you
always elude people. You have to stay safe and protected.”
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The media lampooned his claim that he came from “the streets,”
but Ice countered with the Rakim line that it ain’t where you’re
from, it’s where you’re at. Moreover, becoming a rapper in the
mid-to-late ’80s was nothing like it is today.
“When I said that I was from the streets, I meant that that was
where I learned to rap,” Ice says. “It wasn’t anywhere else that
anybody could learn it. We didn’t have the fucking internet. We
didn’t even have computers.”
The narrative had irrevocably shifted. Rather than focus on the

details of his rise, every newspaper and magazine picked apart
the inaccuracies. The controversies mounted after he dropped
off Hammer’s tour, not long after To the Extreme bumped the
Oakland minister from the top spot. Ice joked that finally
someone had “touched [Hammer].” It didn’t help that the SBK
marketing team copied the latter’s runaway success and
festooned their young superstar in Hammer pants, sequined
jumpsuits, and military suits. As jingoism ran high during the
Gulf War, they costumed Ice in an American flag motif. It was
very corny. He says that toward the end of his stint on the tour,
his merch began outselling Hammer and a friendly rivalry broke
out, which briefly turned acrimonious as the media baited them
into taking shots at each other.
Then there was the “Under Pressure” sample. According to

Earthquake, Queen, David Bowie, and their publishers took 85
percent of the royalties. Clueless journalists lambasted Ice for
stealing the riff rather than practicing hip-hop tradition. To be
fair, Ice did himself no favors when he gave interviews admitting
to the sample, but goofily splitting hairs between the “ding ding
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ding” of the two songs’ bass lines.
To hip-hop devotees, the brazen sample flip was the first of

several acts of war. The genre started with outright heists of
Chic’s “Good Times” and Liquid Liquid’s “The Cavern,” but Ice
dropped right as the Bomb Squad, Prince Paul, and the Dust
Brothers were creating psychedelic sample mosaics that felt like
the next advancement of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. By 1997,
Puffy and Mase would rip off “Let’s Dance” with a video of them
getting jiggy in the middle of the Sahara with what appeared to
be an Algerian militia. It elicited a modest furor, but the mad
rappers were slowly silenced. What Ice was crucified for
practically eventually became a hip-hop rite of passage.
Back in late 1990, the 23-year-old became the pale face of hip-
hop apostasy, attracting oblivious Karens and Brads at a
startling clip.
“I was mentioning eight balls of cocaine, 9-millimeter guns, a 12-

gauge shotgun, and prostitutes. You can’t paint this picture to a
9-year-old. So how did they clean it up? Use the image, let ’em
focus on the beat and the dancing—it worked,” Ice says. “I
wasn’t targeted to be a role model; I was never put out as an
artificial boy-band thing to fit this new audience that I was
catering to now. All of a sudden, it went from Black clubs that I
thought I’d been in and would be in forever to stadiums with
white people.”
Robert Christgau, then the reigning dean of critics, eviscerated

him for being somehow “blander than Hammer.” The barrage of
criticism felt intentionally ruthless; To the Extreme might be far
from a classic, but “Ice Is Workin’ It” is a surprisingly muscular
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display of lyrical bluster, à la LL Cool J. The pair of Khayree

songs are funky party tracks that admirably convey why KMEL
booked Vanilla Ice to headline its New Year’s Eve 1991 concert.
There are certainly embarrassing moments, like the sappy
ballad “I Love You” or “Rasta Man,” which seems like the covert
blueprint for Lonely Island’s “Ras Trent.” But even absent “Ice
Ice Baby,” it’s essentially a replacement-level 1990 rap album,
no worse than anything Kwamé put out.
The Source, the bible of hip-hop, ran a one-page diatribe by

Dan Charnas with the headline “Vanilla Ice: Our Worst
Nightmare?” He envisioned the “nightmare become reality”
where the American mass media pigeonholes hip-hop as the
totality of Hammer, Ice, and Young MC, where true innovators
would get whitewashed by derivative pop opportunists.
Nonetheless, Charnas incisively noted that Ice was similar to
what MC Serch of 3rd Bass might’ve been like had he grown up
in the South.
“I remembered watching [Hammer’s] ‘U Can’t Touch This’ video

and being really angry. What is this shit? It’s horrible. He was
definitely a good dancer, but this is the worst song I’ve ever
heard. The Rick James sample was so obvious,” says Jonathan
Shecter, the cofounder of The Source and its editor-in-chief from
1988 to 1996. “We’d already started writing negative things
about Hammer, then out of nowhere came ‘Ice Ice Baby,’ this
even more offensive song. The sample was even more obvious,
and I didn’t like his rapping either. It became the biggest song in
the world and now we had another enemy. Now, all of our anger
was directed at him.”
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Ironically, Shecter had been one-half of B.M.O.C., the duo of

white rappers who first sampled “Play That Funky Music.” The
entire staff of his publication—Black, white, Latino, and Asian—
all shared a mutual loathing of Hammer and Ice. Only later did
Schecter reconcile the vampiric nature of the music industry. No
matter how many indignant essays were written, record
executives would continue their desperate search for an MC
Hammer or Vanilla Ice of their own.
Every label tried to sign a white rapper. In a reminder that life is

totally arbitrary and we are all susceptible to confirmation bias,
Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad put on a group of white kids
called Young Black Teenagers. Competent but unoriginal, YBT
rapped about Kelly from Married With Children and cringingly
titled a song “Daddy Kalled Me Niga Cause I Likeded to
Rhyme.” This interview may as well be the foundational text for
Rachel Dolezal, but because of their connections, they received
a pass. Eazy E tried and failed twice with Tairrie B and Blood of
Abraham. Jive hoped that Kid Rock would give them an “Ice Ice
Baby,” but instead his Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast bricked
despite production from Too Short and D-Nice of Boogie Down
Productions. The only “success” was Marky Mark in 1991, who
racked up a no. 1 record for a hip-house track produced by a
member of New Kids on the Block while somehow receiving a
fraction of the censure as Ice.
“My image would’ve been different if I’d signed to Def Jam, but
it’s hard to speculate how the record sales would have been
impacted,” Ice says. “A lot of people probably could see me
being more respected with a crew like Public Enemy, instead of
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being all alone and being put into the pop world. It probably
would have happened on its own anyway though. ‘Ice Ice Baby’
was magical; it had fairy dust all over it.”
For all the nuclear attacks, hip-hop would’ve gone mainstream

with or without Vanilla Ice. In many respects, Kid N’ Play
established a template for Hammer and Ice’s brand of poppy
dance rap, but because they were from the Bronx and Queens,
purists (accurately) recognized them as the latest evolution of
the four elements—kid-friendly but still reverent of tradition. The
same month that To the Extreme dropped, NBC premiered The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Kid N’ Play, a Saturday-morning
program that turned the latter into literal cartoons. Yet when
artists from the Bay and Dallas/Miami did it, their
commercialization was considered hip-hop’s death knell.
In reality, the genre had been steadily crossing over since 1986,
when Run-DMC covered Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the
Beastie Boys tapped into a fraternity crowd that needed white
rappers talking about beer, burgers, and girls to make them
care. In 1989, the Grammys introduced the Best Rap
Performance category, giving the first award to DJ Jazzy Jeff
and the Fresh Prince. In that same year, Young MC, Tone Loc,
and Biz Markie all cracked the upper reaches of the Billboard
Hot 100. Just before Hammer and Ice’s 1990 takeover, Bell Biv
DeVoe and Salt-N-Pepa became pop-rap sensations. Ice
certainly wasn’t the first nor would he be the last; he just
happened to be the largest target.
You could almost see the gears turning in Keenen Ivory

Wayans’s head. In January 1991, the In Living Color creator
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was tasked with introducing Vanilla Ice’s performance of “Ice Ice

Baby” at the American Music Awards. Dressed like Captain
America meets Aladdin, Ice eventually won the award for
Favorite New Pop/Rock Artist. Flanked by Quon and the VIP
Posse, Ice gave an abbreviated but memorable speech that
concluded with his saying “to the people who try to hold me
down and talk bad about me, kiss my white butt.”
“I was getting hate everywhere. I was like, ‘I’m going to show

y’all. Here it is, in your face. Eat a dick. Fuck you,’” Ice says. “It
was wrong and I regret it; I was stupid, young, and dumb. Shit
hit me from left, it hit me from right, from above and from under.
I wasn’t coached on what to say. In hindsight, I should’ve just
thanked my mom.”
It’s hard to blame him much. He was 23 and secure in the belief
that every artist has when they’re on top of the world: This will
continue forever. Despite the searing criticism, things still looked
rosy. He had just filmed the iconic “Ninja Rap” scene from
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze and
Madonna had popped into his dressing room at Madison Square
Garden to give him her phone number. They became a couple
after he visited her in Indiana on the set of A League of Their
Own, culminating in his appearance in her Sex book.
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Photo by Bill Nation/Sygma via Getty Images
No one could’ve defended against what came next. On Sunday,

February 10, 1991, just 12 days after Wayans watched Ice
perform at the AMA’s, Jim Carrey parodied him on In Living
Color. “White White Baby” is a massacre. It’s not technically a
diss song, but if it were, it’d be up there with “Who Shot Ya,”
“The Bridge Is Over,” “Hit ’Em Up,” and “Takeover”/“Ether.” It’s
difficult to convey the magnitude of the Fox sketch show in
1991. It had been on the air for only 10 months, but it had
become the hip-hop generation’s analogue to Saturday Night
Live in the late ’70s. We now recognize Carrey as a brilliant
satirist, imitator, and actor who was on the verge of becoming
Hollywood’s most bankable comic. But at the time, all anyone
knew was that Fire Marshal Bill had just set Vanilla Ice up in
flames.
If the previous fusillades were often academic and easily

dismissed, “White White Baby” was the shit that made your soul
burn slow. Carrey pulls off the look perfectly: the cuts in his
scalp, the dazzling preposterousness of the emperor’s new
pajamas, the all-Black backing dancers with the “marketable”
face up front. Had it been anyone else other than the future Ace
Ventura, Ice might’ve been spared, but Carrey was already a
master. The gesticulations and flailing dance moves were
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amplified just enough to make you question why you liked Ice in
the first place. It was both slapstick and skull-crushing: As he
rapped “Let’s kick it,” Carrey sent a single shoe into the rafters
and chased after it like an outfielder losing a fly ball in the sun.
His Ice is an empty mannequin, a brainless puppet foisted into
the spotlight solely because of his skin color—rap’s Manchurian
candidate, backed by the dark machinations of industry to
exploit a rich cultural tradition.
With all savage parody, there is enough truth for it to stick. With
all good comedy, it’s fucking absurd. Carrey does a Three
Stooges routine while pumping his arms and skittering
backward on one leg. He pelvic-thrusts, turkey-necks, sticks his
tongue out, and does the “I’m a little teapot short and stout.” The
dancers do a call-and-response mocking his real name, and
Carrey says nothing rhymes with Van Winkle.
With pitch-perfect mannerism and vocal tone, Carrey spits, “I’m

white and I’m capitalizing / On a trend that’s currently rising.”
Before ultimately leaving in disgust, the dancers chant: “When

you gonna stop?”
“Maybe never,” Carrey responds. “I become richer with every

endeavor. … I’m living large and my bank is stupid / Because I
just listen to real rap and dupe it.”
Ice was arraigned as the latest in a long line of white

appropriators, from Bix Beiderbecke to Elvis to Led Zeppelin. If
he’d received private support from some of rap’s most
respected figures, he was an unguarded mark in the public eye.
Dallas wasn’t about to defend him because he didn’t represent
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it, and even if it had, unless Michael Irvin stepped forward to say
that he’d seen Ice kill brains like poisonous mushrooms, no one
would’ve cared. Nearly a decade later, the Interscope brain trust
knew to pair Eminem with Dre to ensure his street credibility and
avoid another Vanilla Ice meltdown. But Ice had emerged at the
apex of the conscious rap era, unaffiliated and dressed like an
opulent Nordic dictator. It was open season.
The fait accompli occurred just two days later. Invited on The
Arsenio Hall Show, Ice walked blithely into the lion’s den. This
was peak Arsenio, where the Dog Pound was howling and the
best rappers and entertainers appeared nightly. The same year
that they turned over the program to Prince one night for the
best hour of music television ever aired. Someone should’ve
warned Ice.
It remains a brutal interview to watch. You can practically see

Ice’s career leave his body. There is none of the jocular banter
of late-night programs. From the start, Hall is antagonistic and
aiming for the jugular. Dressed in a bedazzled green-and-white
proto Power Ranger suit, Ice is immediately greeted by Flava
Flav. A scowling Hall hammers him on the American Music
Awards gaffe, his “white rapper revenge oppression,” the
mistruths in his biography.
Ice’s rebuttals are reasonable, but he’s defensive and rattled. It

doesn’t help much that his hair is sculpted and blow dried, the
cuts in his eyebrow delicately shaved. Had Ice shown up looking
like he had on the cover of Hooked, it might’ve gone differently,
but he was too deep into his public persona.
For all his missteps, Ice never wavered from acknowledging his
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creative debt to a Black art form. He gave a lot of foolish quotes

at the time, but his commitment to the culture was deep and
genuine, even if it got lost in the mass-market translation. As
ridiculous as his Ice by Ice book was, he shouted out his love of
Rakim, the Geto Boys, Big Daddy Kane, N.W.A, and Audio
Two—singling them out as brilliant artists who deserved more
love from the mainstream music world.
But Arsenio wouldn’t concede an inch. He’d later explain that

he’d felt like he’d been used and misled by biographical
information that Ice’s team had given him. He was “pissed.”
When Ice tried to point out his friendship with Flava Flav,
Arsenio spat back, “Is that why you brought him out, to show
that you have a Black supporter?”
There was no point to explaining the City Lights years or the fact
that Chuck D had tried to sign him. After all, this is what mass
culture does: It flattens and removes the arcane but relevant
details. The people want the shiny suit until they don’t want it
anymore. Then there’s always a next model to replace it.
As his world was collapsing, Ice says that a young 2Pac was
one of the people who gave him the strength to keep enduring.
This was a young Pac, fresh off “Same Song” with Digital
Underground and about to begin recording his debut,
2Pacalypse Now.
“We’d played some early shows together with Digital

Underground and let me tell you, 2Pac was one of the biggest
Vanilla Ice supporters you ever met,” Ice says. “He gave me
great advice: Keep your head up, don’t let no haters fucking
keep you down, keep doing your thing, and don’t focus them
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people ain’t paying for your bills. You know who is? The ones
that’re buying it. Focus on them.”
According to lore and VH1, 2Pac’s future label boss, Suge

Knight, paid a visit to Ice’s room at the Bel Age Hotel the same
night as the Arsenio Hall taping. The story famously holds that
the former University of Nevada defensive end dangled Ice from
a balcony in order to secure songwriting points off “Ice Ice
Baby.” In Knight’s version, Ice had stolen the lyrics from Mario
Johnson, Earthquake’s former collaborator. In Ice’s version,
Knight extorted him into signing away millions of royalty dollars,
which became part of the seed money for Death Row.
As with all things pertaining to Vanilla Ice, the absolute truth is

impossible to ascertain, but the stories are relentlessly
entertaining. In Earthquake’s reminiscence, Knight approached
Quon on the set of Arsenio demanding money from “Ice Ice
Baby,” but the manager demurred. Later that evening, Knight
and his hulking bodyguards found their way into Ice’s suite for
an impromptu business meeting.
“Every time Mario [Johnson] said something, Ice would interrupt

him and call him a liar,” Earthquake says. “Suge said, ‘Ice, when
you had the floor, no one interrupted you.’ Ice interrupted two
more times. After the third time, he said, ‘Ice, I’ma ask you more
time or I’ma throw your ass off the balcony.’”
Earthquake says that he never saw Ice pen the lyrics to “Ice Ice
Baby”; in his last conversation with Johnson—who Suge would
soon rename “Chocolate”—the rapper emphatically refused to
write anything for Ice.
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In Ice’s rendition of the Suge confrontation, Johnson was a

minor acquaintance whom he’d given a few rides home after the
club. Suddenly, “Ice Ice Baby” became the biggest song in the
world. Ice had temporarily moved to L.A. and met Suge Knight,
who started suspiciously materializing wherever he went,
dressed in black suits and shades like a Mafia don. Finally, he
appeared inside his luxury hotel room.
Ice vehemently swore that he wrote every bar to “Ice Ice Baby.”
He says that Suge politely asked him to step out on the balcony
for a conversation. His bodyguards came in armed, but
peaceful. No one was looking for trouble, but they wouldn’t go
out of their way to avoid it either. They told Earthquake to sit
down and shut up, and everything would be cool. The same
went for Ice’s bodyguards. Out on the balcony, Suge began
explaining that he would take some points off the record; at this
point, Ice says that he didn’t even know what that meant.
“He says, ‘Ice, listen, man. Here in L.A., it’s rough. There’s a lot
of gangs.’ He explains a lot to me that I already knew; rap music
had always been gangster,” Ice says. “I asked, ‘What am I
paying for?’ He says, ‘Protection … because of all these gangs.
We’re going to be looking after you now. You’re in with a very
tight clique.’ He said so many rappers and musicians that you
wouldn’t even think pay Suge Knight.”
It was the proverbial offer that he couldn’t refuse. Ice signed

away two points on the spot, technically to Johnson, who Ice
says was brought back into the room freshly bloodied and
bruised.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? Damn.’ It just went from being
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peaceful and shit to crazy,” Ice says. “Suge said, ‘This is how
we’re going to get our points right there [pointing at Johnson].’
So, they basically took those points and put [Johnson] in the
place where he wasn’t. He didn’t help me write anything.”
Things only grew worse. Rather than get him back in the studio
to follow up the smash that had been recorded years before,
SBK tried to cash in with the extremely bad Extremely Live—a
live album with a few new songs, including “Rollin in My 5.0,”
which tried to replicate “Ice Ice Baby” but this time with a sample
of Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.” It was critically loathed and
the singles failed to chart; the album peaked at no. 30 and
quickly disappeared into record store bargain bin eternity.
By the summer of 1991, Marky Mark had replaced Ice as pop’s

flavor-of-the-month white rapper. In a bulldozing attack, 3rd
Bass dissed Ice with “Pop Goes the Weasel.” The song was
good, but the appropriations committed by the white rappers
from Queens and Long Island were no different from those
perpetrated by Ice. They jacked a straightforward pop hit (Peter
Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”), used Black people and the Watts
Towers (?!) as props to score authenticity points, and presented
themselves as white saviors attempting to preserve hip-hop’s
cultural purity. The Source pointed out the deceptive similarities
between Ice and MC Serch, but the other rapper in the group,
Pete Nice, had an English degree from an Ivy League school.
Ice was a high school dropout from a broken home—not to
mention that he had dramatically better dance moves than the
bespectacled Serch.
But because they were from New York, signed to Def Jam, and
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had recruited punk rock legend Henry Rollins to play Ice in the
video, 3rd Bass was hailed as a refreshing change from Ice’s
“same old thieving.” Between In Living Color, Arsenio, and 3rd
Bass, I completely bought in too. Ice suddenly became played
out and corny. A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory dropped
that September. On the “Scenario” remix that came out a few
months later, Phife sneered “Vanilla Ice platinum? That shit’s
ridiculous.”
The Ice Age formally ended that October with the release of
Cool As Ice. Financed by SBK at the apogee of his success, the
film was conceived as a modern cross between The Wild One
and Jailhouse Rock. Though it’s since become a sort of camp
classic, it received atrocious reviews and grossed just $1.2
million on a $6 million budget. The soundtrack album flopped,
and the film was nominated for seven Golden Raspberry
Awards. Ice won the Razzie for “Worst New Star”; he did not
show up to accept the trophy.
IV. Word to Your Mother
If anyone disproves the F. Scott Fitzgerald cliché about second

acts in American life, it’s Vanilla Ice. But what’s overlooked
about that adage is the idea that while one’s life can splinter in
new directions and even regenerate to a degree, there remains
the lingering memory of that first pristine wave of success. This
is a nation perpetually in thrall to the new, simultaneously
sentimental and suspicious of age. No matter how many times
Ice has attempted to rebrand or redefine himself, there is the
understanding that it could go only so far. “Ice Ice Baby” was too
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big, too era-defining, the song you chase forever until you
eventually learn to let go.
“It was beyond wildfire, beyond a tsunami. Just unbelievable

success, so fast, and so incredibly impactful—to the point where
we look back 30 years later and ‘Ice Ice Baby’ has become an
anthem that actually defines the ’90s,” Ice says. “All you have to
do is play ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and you’ll remember everything you
were wearing, who you were dating, how cheesy and corny we
were. The ’90s just had that attitude.”
Photo by Matthew Eisman/Getty Images
The more accurate Fitzgeraldian aphorism to describe Ice is

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to
start over.” Anyone with a passing familiarity with pop culture
has witnessed at least a half-dozen versions of Ice. After
vanishing in late ’91, he retreated to a mansion on Star Island to
pursue a decorated motocross and Jet Ski career (he was
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ranked no. 6 in the world in the latter at one point). Upon his ’94
reemergence, he tried to adapt to the times by going hardcore,
sporting dreadlocks and rapping about weed smoking like an
excited teenager who had just hit his first bong. After it failed, he
nearly overdosed, which led him toward spirituality, therapy,
marriage, and a grunge band. There was the nu-metal phase
when he collaborated with one of Korn’s producers and another
phase at the beginning of the millennium when he appeared on
any reality show that would take him. Eventually, he landed on
VH1’s The Surreal Life, where Tammy Faye Bakker offered the
most valuable advice that anyone had given him since 2Pac:
“Honey, you are who you are because of who you were.
Embrace it.”
There were brushes with the law: a 2008 arrest after his wife
said he kicked and hit her (the charges were later dropped after
she recanted). He copped to a plea deal in 2015 related to
charges of residential burglary and grand theft after police say
he took furniture, a pool heater, and bicycles from a Florida
home that he presumed was vacant. He became a Juggalo and
released an album on ICP’s label, starred in an Adam Sandler
movie, played Captain Hook in a British production of Peter
Pan, and nearly was involved in a Fourth of July concert in
Texas that was called off because of COVID-19 concerns. This
is all in addition to the decade-long run of The Vanilla Ice
Project.
Most recently, Dave Franco announced an Ice biopic in the vein

of The Disaster Artist. The logline for To the Extreme reads:
“From a high school dropout selling cars in Dallas to having the
38 of 41 10/13/20, 12:39 AM
first hip-hop single to top the Billboard charts … a young Vanilla

Ice struggles with stardom, extortion attempts and selling out as
he makes music history.”
In the three decades since the album’s release, it has become

difficult to see the world in which it all emerged. The questions
of cultural appropriation and artistic integrity continue to be
paramount to the modern conversation, but it is almost
impossible to imagine a landscape where a few negative
articles, a comedy sketch, and a rough appearance on a
syndicated late-night show could cause the biggest artist on
earth to completely implode. The fear of Ice was that it would
hasten a world in which the urgent salvos of Public Enemy and
N.W.A would never reach white Middle American households.
But both are deservedly enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame, and the latter had a biopic that grossed more than $200
million and was nominated for an Academy Award.
After Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark left the limelight, another solo
white rapper wouldn’t become famous until Eminem eight years
later. And after that, it would be over a decade before
Macklemore raised all the same troubling questions that had
first been asked during the presidency of the elder George
Bush. Hip-hop has been so thoroughly co-opted and embedded
into the mainstream of pop existence that rappers, many of
them white, can pack arenas without remotely intersecting with
the street world. The question of selling out is so obsolete that
Travis Scott—who never met a beat, ad-lib, or nickname that he
couldn’t steal—can do a nihilistically shameless cross-
promotional deal with McDonald’s. And rather than catch flak for
39 of 41 10/13/20, 12:39 AM
partnering with a soulless corporate behemoth, millions of

teenagers treat his pseudo Happy Meal like the holy grail.
If Vanilla Ice were to debut today, he might be something like

G-Eazy, a well-meaning and technically adequate rapper
acknowledging his cultural debt. After all, the Bay Area artist got
his start selling post-hyphy music on the streets of Berkeley and
Oakland before cleaning up his image to look like a leather-
jacketed ’50s black-and-white matinee idol.
The more accurate comparison might be Post Malone, a fellow

Dallas native who has been condemned for borrowing hip-hop
tropes without paying the proper respect to the art form. In a
fitting twist, Malone records for Republic, the label founded and
run by Monte Lipman, the original A&R who discovered Ice in
1990. But whereas Ice was felled by the ceaseless avalanche of
criticism and scorn, Malone’s star has only ascended in spite of,
or maybe even because of, it. When I wrote a diatribe against
his staggering creative emptiness, woeful theft, and insistence
on treating hip-hop like a Halloween costume, I received death
threats and was the subject of multiple articles questioning my
objectivity. We have been in the “too big to fail” era for far too
long, and it extends to all walks of life, except maybe the
country itself.
As for Vanilla Ice, it would be comforting if we could look back

and believe that all the hatred was meant for something, rather
than as an ideological Alamo for gatekeepers desperate to stop
an inexorable annexation. He survived, made millions of dollars,
the story ends well. But it is difficult to remember his rise and fall
as anything but a senseless casualty, for important causes that
40 of 41 10/13/20, 12:39 AM
no one can quite remember.
Jeff Weiss is the founder and editor of POW. His work has
appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and
GQ.
41 of 41 10/13/20, 12:39 AM

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The Rise and Fall of Vanilla Ice, As Told by Vanilla Ice about:reader?url=https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/10/6/2149...

The Rise and Fall of Vanilla Ice, As

I think I know enough of hate

—Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”

I. Something Grabs a Hold of Me Tightly

Vanilla Ice was discovered on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The property had already weathered several boom-and-bust

cycles. Originally a segregated postwar movie palace christened

The ballers, hustlers, and dope dealers of South Dallas

“I noticed this white guy dancing in the crowd,” Brown says.

In about two years, in September 1990, the anonymous white

The story of Vanilla Ice has long been shrouded in a fog of

entered the world in a Miami suburb. His biological father was

Photo by Acey Harper/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty

Ice and I speak during a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom call in

Forming a crew, the kid nicknamed Vanilla made $40 a day

“I had my big ghetto blaster sitting there and a microphone

Hip-hop is now the nucleus of modern pop culture and

In Dallas, a nascent hip-hop culture began to flourish in the late

At least that was Tommy Quon’s plan. Raised in the Mississippi

holding talent competitions to boost business at the club on slow

dreams—the lone white boy battling in an almost entirely Black

Enter the biopic moment. Too young to legally be in City Lights,

In Ice’s recollection, Earthquake was having none of it. The

He kicked a few bars and segued into a beatbox routine: the

Rodney O and Joe Cooley’s “Yeah Boy,” and busted out a

“Ice captivated everybody in the room,” Bush said several years

II. I’m on a Roll; It’s Time to Go Solo

With hip-hop growing exponentially, the club had Ice opening up

The Oakland rapper was wowed by his future tour mate:

Before signing to a major label, Ice says that he was the

Photo by Walter Iooss Jr./Getty Images

At that point, Ice had never seen a white audience. That

Earthquake remembers when Public Enemy first saw Ice:

The hip-hop world was relatively small back then. Anyone

start toting records for the groundbreaking Ushy, and quickly

When he made “Ice Ice Baby,” Earthquake was homeless and

Trawling through a garage full of dusty records, Earthquake

Ice’s memory is slightly different. He claims that he initially wrote

It was the age of fibula-snapping bass, 5.0 Mustangs with the

had never considered listening to rap music,” Ice says. “They’d

From the Bay Area, Quon flew in Vallejo’s Khayree, soon to

It’s bizarre to consider that barely a year before becoming a

“We didn’t have a video, so when people heard the song,

A million is an overstatement, but Ice says that they sold 48,000

all of “Ice Ice Baby,” a flamboyant exercise in flamingo-pink

Ice cruises A1A in South Beach looking like a Miami Hurricanes

Laugh at what it became, but “Ice Ice Baby” remains a perfect

He’s certainly no Guru, but the lyrics are nonsensical and

There is a tendency to disregard music loved in childhood as

The wave kept cresting. The most influential hip-hop station on

releasing “Ice Ice Baby” on 7-inch, 12-inch, cassingle, and CD

Koppelman, the archetypal old-school, cigar-chomping mogul,

III. Will It Ever Stop? Yo, I Don’t Know

A newspaper article triggered the eventual crash. Ice had only

university. Most damningly, they uncovered his government

In retrospect, the scandal was laughably trifling. At the time, Ice

“When the press showed up at my door, I got scared,” Ice says.

The narrative had irrevocably shifted. Rather than focus on the

Then there was the “Under Pressure” sample. According to

ding” of the two songs’ bass lines.

To hip-hop devotees, the brazen sample flip was the first of

“I was mentioning eight balls of cocaine, 9-millimeter guns, a 12-

Robert Christgau, then the reigning dean of critics, eviscerated