![]() ![]() "I realized then that the hip-hop community had basically turned their back on me, and I was just the butt end of a lot of jokes."īut the vitriol directed at Vanilla Ice went way beyond jokes. "There would be a great moment, and then the next day I'd read something or see something on TV just dogging me out," he says. During the whole time I was given all my success, it was being ripped away from me. I never got to enjoy being up for a Grammy, the two American Music Awards and the People's Choice Awards. The more records he sold, the more he became an object of derision. but here it is, it's huge and it's way too late to turn it around." "But at the same time it threw me into a novelty-type thing, a New-Kids-on-the-Block-with-snot-type deal. "It was way beyond what I ever expected," he says. At a Patriot Center show in Fairfax, thousands of screaming teenage girls knocked over steel barricades in the hopes of getting close to him. He was tapped for a couple of movies, the vehicle "Cool as Ice" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II." He was linked romantically with Madonna, the most aggressive celebrity of them all (and later appeared in her "Sex" book). He caught up on the note for his Mustang 5.0 and became a pop superstar, spending his days on the road and his nights in fancy hotels, surrounded by hangers-on and bodyguards. "I was like three car payments behind on my 5.0, man. So I was like, No way.' And they were like, Will you do it for a million bucks?' And I'm like, Uh, yeah, of course.' "Here I am, with a fat gold rope chain, Fila sweat-suit, b-boyed out - hip-hop all the way. And they wanted him to wear "crappy clothes - an outfit that had this American flag because we were at war at the time." His demise was sealed, he says, once he signed with SBK Records and began to play "a puppet role." The New York-based label, he says, wanted his debut album to cross over into the pop market. When he began performing, he was opening for rap acts Run-DMC, Stetsasonic, EPMD and Ice-T. Vanilla Ice says he first recorded "Ice Ice Baby" when he was only 16, and it was initially released by Ichiban Records, a small Atlanta-based label. Ice's blessings include his wife, who is not a celebrity, and their toddler daughter, whose name is Dusti Rain. From that moment on, He's been blessing me tremendously." "I've been four years sober now, and I made a promise to God that I'll never turn around. He was given "a second chance to live," and is grateful for that. Found myself on the floor, my friends dumping buckets of cold water on me." And then I overdosed on purpose because I wanted to escape permanently. He says that the bad times - when he felt like the most despised person on the planet - led to drug abuse. Vanilla Ice's shortcut to redemption is paved by cliches. "How many people known what ADD is?" Ice asked the audience. The music was fast and furious, a hybrid of skate punk, metal and rap. Heavily tattooed and almost brawny in a wife-beater tank, he yowled into the microphone, veins popping along his neck. "You nothin' but white trash," seethed one.īut when Vanilla Ice played a recent New York showcase at Wetlands, the TriBeCa rock club was jam-packed with moshing fans. Several raged against him, dismissing him as a "punk," a liar, a phony. While Stern was sympathetic, not all the callers were as supportive. Last month, he guested on Howard Stern's radio show. Ice's pouf is gone now - his close-cropped hair is dyed blond - and so are the chiseled cheekbones that once made him an object of teenage lust. For his new album, titled "Hard to Swallow," he collaborated with Ross Robinson, the producer who forged the post-metal sound of rock big sellers like Korn and Limp Bizkit. Ice Ice Baby has refashioned himself as a kind of heavy-metal skate punk. Now, indelibly humbled, Vanilla Ice is attempting a comeback. When he fell off the pop culture radar a couple of years later, it wasn't soon enough. He was ridiculed in the press and on talk shows look-alikes were pummelled on film and video. He was mocked because he wasn't a particularly good rapper, because the ubiquitous "Ice Ice Baby" became so irritating, because of his ludicrous poufy hairstyle. ![]() Then he was exposed as a fraud whose record label bio was fabricated to make him seem "street." Many white performers had appropriated black music styles in the past few had been as brazenly insensitive.Īfter that, Vanilla Ice became the unofficial National Butt of Jokes. First he was excoriated because he was white and enjoyed extraordinary success while dozens of black rappers struggled for exposure. Inadvertently, the phenomenally successful rapper had stepped on a racial land mine. His 1991 smash hit, "Ice Ice Baby," led 13 million record buyers to go for his debut album, "To the Extreme." The rest of the world, however, seemed to despise him.
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