One critic’s view: “With this one song, Robbie Van Winkle destroyed a cool Queen tune and set back the cause of white people in hip-hop a decade.” – John Nova Lomax @ Houston Press
The public’s view: 2.14 / 5.00, the fourth-worst #1 hit of 1990
“Ice Ice Baby” was the first true rap record to reach #1 on the Hot 100, but that’s just one of its notable achievements. It was also the first of many #1 songs to be built around an obvious sample of another hit record. It was the first of many #1 brag-rap records, with lyrics consisting of a misleading portrayal of the performer’s popularity, rhyming skills, and street smarts. And, of course, it was the first of many #1 songs by white rappers. Most people who achieve a historic “first” are remembered favorably, like Jackie Robinson, Neil Armstrong, and Annie Edson Taylor. But Vanilla Ice is, fairly or not, viewed more like a Patient Zero who started a pandemic.
It’s easy to find fault with the lyrics of “Ice Ice Baby”. (Why is he asking us to “collaborate and listen”? Ice has already burned his rhyme onto millions of CDs, so the time for collaboration is over. It’s all listening from here on out.) It’s also obvious that Ice would be waxed like a candle in a rap battle with today’s talent. But when you judge “Ice Ice Baby” in the context of 1990, it really isn’t that terrible. The other huge rap hit from that year was MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This”, which was an even more blatant overuse of a sample with even less poignant lyrics. Not to mention, Hammer’s pants appeared to be concealing several layers of diapers. Not only can’t I touch this, I don’t want to touch it.
Neither Ice nor Hammer looks edgy in hindsight, but they were almost revolutionary when played on the radio alongside Wilson Phillips and Michael Bolton. Some top 40 stations found “Ice Ice Baby” so scandalous that they initially confined it to evening hours. Younger readers probably think I’m joking about this, but I am not. Ask your grandparents.
Ice didn’t ask for permission before sampling “Under Pressure”, but this was solved to everyone’s immense satisfaction by selling 10 million albums and giving Queen and David Bowie a sizeable cut of the royalties. Good thing he didn’t rip off a more sensitive artist. Sampling “Hotel California” without consent would have caused a grave psychic injury to Don Henley that no amount of money could ever rectify, and Ice would have had to undergo a ritual disembowelment to appease Henley and his lawyers.
The reputation of “Ice Ice Baby” suffers not so much from the track itself and the surrounding copyright controversy, but from all of the hype that Vanilla Ice was thoroughly incapable of living up to. This was a guy with maybe two-and-a-half commercially viable songs in his repertoire, but he was marketed like he was the rap version of Jesus – or even Elvis. We didn’t particularly need a Cool as Ice movie that would earn a 3% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nor did we need a Vanilla Ice Electronic Rap Game. I won a copy of this game in a radio station contest, so I can describe it for you in detail. It contained a game board, a deck of cards with rhyming words like “chunk” and “stunk”, and a score pad. The most interesting component was an oddly shaped yellow piece of plastic which emitted drum machine noises that were fuzzy enough to be transmissions from space. The game’s participants were supposed to pretend that this sputtering device was a microphone, and rap nonsense into it after each line on the game board was completed using the cards. “Yo! Slam dunk! She found her stunk! He lost his chunk…” It’s sort of like the Game of Life, but with a square that requires you to get a lobotomy if you land on it. Word to your mother, and word to Milton Bradley.
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