Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/23/vanilla-ice-to-get-his-own-bio.html
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Mocked, but married a down-to-earth woman with a good financial mind and now he’s pretty wealthy.
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Considering what a train wreck he had the potential to be, and the shortness of his trajectory, he’s done okay.
I happened into a show of his in the 90s at a basement teen center in VT and he gave a great show to the kids even though he’d long moved on from flash stardom.
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If were him, I would have kept “Rob Van Winkle”—that is a great name.
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The story of a one-hit wonder portrayed by the lesser Franco brother. Awesome.
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And who said Hollywood has run out of good ideas?
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Neat, but will it have three serviceable plots, like Cool As Ice did?
Of course, the biopic is just going to be a remake of Bohemian Rhapsody with minor plot changes.
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If it is made by John Waters I will come.
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He has much to teach us.
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The main appeal of Ice Ice Baby is that it requires no rapping ability. If I tried to rap along with Rakim, Posdnous, Ice Cube, Q-Tip, MCA, or any of the other contemporary rappers it just sounded embarrassing. Vanilla Ice, however, was a rapper that anyone could rap along with.
The lack of skill was a key part of his success
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If it isn’t named “To the Extreme”, just throw away your bio pic cuz it’s garbage.
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Was it “good” music? Eh… but the dub I had of his first tape was well worn back in the day.
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He did a song with The Bloodhound Gang, and I like it!
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And the world asks, “Why?”.
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I have no beef with Vanilla Ice. He was paid tons of money to embarrass himself as a teenager. I also did embarrassing things in my teens but, like a fool, I did it for free.
I saw him interviewed in recent years and he completely takes ownership of his youthful buffoonery.
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Everything I learned about being cool I learned from Vanilla Ice.
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In retrospect his flow on that tune was not that much worse than other pop-rap hits of the day, Young MC, Technotronic, Snap!, etc. He just took himself a little too seriously.
Snap! I suppose I’ll give you, but Young MC definitely had better flow, and Ya Kid K (of Technotronic) had more skills and style than often given credit for.
ETA: Something I just now found out (or maybe I learned it before and forgot). The rapper in the old “Pump Up the Jam” video is not Ya Kid K, but rather a lip-syncing model. Here’s the real deal, also lip-syncing. Hey, it’s Top of the Pops, what can ya do:
Frankly, she strikes me as more conventionally attractive (and therefore more marketable) than the model. Darker though, which I fear is what the deciding factor was.
Edited again: I may very well be wrong about who is who here. Supposedly the model, Felly Kilingi, is in the music video. Well, the woman above is definitely not the woman in the music video, but perhaps there’s been more than one video.
Hope all this is more interesting than Vanilla Ice!
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Sure, I don’t disagree, I guess my point was that a lot of those pop hits were still just very basic rhyme schemes, AA/BB/CC etc. Young MC did plenty of that but sounded more natural at it (and “Bust A Move” at least had a story to tell.) Vanilla Ice’s flow would have been great above average if the tune had come out five years earlier, pre-Rakim. Still, his metaphors are pretty cringe-worthy (“wax a chump like a candle”? Oy vey.) I used to buy a lot of obscure 80’s rap 12-inch singles and there was a lot of rhyming that in retrospect is pretty horrible.
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Said Trustus Jones in CB4 when talking about band names: “How about Ice Pick? Ice Coffee? ‘Ice’ is real big right now!”
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