6 December 1990
Yet again a 1990 number one proves to be dubious pop music but impeccable pop culture. MC Hammer had already struck oil that year by dressing rap in the gold lamé baggy trousers of familiar funk samples and family-friendly lyrics. However, Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was the first rap or hip hop track to top the US Billboard singles chart, a symbolic achievement which came to sum up the problematic history of mainstream white acts adulterating a sound from Black originators with far more success. What compounded it was that this whiteness was his angle, his USP, his bloody stage name. Maybe this was top, top bantz with any Black rappers he knew on the scene, but it hints at Vanilla Ice being someone who had two tin ears: one for music, the other for culture.
Would it have helped if, on top of that, he hadn’t been such a prick? Perhaps not, but his chippy attitude and whiny delivery, especially when insisting on his questionable bona fides in the US rap community, came across as crass white privilege. The whole concept of Vanilla Ice was rotten. No one took him seriously. And yet here we are. Vanilla Ice may have been a streetwise rapper in his own mind but to the rest of us he was a novelty act: Jive Bunny made Caucasian flesh.
For all that, there’s the frozen sperm of a good idea in ‘Ice Ice Baby’. Yes, it uses a classic rock sample as if to double down on its whiteness, but that ‘Under Pressure’ bassline is a good pick: recognisable but not dominating the track, unlike later ’90s rap number ones by Puff Daddy and Will Smith that cling for life support to a famous hook and even copy its melody. Again, a more likeable performer could have brought us further along the road with them on this. But Vanilla Ice is not only an unlikeable rapper; he’s also a terrible one. As is often the way, novelty status grants a visa of kitsch to the clumsy shiteness of his rhymes: “Stop, collaborate and listen!” “Cooking MCs like a pound of bacon!” “My style’s like a chemical spiiiill!” He has the rhythm of a dad dancer. And note how his vignette of thug life, Vanilla flavour, ends with the cops descending on a shoot-out but not pulling him over, presumably because he’s… well… you know.
Rap and hip hop doesn’t stand or fall on the basis of terrible mainstream product like this. Vanilla Ice shows up almost halfway between classic late ’80s Public Enemy and early ’90s Dr Dre G-funk, with little effect on that evolutionary timeline of rap. However, as with Puff Daddy and Will Smith mentioned above, many of the humungous chart-topping rap hits of the rest of the ’90s will map onto the ‘Ice Ice Baby’ template: classic rock hit sample for crossover appeal, stereotypical rapper persona, bland self-referential lyrics. In that corporate unit-shifting sense, this is probably one of the most influential records of the ’90s. In any wider and more meaningful sense, its inventive-for-1990 choice of sample and its comedy value afterlife can’t hide an awful rap by a terrible rapper on an ignominious rap-sheet of historical cultural appropriation.
