Everyone knows Ice Ice Baby, and if you don’t, well, you’re just not human. With that song and its accompanying album To The Extreme, Vanilla Ice became the second white rapper to top the charts. Who was the first? The Beastie Boys, of course. However, unlike The Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice didn’t have any street credibility and, as such, decided to invent some, claiming some seriously violent gangster past.
To The Extreme spent 16 weeks at number one and sold over seven million copies. At the height of this success, in the spring of 1990, Ice began filming a feature film, Cool As Ice. But by the time that the film had come out in the fall, his star had fallen dramatically. Sensing that his luck had subsided, he took a couple of years off, re-emerging in 1994 with Mind Blowin’. It didn’t happen. In 1998, he decided on another resurrection with his album Hard To Swallow. It still didn’t happen. And then in 2001, he tried it again with Bipolar. Guess what happened?
But it’s now 2011, a decade after the release of Bipolar. Surely he’d have his act together by now? With his extremely high class list of national appearances, I’ve got the feeling that Vanilla Ice is back to really get us all on his bandwagon.
