When was vanilla ice ice baby released

Iraq had recently invaded Kuwait and it looked as if America was headed for its first major war in the Middle East. It changed the world of rap that was once reserved only for actual rappers and kids from the streets. Vanilla Ice changed the genre, proving that even white kids can become successful in dropping a dope hook. The song became the first hip-hop single to break into the Billboard Hot and reach the top.

Yes, times were different back then. Dre, and Eazy-E who were at what they thought at the time, the heights of their careers. Once rap became mainstreamed, their popularity skyrocketed, and many credit Vanilla Ice for opening up a whole new audience. MTV Raps premiered in , it was rarely seen on TV; urban radio station programmers largely dismissed it as an unmusical fad.

The conditions seemed ripe for the city to become the mecca of Texas hip-hop. Raised in the Mississippi Delta around blues and soul musicians, the son of Chinese immigrants naturally segued into the world of club ownership, music management, and eventually, the Ultrax label—his attempt to tap into the vibrant Dallas scene.

Quon began holding talent competitions to boost business at the club on slow nights. The attack occurred in relatively safe Richardson, Texas, where Ice went in search of retaliation after someone had jumped his friend.

A few years later, he famously pulled down his pants on Rick Dees to reveal the battle scars. Ice was a high school dropout abandoned by his real father, and whose mother was married several times. He grew up lower middle class and toiled away at menial jobs while chasing his dreams—the lone white boy battling in an almost entirely Black environment. I knew it. There were too many people who liked what I was doing.

Enter the biopic moment. Despite his avowed bad streak, the young Ice loved poetry and says he never drank or did drugs—at least until Squirrel got him wasted on a concoction called the Runny Nose. The liquid courage was all it took. The Vanilla Ice book purports that they nearly came to blows after Ice served him with some freestyle rhymes. The crowd gawked in disbelief. Snickers and laughter rang out; then he went in. I could beatbox like a motherfucker, rhyme, and dance.

He kicked a few bars and segued into a beatbox routine: the Freddy Krueger, the Popeye, and the Sanford and Son, which he described as a drum sound underwater. Another audience member was John Bush, the manager of City Lights, who saw something special in the kid from Farmers Branch.

Within days, Ice signed a management deal with Quon and became the City Lights resident act, performing nightly five-tominute routines for the packed crowds.

In a year, Hammer would have the no. A, and EPMD tour. Backstage, Ice-T told him he was going to make it. This kid can dance. They saw the whole entertainment thing of me onstage and the crowd response—because the crowd loved it. At that point, Ice had never seen a white audience. Did Chuck D just say what I think he just said? The hip-hop world was relatively small back then.

Anyone seriously trying to make it invariably crossed paths with everyone else on the circuit. The shooter was barefoot, clutching a musket, blasting out the back window of a car.

But until Ice could record a hit, local notoriety could take him only so far. Quon—who declined multiple requests for an interview—had a plan to remedy that, and only had to turn to the DJ booth at City Lights. The East Dallas Earthquake got his start toting records for the groundbreaking Ushy, and quickly graduated to spinning at block parties and long-vanished clubs—as well as making beats for a pre-N.

According to Earthquake, Quon asked whether he and Johnson would help create songs for Vanilla, now rebranded as Vanilla Ice for marketing purposes. No longer were producers restricted to snatching a guitar squeal or a kick drum—they could loop entire songs.

According to Earthquake, Ice went crazy the first time he heard the beat and hook in its skeletal form, and asked the producer to dub him a tape to ride around with. Earthquake countered that Ice needed to finish the song first. Ice refused. He claims that he initially wrote the lyrics circa After moving out on his own, the year-old was broke and back living with his mom.

Inspired by a recent weekend trip to Miami, Ice says he wrote it in a half-hour between and 1 a. Earthquake had sent him a bunch of instrumentals, but he never actually let Earthquake know that he planned on writing to them. It was the age of fibula-snapping bass, 5. Ice had a 1,watt Rockford Fosgate sub stashed in the trunk that made the license plate rattle. But this was a distinctly different image of Vanilla Ice from the one about to become ludicrously famous, the one rocking shiny suits and parachute pants.

Behind him, a naked blond throws her head back seductively. He looks like a cocaine-trafficking rapper who Crockett and Tubbs are trying to catch.

It was that simple. Except that initially it failed. Without social media to make a song go viral, if radio ignored your first salvo, it often meant your career was over.

So Ice, a DJ, and three backup dancers packed into a small van to play a series of promo shows across the South at record stores and sweatbox dives. Dallas radio ignored it, but it caught fire across the region when Dave Morales in Jackson, Mississippi, threw his full weight behind it. A million is an overstatement, but Ice says that they sold 48, copies on Ichiban in two months, making them an underground success before he ever wore his first pair of harem pants.

Offers rushed in from Atlantic Records and Def Jam. Koppelman was so certain that it would be a worldwide smash that he tendered the seven-figure advance before even meeting the rapper. This is my dream, this is the greatest thing ever.

Nothing about it really makes sense. Are you being invited to collaborate with the VIP Posse? Are these the instructions to a junior high group science project? Pay no mind. Ice cruises A1A in South Beach looking like a Miami Hurricanes fixer, moussed hair blowing in the wind, steady as a rampart. His cheekbones are scythe sharp and James Dean sunken, but the zigzag lines razored into his hair are strictly Dallas. Vanilla Ice has only one song that your average music fan can name, but nearly every music fan can name that one song.

That is power. That is waxing chumps like a candle. The hook might as well be a subliminal brainwashing koan. Ice is back with a new invention, but this is his first major song. The cops pass him and his friend D-Shay by to confront the dope fiends.

Of course they do. Ice looks like Ice. This is part of the problem. There is a tendency to disregard music loved in childhood as profoundly uncool—at least prior to TikTok, where now even nominally cool things exist in an amniotic state of theatrical sadness. The song borrowed its title and some of its content from Wild Cherry's hit. After spending 16 weeks at the top of the album charts, To the Extreme sold more than seven million copies.

During interviews and in his official biography, Ice by Ice , Vanilla Ice discussed his difficult youth and his time on streets. He also indicated that he had won numerous motocross events as well. As the press investigated these stories, it turned out that many of these claims were exaggerations of the facts, or completely false. Vanilla Ice later tried to blame his manager for these errors, and also said that he changed some of the information about himself to protect his family. Whatever the case, Vanilla Ice's credibility and career took a serious hit over the controversy.

Vanilla Ice also received a lot of negative comments from critics. Many found Vanilla Ice's lyrics to be "inane," and lacking in creativity and originality. Some called him the "Elvis of rap" because he was capitalizing on a predominantly African American music style.

At the time, more socially and politically challenging rap acts such as Public Enemy were having a hard time getting played on the radio, while pop-oriented rap like Vanilla Ice and M. Hammer dominated the charts. Taking on his first lead acting role, Vanilla Ice starred in Cool as Ice In another sign of his fading appeal, Vanilla Ice scored only a minor hit with the film's soundtrack and its title song.

At the height of his fame, the rapper had a brief relationship with pop star Madonna , and even posed for her controversial book Sex. But as his career declined, Vanilla Ice began using hard drugs and experienced bouts of depression.

He tried to revamp his image with 's Mind Blowin , taking on a funk-influenced rap style. Fans and critics were not impressed, and the album failed to make the music charts.

In July , after receiving a flurry of negative reviews, he tried to commit suicide by a drug overdose. He was shaken by this near-death experience and stepped away from his Vanilla Ice persona for a time. Returning to extreme sports, the rapper started jet-skiing competitively using his real name. In , he even opened a sporting goods store called "2 The Xtreme" in Miami Beach.

In , Vanilla Ice ended his self-imposed exile from the music scene with Hard to Swallow.