![]() ![]() He opens shows for 2 Live Crew, Rob Base, MC Hammer, and that big Public Enemy/Ice-T tour. City Lights takes him in as a star attraction. He battle-raps less well but boy is he charming. Young Robert boldly ventures into the mythical Dallas nightclub and hip-hop mecca City Lights, where he is often the only white person, maybe. Young Robert starts break dancing in Dallas-area malls for loose change. Young Robert likes this movie a whole lot. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. If you wanna get any more 1984 than this you’re gonna need a fuckin’ DeLorean. I’m just kidding, it’s not streaming anywhere. You seen this movie, Breakin’? It’s streaming right now, on Hulu. Young Robert watches the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’. Young Robert grows up between Dallas and Miami, mostly Dallas. That’s overbroad but I’m trying to be brief. Superstar rappers in 1990, in the popular imagination, were from New York, L.A., or Miami, maybe. That’s my overbroad explanation for this confusion. In the late ’80s, if you were an aspiring superstar rapper, it was way cooler to be from Miami than from Dallas. Should I have bought that? Should I have tried to expense that? I’m still thinking about expensing that. Ice by Ice, by the way, is super out-of-print, but it’s available right now, via Amazon, as a used paperback in good condition for the low, low price of $298.94. And yeah, immediately I’m irritated by the vagueness of this origin story. If you believe his 1991 quickie semi-autobiography Ice by Ice, he was born in the suburbs of Miami, but he was probably born in the suburbs of Dallas. Robert Van Winkle-that’s a tough break, name-wise, for an aspiring superstar rapper-was born on Halloween 1967. I will try, and probably fail, to be brief. The Rise and Fall of Vanilla Ice, As Told by Vanilla Ice And here, regrettably, it’s time to set aside our clueless childish ways, and stop being blank slates who don’t know shit about shit, and address, however briefly, the Vanilla Ice creation myth. ![]() This was the song that was gonna make Vanilla Ice famous, and needless to say Vanilla Ice did not get famous until a couple DJs flipped over the “Play That Funky Music” 12-inch single and discovered, on the B-side, the song that would actually make Vanilla Ice famous. ![]() “Play That Funky Music” was supposed to be Vanilla Ice’s breakout single, dude. Somebody is going to town on the vibraslap, on that song, I’ll say that. Let’s let the VIP do some call-and-response while I regroup. I was in a real bad mood when I revisited this song, man. I do not care for this song, which is like that bootleg Calvin & Hobbes truck decal where it’s Calvin pissing on something, but here it’s Vanilla Ice pissing on proud Ohio funk band Wild Cherry’s 1975 classic “Play That Funky Music,” and I’m being unnecessarily rude here because I’ve just identified a fourth major problem, which is the phrase “VIP Posse.” VIP stands for Vanilla Ice Posse, so when he says “VIP posse,” he’s saying “Vanilla Ice Posse Posse” the second posse is redundant. OK, there are three major problems, and Nazi is the second one, but spare a thought for the desperate, oh-shit-I-need-two-more-syllables grasp for “German.” When he says, “I like my rhymes atrocious,” believe him. The second major problem is the word German. ![]() There are two major problems here, to my mind, and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is for sure the first problem. ![]()
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