![]() I’m from around the fucking way.’ I actually tried to detour people.“ I was just like, ‘Listen, I’m from around the corner, man. “ I was embarrassed to tell people I was from Farmers Branch. Confronted, the rapper insisted the offending lines were put in the biography without his knowledge, and that he hadn’t actually lied, as such. Ice’s birth name, it turned out, was Robert Van Winkle (which is about as white as you can get), and he was actually from a suburb of Dallas, Texas, not Miami. However, curious newspaper reporters soon discovered “numerous contradictions” in this supposed life story. Vanilla Ice’s hastily-ghostwritten 1991 autobiography, Ice by Ice, claimed that he grew up in and around Miami and went to the same high school as Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew. But the core problem was one of authenticity, or lack thereof. Part of it was the huge hair and the spangly costumes, which Weiss describes as “Captain America meets Aladdin.” Part of it was the nakedly commercial nature of the whole phenomenon and all those spin-off products. So what went wrong? What made Vanilla Ice so legendarily corny? It wasn’t lack of skill even today, Ice is a perfectly decent rapper on a technical level. By the end of 1991, Vanilla Ice was synonymous with corniness, the butt of a scorching Jim Carrey parody song called “White, White Baby.” His Hollywood debut, Cool as Ice, was nominated for seven Razzie parody awards, including “ Worst New Star” and “ Worst Original Song,” and its opening track “Cool as Ice (Everybody Get Loose)” peaked at 81 on the charts. But his moment in the sun was short-lived, lasting roughly 12 months. 1 on The Billboard 200 album popularity chart and raked in more than 10 million worldwide sales in its first six months. His debut album To the Extreme reached No. His signature hit, “Ice Ice Baby,” was everywhere. He had his own board game, performed the “Ninja Rap” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, and reportedly turned down a marriage proposal from Madonna. As music journalist Jeff Weiss recalls in his definitive profile for The Ringer, Ice wasn’t just a rapper he was a multi-media empire, briefly eclipsing even the popularity of M.C. Truthfully, the white rapper didn’t really arrive as a cultural force until 1990, with the advent of one Vanilla Ice-and it was there that the problems began.įrom our vantage point in the 2020s, it’s hard to believe just how ubiquitous Vanilla Ice was at the height of his fame. ![]() (Seriously, Google it.) The Beastie Boys charted with Licensed to Ill in 1986, but they were a hybrid act, equal parts punk rock and hip-hop. It’s difficult to know who the first one actually was technically it could be Debbie Harry of Blondie, who rapped on 1980’s “Rapture,” or even Rodney Dangerfield, who dropped the deeply weird novelty single “Rappin’ Rodney” in 1983. ![]() ![]() But in those early years, white rappers emerged, too. Its creators were working-class Black men performing as DJs in New York City circa 1973, and its greatest songs-tracks like N.W.A.’s immortal “ Fuck Tha Police” or Kendrick Lamar’s “ Alright”-are explicitly about African American struggle and protest. Like jazz and the blues before it, rap music is undeniably Black. The odd man out, the black sheep: the white rapper. One whose very existence is politically charged, and whose evolution can tell us a lot about the dynamics of race and racism in the United States. But in the whole pantheon of rappers, there’s one figure who fits awkwardly among the rest. From DJ Kool Herc to the latest Drake album, it’s a rich history. In five decades, the genre has produced a dizzying variety of artists and styles: there’s gangsta rap, mumble rap, horrorcore, crunk, drill, trap, and a dozen others. Rap music, as you may have heard, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
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