how was vanilla ice portrayed by the media?

It's all about the hair.

It isn't. There's a small laundry list of things that bug me about this song:

1) Ice sounds like somebody's kid brother rhyming along to a Big Daddy Kane record.

2) You can hear him almost trip up in spots where he tries to cram too many words into one line - he gets short of breath and races to catch up.

3) Every time the beat drops out for the "if there was a problem / yo, I'll solve it" prechorus, Ice's timing goes out the window. The vocal track in general has a very rough-take shakiness to it, like the producer couldn't coax out a better performance out of Ice.

4) The beat programming has dated VERY badly - it sounds like a chain-store Casio keyboard set to "Rock", and not in a good way.

5) The gangsta posturing in the lyrics, which has been better critiqued upthread.

6) There's no cutting or scratching anywhere on the record, so why the repeated references to a DJ?

If you can find it, grab a copy of "Rok One's Crazy", in which Rok One manages to both spoof and eulogize "Ice Ice Baby" - tighter delivery, better beats, better use of the Queen / Bowie sample. It's like the record Ice wanted to make all along.

I also put on "Triple Stage Darkness" by 3rd Bass. No way does IIB beat this - the beats are catchier and funkier, the sounds more engaging and atmospheric in their layering, the sampled riffs more memorable.

Yeah, 3rd Bass, no contest. I still bust out "Derelicts Of Dialect" on occasion.

I understand you think he fails splendidly, that his so called "technical shortcomings" are part of its appeal, but to me they are just a large part of what contributes to the song's dull, grating sound. Plus as someone pointed it, it's far too long.

Actually screw that they didn't sound quirky they had a lot more dimensions to their sound - you can't nail it down with one term because "The Cactus Album" is a diverse effort that goes from the Aretha sampling goofiness and racial politix of "Gas Fas" the aggressive funk of triple stage darkness.

Yes, exactly - thank you. There ARE songs that I love despite / because of technical shortcomings (Trax Records' entire back catalog to thread), but "Ice Ice Baby" isn't one of them.

But in Vanilla Ice's case, his shortcomings give the whole record the obnoxious mood of a cipher attempting to be down and failing, not splendidly, but miserably.

OTfreakin'M.

Vanilla's only legacy is that he got a bunch of white kids interested in rap, many of whom did get move on to the more "legit" (quotations intentional) stuff. I was 16 when "Ice, Ice Baby" hit, and was already well into Rakim, KRS-One, Paris, etc. by that time, so Vanilla Ice just didn't do a thing for me.

>no real lyrical hook<

>the only real hook in it is taken straight off a much better Queen/Bowie song

And "everyone else" obviously includes the millions of people who bought the damn thing, right?

I've written about the song plenty in my second book, and elsewhere. There's a lot to love about it.

No, what I'm saying is that Vanilla Ice's ability to bring rap to the mainstream in a way that hadn't been done at that time is the only thing about him that I personally find interesting. I found him laughable in his day and damn near unlistenable now.

um, Run DMC/Aerosmith, and the Beastie Boys would like a word with you...

Or rather, I found him laughable in his day and I FIND HIM damn near unlistenable now.

SCREAMING! SCREAMING FOR A PREVIEW BUTTON!!!

I think there's a problem in separating and isolating the two things here. I think "Ice Ice Baby" fails to be catchy because it lacks skills - the rap doesn't flow, the beats are too straight, there is little going on sonically to catch you aside from the bassline, which is catchy but which is taken straight off another song that had a lot more going for it. And I think "Triple Stage Darkness" is more catchy or affecting because it flows more rhythmically, both in the voice and beats and because there's more going on with the samples and how they're put together. That looped sax melody near the end is great. Maybe I should say "affecting" rather than "catchy" but I don't like virtuosity just for it's own sake - I like it as a tool that achieves something affective. I'm not an expert on rap technique so lots of people probably disagree with me (well they would even if I were an expert) - enough people liked IIB at the time! - but that's how it sounds to me.

Oh, without question!

I'm referring specifically to places like the horrible backwater town in which I grew up, which is why I said "in a way that hadn't been done before". I understand that most of Western civilization had heard at least some rap music by Vanilla Ice's inception. In places like my home town, though, rap, even in 1991 was still this somewhat new-fangled invention by them there "colored" folk.

(And I'm not exaggerating - growing up I heard "colored" as much as I heard the n-word. Canucks who love to trumpet our country's supposed lack of racism have no idea of what they're talking about.)

as usual, this is 100% grade-A balonium. Rap during Vanilla Ice's day was not dominated by humorless, "complex" artists, especially not on the charts and radio - see MC Hammer, Digital Underground, Fresh Prince, Salt n Pepa, Tone Loc, Young MC, ad nauseam.

People love Rakim because of his personality, not his "skillz". His skills INFORM his personality - his character was all about talking about how badass a rhymer he was, and he backed it up w/ techincal ability.

Shakey's list of fun rappers aside, I don't see hip-hop of this time as being "humorless and self-important" "quiet storm adult contemporary" at ALL and I think the accusation is baseless and ludicrous.

I also don't understand why you feel the need to tear down the old "hip-hop canon" (a canon that has been underappreciated by the mainstream of critical thought as it is) in order to prop up this joke of a song that - while I certainly understand why some ppl like it - is not somehow INHERENTLY better than 3rd Bass just because it embraces a fun party aesthetic, ESPECIALLY because there were much better fun party songs going on at the time (see Shakey's list).

By the way Chuck I bought yr book ("accidental evolution"...) a few days ago and just got it in the mail and am very interested in reading it.

who posted that a while back?