“I noticed this white guy dancing in the crowd,” Brown says. “City Lights was all Black, so at first I was like, ‘What does he think he’s doing?’ He could dance his ass off, and we’d never seen a white guy do that. The women was loving it and getting all up on him like, ‘Oooh, look at him.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not finna stop. In about two years, in September 1990, the anonymous white dancer in the crowd would drop To the Extreme, which would sell 15 million copies worldwide, faster than any album since Purple Rain six years earlier. Its inescapable lead single, “Ice Ice Baby,” became the first rap song to top the Billboard Hot 100 and accelerated the genre’s crossover into the American mainstream. There were Vanilla Ice dolls, a ghostwritten autobiography, a Scholastic book with MC Hammer, rock ’n’ roll comics, and a board game that came with a toy boom box a Vanilla Ice movie and cameos in both Madonna’s Sex book and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel. The first white solo rapper to become a pop star would have one of the most dizzying ascents and precipitous downfalls in music history. At 23, he was briefly the biggest rapper in the world and the public enemy of hip-hop purists-the subject of (still ongoing) debates about appropriation and authenticity. But before any of that could transpire, he had to win over the doubters in South Dallas. The story of Vanilla Ice has long been shrouded in a fog of shoddy reporting, breathless tall tales, and harmless self-deception. A white rap Rashomon, if the bandit battled Bebop and Rocksteady. Everyone’s narrative is slightly askew, which adds to the charm. You would just print the legend if you could figure out exactly what it is. Here are the basics: Vanilla Ice was born on Halloween in 1967, most likely in Dallas, though the first chapter (“Ice Formations”) from his quickie Avon Books memoir, Ice by Ice, claims he entered the world in a Miami suburb. His biological father was never in the picture. The unfortunate last name, Van Winkle, was bequeathed by the man his mother was married to at the time of birth. By the time the future Ice was 4, the elder Van Winkle had departed, leaving Ice’s single mom, a piano teacher, to raise him and his older half-brother. For the next dozen years, the family shuttled between diverse neighborhoods in Dallas and Dade County, where his new stepfather, Ecuadorian immigrant Byron Mino, worked at a Chevrolet dealership.Īfter fame hit, Ice was attacked for claiming Miami as his hometown.
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