Vanilla ice where is he now

Ice Ice Baby gets credit for making rap more mainstream than ever. But here is a little bit of trivia that people generally forget. While it is certainly the first number one hip hop song, it was the third one that included rapping — or sustained rhythmic talking… however you want to put it. Another interesting fact about these billboard number one hits is that all three featured white people doing the rapping. It depends on how you define hip-hop. I mean, most people would suspect that the fraternity probably took the famous line.

However, Vanilla Ice and that song in particular does have a history of plagiarism. At the tender age of 13 years old, Vanilla Ice learned to break dance and loved it. But the rhymes soon followed, and a career in show biz looked like an option. Before he became a household name, Vanilla Ice spent a lot of his time hanging out in City Lights, a local Dallas nightclub where he would often perform.

Being a more specific demographic, Vanilla Ice really stood out at the venue. Along with his fast-moving dance feet and his ability to put quick rhymes together, the club owner, Tommy Quon, noticed something special about the performer. It really was fate that these two found each other. Once the song was played on a Georgia radio station, people became intrigued. Who is this unknown, talented artist with the catchy lyrics?

It was almost like overnight stardom for the rapper. The franchise was a massive hit with kids in America and is still considered a favorite of the last thirty years. If you watched the second film, you probably noticed a cameo from a famous rap star. At this point, Vanilla Ice was dominating the music scene.

Just two years after Ice Ice Baby was released, it looked like the rapper was transitioning into films. Although it was a small role, it was certainly a memorable one. He took his talents and became an author. We already know he is a skilled writer, so why not become an author? In , Vanilla Ice released his official biography entitled Ice by Ice.

But some of the claims the rapper made in his book and interviewed raised some eyebrows. Fact-checking press wondered if he was telling the truth. Reaching the top comes with a price. There are some mistakes that even the greatest PR representatives cannot fix. Many people started wondering if Vanilla Ice was too overrated. In , he took on the lead role in Cool as Ice, but it ended up being a commercial flop.

The film earned less than one million dollars at the box office. Would he be a one-hit-wonder? Ice publicly revealed that he was drawn to beautiful women. So, of course, it comes as absolutely no surprise that he got with the Material Girl herself. She and Vanilla began dating and were together for about eight months. They were seemingly happy together until Vanilla ended things with her.

He said that the reason behind their relationship ending was the release of her controversial book. The book was released in and shocked the world. The book included sexually suggestive and even pornographic images of several sexual acts. 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. He called the album "my much-needed therapy session" and even included a song about his troubled childhood called "Scars. Despite lukewarm reviews, Vanilla Ice persevered with his music career.

His next two efforts, 's Bipolar and 's Hot Sex , came and went with little notice or fanfare. He did, however, find an audience on television, appearing in several reality shows. Bridges defeated Vanilla Ice in three rounds. For about two weeks, he had his every move filmed as he lived with the likes of adult-film star Ron Jeremy and former televangelist Tammy Faye Messner.

Around this time, Vanilla Ice also returned to the world of motocross. He auditioned for the X Games in the freestyle division and placed seventh at the Suzuki Crossover challenge, according to Sports Illustrated.

He told the magazine that the track "is where I'm happiest. Vanilla Ice, once described as "one of the most ridiculed performers of all time," did not abandon his music. In , reality television helped boost his next album, Platinum Underground. More recently, Vanilla Ice has been revisiting some great songs of the past, including his own "Ice Ice Baby. In , Vanilla Ice gave a concert with fellow s rap-pop star M. Hammer in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the two plan to appear together again. While he has never recaptured the stellar success of his early career, Vanilla Ice continues to record new material and to tour.

Today he says that "the music is for myself, not to be rich or famous. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Few took L. Ice and I speak during a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom call in September.

He dials in from the private theater inside his massive Florida rococo mansion, near Palm Beach. When you talk to Vanilla Ice, you quickly realize that it was more than just privilege and luck that led him to stardom. The work ethic, self-belief, and sense of humor that allowed him to survive the withering backlash were there from the start. There is also the endearing charm of a lifelong hip-hop and funk obsessive.

Until Yo! 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.