Vanilla Ice: Mind Blowin : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Vanilla Ice sold millions of albums filled with what started out 20 years ago as black music. He was pronounced, with contempt, the Second Elvis. In 1990, M.C. Hammer's easy-bake Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em was the No. 1 pop album for 21 weeks – until Ice bumped him off. Ice's debut, the lumbering To the Extreme, ended up selling more than 11 million copies. Surely, hip-hop was going to hell in a handbasket.

But savvy fans hardly blinked when the previously undernoticed and as yet unlabeled gangsta rap gained backlash popularity. Hip-hop still reverberates (mostly to the Long Beach, Calif., sounds of Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Domino) from Hammer and Ice's rise to platinum power.

After a three-year hiatus, Ice has gained little insight into himself or his music. His half-ass gibes at the press and Hammer are predictable, as are all the songs on Mind Blowin. "Fame" is filled with loops and samples from David Bowie's "Fame." Ice jumps on the bandwagon and does "Roll 'Em Up," about rolling joints. "Ice Man Party" pans out over a loop from Zapp's version of "(I Heard It Through the) Grapevine," one of the most sampled tracks in hip-hop. And he ODs on pseudosimiles: Like Larry Bird, he's shooting three-pointers; like Jerry Rice, he's into breaking records; like Mary J. Blige, he needs real love; like LL Cool J, don't call it a comeback. When in truth, like Patti LaBelle, he could use a new attitude.

But "Get Loose," the last song on the album, is snappy. Phrases like "I'll flip you like a flapjack and roll you up like a knapsack" are inane, but the song is a thumping party, one of the few places where Ice loosens up. He sounds solid at the beginning of "The Wrath" as well, where he almost moans, "Do you like it like that?/Do you like it like this?" He sounds easy and unaffected – close to sexy. But he doesn't keep it up: In "Now and Forever," a wet dream kind of song, Ice goes back to goofy lyrics ("the kind of woman who can make my volcano erupt") and his dry Max Headroom style.

On Mind Blowin, Ice might have asked himself probing questions about his strange but familiar position in American music. He might have done what performers sometimes do: grow. But this album sags under the weight of music as generic as mall stores. And as with a bad movie, you giggle when he wants you to be awed, fast-forward when he wants you to turn it up. His lyrics are a grab bag of unintended ironies.

Vanilla Ice's bland rapping and white-boy dancing helped turn hip-hop into a big-time American commodity. Now his best attempt at being provocative is his newly grown blond dreadlocks. What's pitiful is that he sees little beyond them in his world or himself worth rapping about.