Vanilla Ice

For a million-selling pop star, Robert Van Winkle, a.k.a. Vanilla Ice, has had a pretty rough ride. His debut To the Extreme hit #1 in early 1991, and immediately, due to his numerous dubious claims to street cred, he became the willing punch line to any number of jokes regarding white rappers.

He has never recovered from that one blistering year in the sun. And yet his chart-topping Queen- and David Bowie–interpolating single from that year, "Ice Ice Baby," is a landmark that has never truly faded from view. The remainder of To the Extreme is a regrettable yet oddly charming curio of late '80s hip-hop production tropes, a rewrite of L.L. Cool J's "I Need Love" called, ahem, "I Love You," and some truly dumbfounding rhymes. To wit, this boast from "Play That Funky Music": "You're amazed by the V.I.P. posse/Steppin' so hard like German Nazi." The album, in addition to his thunderous lack of self-consciousness, doomed his public profile so completely that by the time his feature film Cold as Ice appeared a year later, he was drummed out of show business.

In 1994 he reappeared with dreadlocks and an astonishingly inept and hilarious "gangsta" record, Mind Blowin. Even the contemporaneous release of MC Hammer's The Funky Headhunter couldn't make Ice's paeans to marijuana ("Roll 'Em Up") or numerous attacks on persistent critics and fellow white rappers 3rd Bass seem less desperate by comparison. Again banished, he reappeared in 1998 with Hard to Swallow, in which he hitched his cart to the burgeoning rap-metal idiom. Produced by genre kingpin Ross Robinson, the record sounds as thick and vicious as Korn, and (surprise) the Iceman dumps eight years of resentment and recrimination into the mix, emerging with furious responses to his critics, as well as "Too Cold," an aggro retooling of "Ice Ice Baby." His most convincing music came when he appropriated the metallic white-MC style that he presaged. But it was all for naught; Hard to Swallow failed and was followed by 2001's utterly listless Bipolar. (ROB KEMP)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide