Vanilla Ice
You didn’t think we could write any list of 90s music stars without including the brilliance of Robert Matthew “Vanilla Ice” Van Winkle, did you? In 1990, Vanilla Ice gave us what would become the defining song of an entire decade: “Ice Ice Baby,” which was the first hip hop single that ever reached number one on the Billboard charts. In retrospect, there was no way the song could have failed. It stole directly from Queen and David Bowie, it featured professional beat boxer DJ Earthquake, and it had a recognizable, repetitive chorus that everyone from preschoolers to seniors in an old folks home would love to chant. There’s a reason why it’s still a karaoke favorite, after all.
Vanilla Ice led a quintessentially 90s lifestyle throughout his peak. He dated Madonna for eight months, released a lifelike action figure, appeared on Saturday Night Live, and even found his way onto the cast of the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. He spent the first three years of the nineties making music and touring nonstop, and went through a dark, cannabis-laden period where he developed an interest in Rastafari and released a flop of a second album. He found his second wind in 1997 with his third album, Hard to Swallow, which went gold. No matter how much you liked any of his later stuff, though, no one who hears his name can go two seconds without whisper-chanting, “Ice, ice, baby… vanilla ice, ice, baby…”
But what is he up to now? Back in 2010, he joined Jedward’s performance of “Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby) at the 2010 National Television Awards, and he recorded a verse for their album the same year. All that is to be expected for an old 90s star, right? Why not make some more music?
Here’s what you probably didn’t expect: as of January 2012, Vanilla Ice is spending his time and money on a DIY Network home improvement show. He’s not just a producer, either– he’s the host. Evidently, our beloved 90s rapper has been buying and flipping houses since his early twenties, and he didn’t bother to write a song about it. On The Vanilla Ice Project, Ice and his crew spend their time fixing up homes for your viewing pleasure– or, as he put it, “pimping out properties” and getting paid for it. So far, the award-winning television show has five seasons and 63 episodes. We’re not making this up.
