Vanilla Ice interview
The rapper who sold his soul: Vanilla Ice raked in millions of dollars, but
was it worth all the misery?
Calgary Herald
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Page: C1 / FRONT
Section: Arts & Style
Byline: Nick Lewis
With 17 million units of To The Extreme sold, he still
holds the record for the best selling hip-hop album of all
time. So why is Vanilla Ice pop music's biggest
punchline?
As far as one-hit wonders go, there's none more
popular than the Miami rapper and his hit Ice Ice Baby. It's
why, 13 years later, he can still fill venues on the
strength of one song, as he is doing across Canada this
spring. The Word To Your Mother Tour stops in Calgary
on April 22, and Vanilla Ice says its success is a slap
in the face of the industry.
"Basically, what I'm doing is shooting a middle finger
to the entire music industry because they chewed me up
and spat me out," he says.
In 1990, 22-year-old Robert Van Winkle crept into his
older brother's bedroom, looked through his immense
record collection and snuck out a copy of Under
Pressure by David Bowie and Queen. He sampled the synth
bassline and rapped over it -- about life in Miami,
about his skills as a rapper, about rolling in his Mustang 5.0,
which he was three payments behind on.
He shopped the tape to a couple of labels, and before
long there was a bidding war.
In a move he says he regrets today, his manager turned
down an offer from Def Jam, the rap label that
boasted Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Beastie Boys on
its roster. Instead of street credibility, he went for the
"more money route" through Capitol Records.
This came at a time when Winkle couldn't chip in for
rent.
"I regret that a bit, yeah, because of where that led
to," the 34-year-old says on a cellphone from Toronto's
Pearson International Airport.
"I couldn't see it, you know, before it happened. And
the minute I signed that contract with Capitol Records, they
took over everything."
In 1990, white rappers weren't new, but they were
still novel. The Beastie Boys had hit it big in 1986 with
License To Ill, but even though Winkle followed the
same "Fight For Your Right To Party" lifestyle, he was
deemed more marketable for pop music fans.
And all the while his first single, Ice Ice Baby, was
blowing up across the world, Winkle was miserable.
"Here I am standing like a puppet while my record is
climbing the charts and it's number one on Billboard," he
says. "And I'm thinking, 'They know what they're
doing, I'll let them run with it.' And basically the whole thing took
on a life of its own. I was paid heavily to wear
different clothes, and fit this certain image that catered to younger
people.
"I had a team of people around me I didn't even know.
Publicists answering questions for me, telling me what
to say in interviews, because nobody wanted to hear
the truth. Because it wouldn't fit the image they were trying
to build around me. They worked so hard at it, at the
image, to make me wholesome to the younger kids.
'Here's a good-looking white kid, but don't let him
tell the truth.'
"The truth was what? That I did drugs, that I was a
party animal, that I was true to hip-hop, that I fully condoned
the jackass lifestyle?"
And so, Winkle says, the record label turned him into
a novelty act because he was the first rapper to get into
the pop market.
In an era of hardened hip-hop whose members included
NWA and Ice-T, Vanilla Ice seemed a bit ridiculous.
He wore glitter parachute pants, wore his hair in a
bleached blond pompadour with the words "Ice" carved in
the back, opened shows for MC Hammer and lied to the
press about being stabbed five times.
Jim Carrey famously parodied Vanilla Ice on Fox's
largely black In Living Color, and it didn't take long before
the rest of the world followed suit.
"People were 'playa hating' Vanilla before the phrase
even existed," wrote Salon.com.
A leading role in a movie, Cool As Ice (with the
infamous line, "Lose the zero and get with the hero") further
killed his street cred, and an affair with Madonna
didn't help, either.
"So, basically, I hibernated," Winkle says. "I tried
to escape from reality using drugs. I had a weekend that
lasted six months, I went into an overdose, I just
partied out and hit rock bottom. But I got out of it and here I am
today."
The Vanilla Ice episode of VH-1's Behind The Music is
the music station's most popular. In it, Winkle recalls a
run-in with Death Row Records founder Suge Knight that
cost him $180 million.
The way Winkle told it on Behind The Music, Knight
held him by his ankles over a hotel balcony demanding he
pay royalties for Ice Ice Baby.
"Yeah, $180 million, give or take a little," Winkle
says.
"It was pretty ugly. But I look at it in a positive
way. Look at what I have now. I'm totally fine, financially I'm great,
even though so many people tried to rip me off.
"And basically, I look at the whole Suge Knight and
Death Row thing in a positive way because they used that
money towards Tupac (Shakur), Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre,
and those are three of the biggest hip-hop icons of
our time.
"So hey, my money went to some goodness. I look at it
this way: I invested in some of the best hip-hop in the
world."
Fortunately, Winkle made other investments, as well.
Even though contemporaries like MC Hammer went
bankrupt long ago, Vanilla held onto his ice.
"I just did the right thing," he says. "I kept it real
simple. First thing I bought was a few cars, and I learned cars
are cool, but they always depreciate. Next thing I
went and bought a house, and then another house and
another house. A couple of houses sat around
collecting cobwebs for a while and I sold them and made a
tremendous amount of money on them, and I was like
(damn)!"
Winkle learned the value of real estate and today owns
his own land development company.
"Now I've got a real estate company and I build about
10 homes a year and sell them up in U.S. Palm and Port
St. Lucie," he says. "I've got a whole developing
company, contractors, roofers, plumbers, I got all these guys
working for me now. I didn't play the stock market. I
just bought a lot of land and real estate. You can't lose
man, you just sit on it and (it) grows like crazy."
And, he says, he's got no trouble with being a walking
punchline.
"They know who I am in Russia," he says. "People in
China who can't speak English know the words to Ice Ice
Baby. I think that's amazing. There's positive and
negatives about everything, it depends on how you want to
look at it."
Vanilla Ice's not the music industry's only example of
how quickly stars can be exploited, chewed and spat out.
He's just the best one.
