Written for Kurrent Music
Published January 15th 2016
Vanilla Ice blog
For my own website, I occasionally write about design news and I have, so far once, written about Robert van Winkle. Perhaps you still know him better as Vanilla Ice.
Even if you have missed the hype around the song, I bet you know the song itself. “Ice Ice Baby” recycled the bassline from “Under Pressure” (Queen and, the recently late, David Bowie) to a catchy hip hop track, that took to the charts pretty rapidly in 1990.
Vanilla Ice was the first white rapper to gain global success. The world seemed to be at his feet and that in itself caused controversy, because Hip Hop, up onto that point, was something that exclusively belonged to black culture. With Vanilla Ice it suddenly crossed over.
