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.
He became a teen idol and even ran the pop charts, alongside the black dominated Hip Hop charts. The conflict between being a teen idol and a credible rapper caused Vanilla Ice to get split between two very different worlds. To somewhat defend or explain his success and his genre of choice, he would raise his past as a boy hanging out on street corners and breakdancing, to keep tied to the Hip Hop community.
Nowadays, they say it was his record company and management who then thickened his street life story, and it all happened without his knowledge, of course, but video footage of his interviews at the time, show he participated in it just as much. Either way, the press dug up inconsistencies in his story and exposed that his life as a street thug was nothing more than him literally hanging out on the street and breakdancing and his stabbing scars were the result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. No gangster, but just a suburban kid who loved the music. It ended his widely commercial success in music.
Rob had just barely entered his , at the time, and went through a deep dark low to find out how he could reinvent his life. He has re-appeared as a grunge rapper, looking like a skater boy, but just in more recent years, finally found his way. He´s Vanilla Ica again, the Hip Hop rapper, but also makes extra cash with other ventures.
His spin doctor talent of flipping a situation to improve the circumstances in his favor, has turned into a professional career, because he, now, also flips houses, which he films for his own reality show The Vanilla Ice Project. This also led to him designing his own furniture line last year. And to be honest, his style is lavish, luxurious and pretty dope.
Altogether, the way things happened as Vanilla Ice the first time around may not have been on the up and up, but this time around he seems to be on top of his game businesswise and surviving all on his own strength.
