One of Maggie’s work friends gave her a CD from her recent wedding and I was listening to some of it on my ride home tonight.  Most of the CD contained slow, country ballads that I quickly skipped over, but I did stop and listen to Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice.  In the years since its release, I’ve usually only heard this song or played it during compilations like this wedding CD, and even those times were few and far between.  It’s a little unfortunate, all said and done, because at the time, I thought it was the greatest thing to hit the suburbs since Skidz(tm) and overalls with one strap hanging off.  Vanilla Ice was white, he could rap, he could dance.  He wore fresh threads and kicks, and rolled around in his Mustang 5.0 with the ragtop down so his hair could blow.  It was everything that a suburban white boy with too much time on his hands could aspire to in 1990.

Then it all came crashing down for Vanilla Ice and suburban youth everywhere when The Dallas Morning News broke the story that Vanilla Ice’s handlers had fabricated his entire biography.  Reporter Ken Parish Perkins discovered that not only was Vanilla Ice’s real name a definitely not street sounding Rob Van Winkle, but he had also not been raised on the inner city streets of Miami and attended Palmetto High.  Winkle had, in fact, been raised in suburban Texas and graduated from R. L. Turner High School, a member of the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District.  Radio jocks had a field day with the revelation and white kids hung their head in shame.

The problem wasn’t that the 19-year old Vanilla Ice didn’t live up to the tough guy, street cred bio that had been sent to program directors and the public seldom saw, but that it looked like being a white kid from the suburbs was something to be ashamed of.  I’ll be the first to admit that life in an affluent suburb doesn’t require the level of street smarts and mental and physical toughness that an inner city may require.  Trouble didn’t just find us, we had to go seek it out and bring it home.  And that’s just what we did and what most suburban kids do when they have too much time and too little responsibility.  We thought we could hang with the toughest of them and that we were so cool, but now one of our own was caught in a lie about who he was.

The effect was profound and set back white rap for years.  It destroyed Vanilla Ice’s career and pushed Rob Van Winkle, who plausibly claims to have been lead astray by an overeager record company, over the edge.  The drop from fame and turn to infamy caused Van Winkle constant agony that eventually led to serious drug abuse and two suicide attempts even as he continued to attempt to reinvent himself and restore his failed recording career.  As the years went on, Van Winkle got angrier and angrier.  In 1999 he appeared on an MTV program titled 25 to Lame where he smashed a videotape of Ice Ice Baby in a symbolic move that represented the station’s commitment to never airing the video again, not a particularly bold move considering the limited amount of time the network actually dedicates to airing videos.  Van Winkle smashed the tape with a baseball bat and then continued to smash the set until the program quickly cut to commercial and he was removed from the set.

Years later, Rob Van Winkle appeared on VH1’s Surreal Life, another non-music program on a once music network, with recently deceased Tammy Faye (Baker) Messner.  Van Winkle’s anger was a constant topic of discussion on the show, particularly his attitudes toward his former image and his former self.  He was particularly incensed at his artist-rendered portrait on the wall from the Ice Ice Baby years.  During one cast excursion to a karaoke bar, cast mate, Trishelle asked him to perform his signature song.  At first, he was adamantly against performing, but was eventually convinced to take the microphone.  Van Winkle was ready for the worst, but the crowd really took to him, cheered, and sang along with the lyrics.  It was as though a dark cloud had been lifted from his persona and the initially hesitant Van Winkle embraced the moment and put on a great show for the crowd.  In the course of several minutes, he appeared completely transformed and was pleasant and happy for the rest of the Surreal Life season.

The following year, I caught Vanilla Ice again on TV on the short-lived Hit Me One More Time, an NBC program that featured one-hit wonders competing against one another by performing their signature selection and then a cover of a modern song.  Ice took the stage and performed an updated and completely remixed version of the song to resounding applause.  His follow up with a cover of Destiny Child’s Survivor cynched his win for the night.  The victory showed that Van Winkle could only succeed and shake off the stigma of disgrace by acknowledging his past and accepting who he was and is.  It was a lesson that took him fifteen years to learn, and one worth remembering.

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”
Vaclav Havel