Claiming Dallas was a commercially fatal proposition. In late-’80s rap, modern-day capitals like Houston and Atlanta were considered provincial backwaters. But that was only slightly different from the approach taken by fellow Dallas native the D.O.C., who wore Raiders hats while signed to Ruthless Records. For the next dozen years, the family shuttled between diverse neighborhoods in Dallas and Dade County, where his new stepfather, Ecuadorian immigrant Byron Mino, worked at a Chevrolet dealership.Īfter fame hit, Ice was attacked for claiming Miami as his hometown. By the time the future Ice was 4, the elder Van Winkle had departed, leaving Ice’s single mom, a piano teacher, to raise him and his older half-brother. The unfortunate last name, Van Winkle, was bequeathed by the man his mother was married to at the time of birth. His biological father was never in the picture. Here are the basics: Vanilla Ice was born on Halloween in 1967, most likely in Dallas, though the first chapter (“Ice Formations”) from his quickie Avon Books memoir, Ice by Ice, claims he entered the world in a Miami suburb. You would just print the legend if you could figure out exactly what it is. Everyone’s narrative is slightly askew, which adds to the charm. A white rap Rashomon, if the bandit battled Bebop and Rocksteady. The story of Vanilla Ice has long been shrouded in a fog of shoddy reporting, breathless tall tales, and harmless self-deception. But before any of that could transpire, he had to win over the doubters in South Dallas. At 23, he was briefly the biggest rapper in the world and the public enemy of hip-hop purists-the subject of (still ongoing) debates about appropriation and authenticity. The first white solo rapper to become a pop star would have one of the most dizzying ascents and precipitous downfalls in music history.
#VANILLA ICE COOL AS ICE MOVIE#
There were Vanilla Ice dolls, a ghostwritten autobiography, a Scholastic book with MC Hammer, rock ’n’ roll comics, and a board game that came with a toy boom box a Vanilla Ice movie and cameos in both Madonna’s Sex book and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel. Its inescapable lead single, “Ice Ice Baby,” became the first rap song to top the Billboard Hot 100 and accelerated the genre’s crossover into the American mainstream. In about two years, in September 1990, the anonymous white dancer in the crowd would drop To the Extreme, which would sell 15 million copies worldwide, faster than any album since Purple Rain six years earlier. The women was loving it and getting all up on him like, ‘Oooh, look at him.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not finna stop. “City Lights was all Black, so at first I was like, ‘What does he think he’s doing?’ He could dance his ass off, and we’d never seen a white guy do that. “I noticed this white guy dancing in the crowd,” Brown says. In the DJ booth was the surgical turntablist Floyd “Earthquake” Brown, who spotted something out of the ordinary one Saturday evening. It was no place for the meek, but without risk, there is no reward. Tussles were frequent, and being Texas, half the club came strapped. This was the heart of South Dallas, the trenches. No evidence exists that Roy Tarpley was ever in attendance, but I’d bet on it. B-boys and D-boys intermingled with models and around-the-way girls.
The ballers, hustlers, and dope dealers of South Dallas coexisted in uneasy communion. Late at night, when you could feel the bass deep in your sternum, the spot would erupt to the seismic shake of Nemesis’s regional anthem “ Oak Cliff.”
The walls shook from Whodini, LL Cool J, Too Short, N.W.A, and the DFW’s own Fila Fresh Crew. They freaked and hit pop locks, the Roger Rabbit, and the wop. From Thursday night until the break of dawn Sunday morning, the dance floor rumbled with a thousand rowdy but chic revelers. By the end of Reagan’s second term, a local entrepreneur named Tommy Quon had resurrected it as the hip-hop epicenter of North Texas. Originally a segregated postwar movie palace christened the Forest Theater, it was alternately transformed into a jazz cellar, a recording studio, and the stage for legendary seances by B.B. The property had already weathered several boom-and-bust cycles. The only thing anyone can agree on is that at the height of hip-hop’s first Golden Age, all the action in the Triple D went down at a club called City Lights. All exact dates have dissolved into a haze of liquor, hair spray, and the tinnitus caused by long-gone 808 claps. It was the winter of 1987-88 in South Dallas, or maybe it was the following summer. Vanilla Ice was discovered on Martin Luther King Jr. “Robby Van Winkle and Vanilla Ice are the American dream come true.” -Vanilla Ice, Ice by Ice I.
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