6 degrees of seperation : Vanilla Ice to Fabolous?

I can do it in one move with Pharrell as the link between them.

So, can you guess the connection between these three without making a joke about Fabolous and Vanilla Ice having a Filipino grunt doing all the hard work while they take the credit? Here's a hint : it isn't that Fabolous and Pharrell are the other two favourite rappers of Vanilla Ice fanatic/White Rapper Show contestant G-Child, nor is it that Vanilla Ice and Fabolous each have lyrics as worthy of a Mr Humphries raised eyebrow as Pharrell's "just last week I was out in Italy/Italian heartthrobs could not get rid of me" line from Mr Me Too, or that Jedward have also added Frontin' and Toss It In The Bag to their repetoire of cover versions, and it definately isn't that Nigo has hired Ice and Fab to both issue tacky diffusion lines through A Bathing Ape after the success of Pharrell's BBC brand.

The connection seems startlingly obvious once you know it, but you probably won't have picked up on it unless you heard Pharrell's interview on Westwood in 2003 when Cormega also happened to be in the studio and revealed an unlikely seam between the two of them as his sister did back-up vocals on some old Neptunes shit when they were producing for Teddy Riley. Pharrell was talking about various productions of his and how they'd were loosely based on old rap songs so how he'd instruct whoever was rapping on them to channel the spirit of the original songs or adopt the flows or mannerisms of the rappers who created them with the most obvious example being Nothin', which is effectively a Jungle Brothers song from the perspective of a QB thug-rapper and two Filipino production nerds (or half Flip' in the case of Pharrell). Moreover, he confessed, there were certain Neptunes productions where he'd talked the rappers involved into experimenting by emulating something flagrantly corny to see if they could turn shit into shinola, before he dropped the bombshell that he'd gotten Fabolous to mimic Vanilla Ice's rhyne pattern on Ice Ice Baby for Young'n (Holla Back) and had an incredulous Westwood play it to authenticate his bold claim :

Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby



Fabolous - Young'n (Holla Back)



Whaddaya know, right? I still say that's as good a single as Breathe and everybody at my school liked Ice Ice Baby the first time they heard it in 1990. Keep your eyes peeled for an exclusive interview I did with Pharrell recently where he reveals that he's had The Clipse fashioning their rapping on Freedom Williams's stoic lyricalz from C&C Music Factory's Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) for the last four years, which would explain why they've been so utterly boring and one-dimensional since Hell Hath No Fury.