(From Top Of The Pops TV show; 1990)
Say what you want about Vanilla Ice, but this clip of him performing live on British TV proves he could rhyme and dance at the SAME DAMN TIME! It's a performance every bit as good as 3rd Bass doing The Gas Face on Arsenio Hall's show, and it lends credence to my theory that the real reason MC Serch hated Vanilla Ice was because Ice was a far better dancer than him (plus Ice had a better flat-top hairdoo.) There's nowt more pathetic than a white boi rapper who turnt green with jealousy.
In hindsight, I probably should have included Ice Ice Baby in my One Song Wonders™ list. The thing about Ice Ice Baby is that everybody liked the song when it first dropped. And why wouldn't we? That shit was/is a legitimately great Rap single where a Zack Morris-type saltine with an aerodynamic flat-top borrowed the High Rollers flow to spray arrogance over the Under Pressure intro. And for that we should be thankful because only ur dad could possibly prefer Freddie Mercury & David Bowie's singing to Vanilla Ice's rhyming. It's this simple: other than Trevor Horn & Anne Dudley, Pink Floyd, Talk Talk, Peter Gabriel's So album, one Yes single, three Kate Bush singles and one Bowie single, the English middle classes have always made embarrassingly bad music. The rest of them should have sodded off back to drama school.
One point I will concede about Ice Ice Baby is that most of the graffiti in the video is pure toy-town shite. That's some "never forgive action" since Goldie was living in Miami at the time and was regularly joined by his New York writer m8s like Brim and T-Kid.
