Vanilla Ice Takes Off the Rapping

A shared immersion in popular culture gives most Americans the linguistic shorthand to crack wise in a matter of syllables. “Take my wife, please”--four bytes of verbiage likely to raise a snicker, or at least a grimace.

“Vanilla Ice” is even better: again four syllables, but just two telegraphic words, summoning a ridiculous pop artifact more current, if less fondly regarded, than Henny Youngman. The Ice joke still works, nine years after “Ice, Ice Baby” (as he styled himself in the title of his big hit) ignited a pop career as instantly disposable as a match head, but not nearly as bright.

Now 30, he is back on the touring circuit--including a show Thursday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana--in hopes of writing a second career chapter in which a ridiculed, lightweight pop-rapper is reborn as a gut-spilling ranter of crunching punk-metal. His songs sound a lot like the Orange County breakthrough band, Korn, whose producer happens to be behind Vanilla Ice’s latest recordings and is among his new champions.

Coincidentally, Korn and the Offspring, which had the two biggest-selling rock albums out of Orange County during the past year, both invoked “Vanilla Ice” as an instant metaphor for laughable inauthenticity and clueless taste on recent tracks--the Offspring’s hit “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” and Korn’s sardonic, insult-flinging number, “All in the Family.”

Quick Rise, Quick Fall

Vanilla Ice, the moniker of Miami rapper Robert Van Winkle, accumulated his ball and chain, along with his pile of loot, in short order after his 1990 debut album, “To the Extreme,” vaulted to No. 1 and sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.

Ice hit it big as a handsome, pompadoured sex-symbol who, like M.C. Hammer, could be marketed to early-teens and preteens as the nonthreatening face of rap. But he came off as defensive, not charming--especially after it was revealed his official press biography had inflated his “street” credentials and hidden his middle-class background.

A disastrous 1991 film vehicle, “Cool as Ice,” hastened his nosedive; fewer than 40,000 buyers bothered with him when he returned with his second album in 1994.

It would be an enormous feat to stop eyes from rolling at the very mention of Vanilla Ice and focus the public gaze on him as a legitimate, revived musical contender worth a second look. A New York City record executive, a Laguna Beach manager and a Malibu-based producer of rap-influenced metal bands are trying to accomplish exactly that.

Monte Lipman, the executive, helped promote Vanilla Ice’s career during his rise and fall. They remained friends and would have lunch together when Lipman, now co-owner of Republic Records, was in Miami. Lipman would notice what he calls “the John Travolta effect”--strangers flocking around this supposed has-been, treating him like a big deal, enjoying his company.

A series of low-profile rap gigs Vanilla Ice played in the South starting in 1996 drew well; Lipman resolved to play Quentin Tarantino to Ice’s Travolta and engineer a comeback unlikelier than pulp fiction.

Lipman’s theory: If Ice could laugh along with the world at the joke that was his past, and gain some musical credibility singing the “new metal” that was big with moshing collegians who had once been Ice-slurping kiddie-pop fans, the gambit could work.

Last spring, he telephoned John Reese, who manages rockers for Laguna Beach-based Freeze Management, and asked him and his client, producer Ross Robinson, to fly to Miami and check out the new-flavor Vanilla Ice.

Coincidence was Lipman’s ally: The night before, Reese had watched a video of the film comedy “Austin Powers” in which Vanilla Ice is seen preserved for posterity in a hyperbaric chamber next to Gary Coleman. Reese figured that Fate might be knocking; Robinson chuckled but agreed to an expenses-paid trip to Miami to see if Ice could be more than a gag line. In a rehearsal garage in South Florida’s swampy scrubland, Robinson heard what Vanilla Ice had been laying down with a band called Picking Scabs. “He played a track and it wasn’t bad. I could hear he was talented and completely there. I had no worries as a producer.”

Perhaps more important, Robinson, who is known for coaxing intense psychodrama out of performers, connected with Vanilla Ice personally and wanted to champion his comeback.

“It turned into a crusade to change people’s minds,” Robinson said. “It’s the most hard-core thing I could possibly do. If you do Vanilla Ice, you’re showing lots of courage and no fear.”

Robinson picked the musicians and constructed the sound for Ice’s comeback album, “Hard to Swallow.” Vanilla Ice wrote most of the lyrics and does a credible job hollering over the music’s roar.

Angst and Humor

Now Ice is on tour, trying to prove his credibility as an angst-rocker with a sense of humor. That brought him to a hotel room in Des Moines last week, whence a telephoning interviewer’s first inquiry, “Is this Vanilla Ice?,” was greeted, in a nondefensive voice, with a simple, “Rob.”

Rob Ice proved a personable and open fellow who made the following points with utmost sincerity:

The joke’s on him that he became a joke: “As far as being turned into a novelty act, that was totally my option. I sold out, took the money, and I became a puppet.”

Being a joke preyed on him so much, he said, he tried to end it one night in 1994 by ingesting a mixture of heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy that he hoped would prove lethal--only to be revived by friends.

“I read everything, I see everything, and it was very depressing. I was focusing on the people that hated me. The only way I could escape from reality was get high. I had millions of dollars in the bank, a Porsche in the garage, boats in the backyard, all the material things anybody could want, and here I am, trying to escape permanently.”

He said psychotherapy, marriage and raising a 16-month-old daughter have set him back on course. He can take the gibes of those who think he’s a joke: Witness his surprise guest turn with the Offspring in December at KROQ’s “Almost Acoustic Christmas” show in Los Angeles, jumping forward to sing “Ice, Ice Baby” with them at the very moment during “Pretty Fly” when they invoke his name. Reese, who now manages Vanilla Ice, said the gambit was proposed by Ice’s camp and enthusiastically embraced by the Offspring.

“I laugh at it, man,” Ice said of his continued currency in the pop joke book. “I’m not running or hiding from anything. I accept my past, and go along with everything.”

It’s liberating, he said, to address painful subjects from his childhood, including family disarray and feelings of humiliation touched on in “Scars” and “A.D.D.,” which he considers the album’s breakthrough songs.

“I was talking to [Ross Robinson] over dinner, and he said, ‘Dude, if you write about this stuff, you’re going to let it out and then you’ll be free.’ Now I want to write a diary, what’s real to my heart. I don’t judge the success of this record off how many records I sell, but by what I achieve [personally]. It’s been a triumph all the way so far.”

Reese said about 50,000 copies have been sold since the album’s late-October release and that good crowds have turned up for tour dates. The game plan, say Reese and Lipman, is to forgo any attempt at generating a quick MTV hit, build a grass-roots fan base with touring in clubs and small theaters, sell 100,000 to 200,000 copies of “Hard to Swallow,” then gear up for a bigger push on a follow-up album in the year 2000. Who would have thought Vanilla Ice could endure through the millennium?

Says Lipman: “I told Ice, ‘The fact that these guys are still talking about you means you’re still relevant.’ He still strikes a chord. It doesn’t matter [that it’s ridicule]. I don’t hear people making jokes about M.C. Hammer. Nobody cares. If they’re making jokes about it, it means you’re still in their consciousness.”

* Vanilla Ice, Freakdaddy, White Trash Disco and Absolute play Thursday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $16.50-$18.50. (714) 957-0600.