[To complement
last week’s series on winter histories, I wanted to focus this week on cultural
representations of the cold, wintry and otherwise. Add your cultural
connections for the cold, in all media and genres and with all meanings, for a
frrrrrrrigid weekend post, please!]
On two
AmericanStudies stages to Vanilla Ice’s story—beyond the obvious one, that is.
When Dallas-born
rapper Robert
Van Winkle chose “Vanilla Ice” as
his stage name, he embraced quite overtly and strikingly the complex cultural dynamics
that have accompanied “white
rappers” for as long as both the
musical genre and the identity
category have existed. In case that wasn’t overt enough, it was Ice’s single “Ice Ice Baby”
(1990) that became not only his first and biggest hit, but also the
first hip hop single to top the Billboard
charts. And just in case that still didn’t introduce such cultural and social
questions sufficiently, the song and rapper were subsequently embroiled in accusations
that its famous bass line had been sampled without permission from the Queen and David Bowie
classic “Under Pressure” (an accusation that Ice answered with one of the more humorous plagiarism
defenses in cultural history). Lots of AmericanStudies contexts and
connections for a simple ditty that just asked us all to stop, collaborate, and
listen.
Ice has never
been as popular or culturally resonant as he was in that initial, 1990 moment
of ascension, but that doesn’t mean that his evolving American story hasn’t
included other telling moments and stages. With his late 1991 action film Cool as Ice Ice made a bid to become the
latest in a long line of American musical artists who had parlayed that success
into film stardom: Elvis
Presley is often cited as the prototype, but Bing
Crosby and Frank
Sinatra both got there first, and subsequent superstars such as Madonna
have made the same move (if, in her case, with more mixed success to be sure). Yet
Ice’s
film debut tanked, both in box office and with the critics—so much so, in
fact, that it led his
record label, SBK, to decide he was overexposed and pull back on their
support, a shift that would mark the beginning of the end of his stardom. I
haven’t seen Cool as Ice, and it’s
possible that the film is just that bad—but it’s not like all 31 of Elvis’s
scripted films were Oscar contenders either, so it’d be fair to ask whether the
backlash against Ice’s film had something to do with our contemporary cultural
tendency to first obsess over and then push back against ubiquitous cultural
icons (see also: Hammer,
MC).
Whatever the
reasons, Cool as Ice’s failure
coincided with—if indeed it did not cause—Ice’s fall, and as quickly as he had
become a star he was out of the public eye. As I noted in
this post, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous belief that “there are no second
acts in American lives” was framed in specific response to first act collapses
or failures; if we measure such acts by fame or other prominent markers of
success, than Ice has indeed not found a second act to match his first. But why
should we measure a life’s acts by fame or the like, especially in the aforementioned
short-attention-span era, when we move on to the next new celebrity as quickly
as we embraced the last one? Why not simply follow the acts and stages of every
artist’s career and life, and see where they might take us? Seen in that light,
Ice has had a varied and interesting post-stardom arc: it includes a clichéd but
unfortunately authentic battle
with substance abuse, but also features time as a professional motorcross
racer, aesthetic shifts to both hard rock and reggae (among other
genres), and an extended and ongoing participation in the
notorious Juggalo community (fans of the Insane Clown Posse). Not a neat or
simple story to be sure—but a very 21st century American one.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other cold connections you’d highlight for that
weekend post?
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