![]() ![]() Johnny meets Kathy, a straight-laced Honor student, and strikes up a romance with her against the wishes of her father (Gross) and her boyfriend (some choad). They get trapped in some crummy small town and just…hang out…until the cycle is repaired. Īnyway, Cool as Ice follows the adventures of Johnny Van Owen, a rapper and motorcyclist, as he and his backup band ride through the Midwest between gigs until one of their stupid motorcycles break down. Maybe he was suffering from a congenital eye disease when working on Cool as Ice. Speaking of gross, Michael “ Family Ties ” Gross is in this film, which would be surprising if it it weren’t superseded by the fact the director of photography eventually went on to be the cinematographer for Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Minority Report, which is downright mind-blowing. How to quantify a movie that has no other raison d’être than to promote the person starring in it? The plot is paper-thin and hacky, the direction is frankly bizarre at times, and whoever thought an audience would willingly pay money to watch this movie grossly overestimated the appeal of Vanilla Van Winkle. Of course, it also doesn’t help that Cool as Ice is a terrible movie. Released October 18, 1991, Cool as Ice found itself in a radically different culture than the one Vanilla Ice had reigned supreme just a year earlier, with the Seattle Sound quickly ascending to the spot it would largely hold until the end of the decade and the youth of America realizing that 8-ball jackets, motorcycles, and cheesy white boy hip-hop was decidedly embarrassing for everyone involved. The problem was, by the time the movie came out, the cultural moment had passed for Vanilla Ice to be considered “cool.” He already showed up at the end of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, for cripes sake, what did he want, the moon ? Some distinguished capitalists got together and, combined with Universal Studios, decided that what this young rapping fellow needed was to star in a feature film. ![]() It was literally Vanilla Ice being considered cool before Nirvana stepped in and reminded everybody what good music was supposed to sound like and what being cool looked like.Īnd it being the 1990s (and the late 20th century in America in general) we were a country with almost too much money on its hands and limited media outlets to which we could turn. ![]() The culture flailed away like a kid going through puberty, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, taking a tacky misstep to distinguish itself from the previous decade with ill-advised musical, aesthetic, and sartorial choices in the process. It’s staggering to imagine a time in history where this was considered 1) good music, 2) worthy of gigantic success, and 3) something people would listen to unironically.īut such was life in 1990: the 1980s had just barely ended and America was still a year away from grunge music and two years away from Bill Clinton in the White House. With the privilege of hindsight, think about this: that song was the first hip hop single to top the Billboard charts in history and its album spent sixteen weeks at #1 on the charts. To modern ears it sounds like hip-hop for babies. You may already be familiar with what Vanilla Ice was in pop culture history, but just to let it sink in before this article/recap goes any further, click here and watch as long as you can stand it. If someone tried to pull his lame act in modern times, he would most likely be soundly mocked in his first YouTube video and then quit his aspirations long before it got as far as it did with his limited appeal. Looking back, it’s almost unbelievable that Ice (real name Matthew Van Winkle, which is much better than his silly stage name) got as far as he did in his career. The trend in rap and hip-hop circa 1990 was to ease the country at large into this genre by introducing it through clean, inoffensive, easy-to-follow rhyming couplets and upbeat drum loops before dropping the seismic hammer that was Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, and Biggy Smalls.īut first pop culture had to endure the shameful rapping stylistics of Vanilla Ice. MC Hammer had the skills to pay the bills (well, at least for a little while), but he’s not known for his rap career in the 21st century. While Will Smith was a likable personality, his rap “career” was really a stepping stone to a far more successful acting career. At one point in the history of America -specifically the beautiful, stupid early 1990s – there was an awkward transition in pop culture when rap music was on the verge of being a mainstream genre and something entertainers aped to seem hip without actually working too hard at making their rap good or authentic. ![]()
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