Vanilla Ice is featured as one of the members of the cast in the CMT network’s reality television series Ty Murray’s Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge. He is a Grammy Award-nominated musician who was born on October 31, 1968 in Miami Lakes, Florida with his original real name being Robert Matthew Van Winkle. He is most notorious for achieving mainstream popularity and selling more than twenty million records globally, yet having his career success last for a very short time, with it heading into a nosedive almost immediately after. Vanilla Ice’s music genre was primarily known to be rap, though he has also performed nu metal and rock.
He is the son of a classical pianist and music teacher, and studied at R.L. Turner High School in Dallas, Texas. During his musical career, his best-known single was “Ice Ice Baby,” which reached the top of the charts during the early 90s. Vanilla Ice portrayed himself as having grown up in a rough black neighborhood, though the truth came out that he was actually from a middle-class, moderately wealthy and comfortable upbringing. This contributed in part to his career decline, as well as several lawsuits against him which claimed the samples used in his music were lifted from earlier sources.
(Photo courtesy of Ron Jaffe/CMT)