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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)

Best known for his 1990 hit single “Ice Ice Baby,” Vanilla Ice was born Robert Matthew Van Winkle on October 31, 1967 in Dallas, Texas.  While he did achieve stunning popularity with this song, it was very short lived.  His sharp and quick fall from the music scene was also one of the most well-known in the American music industry.

Vanilla Ice attended R. L. Turner High School in Carrolton, Texas, but dropped out when he was 16.  He then became interested in breakdancing and rapping.  He earned a reputation in the predominantly black local club scene during the 1980s.  By this time, he was already opening shows for then rap giants Public Enemy and M.C. Hammer.  He released a little-known debut album "Hooked" with an Atlanta-based independent recording company.

The release of “Ice Ice Baby” was accidental.  It was not the carrier single for Hooked.  It caught on with listeners, though, and the record's seeming overnight success was enough for Vanilla Ice to earn a record deal with a more established label, SBK Records.  Vanilla Ice's next album “To the Extreme” was basically a repackaged version of Hooked.  In November 1, 1990, "To the Extreme" ended M. C. Hammer's 16-week reign at the top of the Billboard Top 200 and stayed there for 16 weeks as well.

A barrage of copyright complaints and threats of lawsuits hit his virtually overnight rise to the top.  To salvage his image, his label released a biography containing mostly false information about the rapper. When all these were revealed, Vanilla Ice's popularity shot down and became the subject of many parodies, mostly focused on his falsified image.

In 2004, Vanilla Ice was cast in VH1 reality show The Surreal Life season 2, touted as the best season yet.  The show features celebrities who are said to be past their primes and puts them in a Hollywood Hills mansion for two weeks.  On the show, he was very cool about his old image and even made fun of it.  In one of the season's funnier moments, he got on former child star Gary Coleman's nerves after he bugged him to say his catch phrase “What'chu talkin' ‘bout, Willis?' several times during the diner episode.






(Photo courtesy of VH1)

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Vanilla Ice

Vanilla Ice

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