Records: Vanilla Ice's Hard to Swallow

By Matt Wiegle

Vanilla Ice was a prefabricated "badass," so toothless that he needed the police to bail him out of his encounters with eightball-fueled chumps. He made rap music safe for seventh grade girls with fan-shaped hair, but, like many fads, he didn't keep. Within a year, both he and the fan-hair were gone. With Hard to Swallow, though, the former "Elvis of Rap" returns, this time with a jones for "authenticity." He's started calling himself Robert Van Winkle more often, ditched his proto-Puffy sampling, and gathered a live band under the guidance of his Svengali, producer Ross Robinson (KoRn, Limp Bizkit).

This is not your junior high cheerleading squad's Vanilla Ice--Messrs. Van Winkle and Robinson expend a lot of sonic and verbal effort to convince us that they've left that loser floating in the Everglades with multiple stab wounds. On "Too Cold," the central track of the album, they remake "Ice Ice Baby" in Van Winkle's new image: he roars out the words to his old standard from within a mass of heavy guitar sounds and pulsating buzz-noises. It's like seeing your old teddy bear get fed to a blender.

Ice is angry at the seven years of abuse he had to take to reach his epiphany, and the album's first track, "Living," details his plans for taking revenge on the Ice-dissing suckers like, well, you. First, he's going to slit your throat. Then he's going to "bash you in the head/ 'til you're dead/ with [his] magnum."

Anger is almost all that Ice expresses. He engages in a howling call-and-response with a heckler in "Fuck Me." He screams at record companies on "S.n.a.f.u." Even when he mellows out and blazes up "a sack of that green Bombay" in the first verse of "Zig Zag Stories," he's back "stomping through the bayou" and damaging people by the third verse.

Maybe, as Vanilla says on "A.D.D," he just can't be himself. But there are performers who have had more makeovers than him and survived. Of course, there's probably a reason why Madonna never claimed to be "like Timothy McVeigh/ but I don't blow up any buildings," as Ice does on "Freestyle." Wait and see. His next comeback might be fun. (Republic)

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