When Glee’s cover of a pop classic is more entertaining than the original, you know it’s bad. Those were my thoughts when I heard ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’, the opening track from To The Extreme by the infamous Vanilla Ice.
I found this shit heap in a shoebox at a giant flee market in Copenhagen for less than a quid. This is an album that manages the difficult task of being not only cripplingly awful, but quite possibly the most snooze-inducing piece of rubbish hip hop has ever produced.
I know, I know: it’s cliché to hate on Mr Ice, but in my mind I had remembered him as being at least catchy and kitsch, instead he’s mindnumbingly boring. ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’ was the first hip-hop track to enter the Billboard 100 and dominates the album.
Track seven is one of the only other singles, ‘Play That Funky Music’, but it has a weird echoey ring in the background that either sounds like post-coital snoring or an alarm clock. Then there’s the high degree of irritation one feels at a) his rapping skills, b) his misogyny and apparent poor sexual technique, and c) his constant need to reassert his skin colour.
A more half-arsed album is difficult to imagine.
