Too cold too cold
– ‘Ice Ice Baby’, Vanilla Ice

One must approach an analysis of Vanilla Ice’s important debut lyric by chipping away at it slowly – like a crafter of a delicate ice sculpture – or by sipping it in small doses, like a double scotch on the rocks. Let us start then, with the infamous opening lines, which take place after the first hearing of the even more infamous refrain (discussed in more detail anon).

“All right stop / Collaborate and listen” demands the singer, claiming that the audience were somehow not prepared for the upcoming artistic experience. They demand that the listener "stop" their former activities, whatever they may have been, and pause… freeze… Thus the listener becomes like ice itself for the duration of the song, frozen in time.

"Nodding to Milton with his use of syntactical inversion, Ice’s wordplay here produces a vivid image of the rapper pelting stones at a microphone"

“Yo, VIP”, says the (surprisingly liquid) voice of Vanilla Ice. The listener is put into a literally privileged position: we are not only a person, not only, indeed, an important person, but a very important person. The hyperbole is significant: we cannot help but be flattered by his words... Flattered enough, perhaps, to commit the miscellaneous acts of vandalism that he commands us to undertake. Let us, indeed, “kick it”, the audience thinks, not even stopping to question what “it” might be.

What if “it” were a helpless child? Hmm? What if “it” were your own mother? It might very well be. After all, it is she who Ice talks to in the closing lines of the poem: “Yo man, let's get out of here / Word to your mother.”

We can see again, that ambiguity and mystery are intrinsic to Ice’s style: what “word” exactly, are we meant to be passing on through the maternal line? Is this perhaps a Freudian desire to return to the generative womb? But to avoid society’s condemnation of that incest, the implicitly sexual act of “get[ting] out of here” with one’s mother, the intercourse is turned into a purely linguistic exchange? Is the sex act euphemistically just a ‘word’? Perhaps. Or, indeed, perhaps not.

Let us return again to the motif of vandalism, which recurs with disconcerting regularity in this aural poem. “To the extreme I rock the mic like a vandal”, claims Ice. Nodding to Milton with his use of syntactical inversion, Ice’s wordplay here produces a vivid image of the rapper pelting stones at a microphone. Presumably, he usually misses his target due to the microphone’s thin surface area. Perhaps this is why his throwing must be so “extreme” and why he tauntingly tells the rap rival that they "better hit bullseye".

The banter doesn’t stop there: Ice promises that he will "light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle." In a delicious subversion of the listener’s expectations, Ice has here combusted into a bright, burning fire. He is so hot that any rival chump will metamorphose into a perspiring candle, a tapering taper. His putdowns are unsurprisingly cool as ice.

The glamorisation of vandalism also occurs in the song’s  companion music video. It is, of course, vitally important to juxtapose the moving image with Ice’s linguistic counterpart: if a picture can paint a thousand words, Ice’s video can grafitti at least a million. Vanilla’s kinetic masterpiece opens with the fluorescent pink and green, bubbly-fonted words ‘Ice Ice Baby’ - words which simultaneously refer to the performer, the lyricist, and the title of the song (a coincidence? I think not.)

These enigmatic words act as a refrain, a leitmotif, throughout the whole piece. We are drawn back to them ineluctably, repetitively, pathologically, repetitively. Yet though these words seem malleable through their varied connotations, their insistent repetition seems paradoxically to assure their rigidity – they have cutting solidity. Therefore the words hold within themselves the same potential as the "ice" which they describe: rigid, able to be sculpted, solid enough for Elsa to make a castle out of it; yet at the same time, alas, brittle as glass.

The ambiguity deliberately places the listener (‘very important’ though they may be) at a teleological distance from Ice. The indeterminacy means that we can never get too close to fully understanding his artic vision: however one might desire comprehension, “grab[bed] a hold of tightly” by his words, the connection crumbles as it is dealt on for too long. Like ice, our attempt to understand his words melt when it undergoes too much handling.

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It seems clear (like ice) that one can only condense the depth of meaning in Vanilla’s magnum opus by quoting the master himself: “Will it ever stop? / Yo I don’t know.” We are reminded of Hamlet’s eternal, awful plea: "Oh that this too too solid ice would melt". But unlike Hamlet, 'Ice Ice Baby' can never "Thaw and resolve itself"; we can only "check out the hook", while his "DJ revolves it". Revolving, never resolving... Like a deadly poisonous mushroom, Ice is “killin’ your brain” when he plays this dope melody.

Indeed he is, but “Killin” in what sense exactly? Killing in Urban Dictionary’s top sense of "doing exceptionally well at something"? Or their second-best definition, of "Chuck Norris’ alternative to going hunting"? Or killing as in Hamlet’s anxious longing for suicide? Certainly I have felt Hamlet’s dreadful desire upon listening to 'Ice Ice Baby' too many times. We may never know exactly what Ice meant here. All that we can know, is that it is easy to see why Ice’s complex and emotionally arresting masterpiece has won multiple awards