The Best of Vanilla Ice

Album Review

Vanilla Ice is one of those artists whose best moments are widely considered indefensible, and many listeners will be satisfied with having "Ice Ice Baby" on a various-artists compilation for the nostalgia and/or kitsch value. For those who want a bigger extract (ha!) of Vanilla's career, The Best of Vanilla Ice offers ten tracks that summarize things pretty effectively. There's one major selection drawback, namely that the hit version of "Play That Funky Music" is replaced by a live performance, but if you want it badly enough to buy a Vanilla Ice album, there's always To the Extreme. So what's here that isn't on his one big album? Quite a bit, actually. You get "Ninja Rap," his oddly anthemic theme to one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies; a non-LP version of "Satisfaction" whose samples are typically obvious and straightforward; the theme to Ice's movie, "Cool as Ice (Everybody Get Loose)"; "Rollin' in My 5.0," the new track from Extremely Live; and "Roll 'Em Up," the calculated, Cypress Hill-style ode to marijuana from 1994's Mind Blowin, which failed to reinvent him for the hardcore set. So if To the Extreme captures Vanilla Ice the short-lived pop phenomenon, The Best of Vanilla Ice also covers the misfires that sped up his already rapid decline and fall.