Vanilla Ice

Despite attempts to create an image of a childhood steeped in street gang violence, Vanilla Ice started out singing in a church choir until he was 15. Drawn to the emerging hip hop scene, he started rapping in high school and wrote his later hit Ice Ice Baby when only 16. Ice signed a contract with Ichiban Records in 1989, releasing his debut album Hooked. When a year later Ice signed a deal with SBK Records, they re-released his album under a new name To The Extreme. Credited with bringing hip hop to a mainstream audience, his single Ice Ice Baby which sampled David Bowie and Queen's Under Pressure, became a worldwide hit. It was the first hip hop single to reach Number 1 in the Billboard charts in the US, while the album became the fastest-selling hip hop album shifting seven million copies. After appearing in the film Cool As Ice, he took a few years out, returning in 1994 with his second album Mind Blowin. But the album was a commercial failure and Ice tried to reinvent himself: first aping the gangsta-rap model in the ascendency with the aptly-named album Hard To Swallow in 1998; and then as a rap-rock act with Bipolar in 2001. Neither attempts succeeded in getting him back into the musical limelight, nor did the release of his fifth album Platinum Underground in 2005.