The Top Ten Songs I Hated When I Was A Kid #5

I've not done one of these for a while, mainly because I've been struggling to think of any more songs I hated back when I was a kid but don't mind now. I can think of plenty I hated then and still hate now - I'd Rather Jack (Than Fleetwood Mac) by The Reynolds Girls always comes to mind, even though I really should have got over that by now. I mean, the Mac obviously had the last laugh on that one, didn't they? I'm sure there are other contenders I haven't thought of yet, and I'll get to those when I think of them, but here's one I couldn't possibly hate now as much as when it came out... I may even have developed a soft spot for it over the years.

5. Vanilla Ice - Ice, Ice Baby

All right, stop: collaborate and listen! My main reason for hating Ice, Ice Baby is plain to hear. The sample. Under Pressure. Queen AND Bowie. I mean, that's friggin' sacred, man! (Or it was when I was 18.) You don't mess with Queen AND Bowie! Even worse, old Robert Van Winkle (you can't make this stuff up) didn't even pay them for the sample at first and even tried to claim it WASN'T a sample and that he'd added an extra note (he didn't) which changed the bassline (it didn't) enough to avoid plagiarism (it didn't). To be fair, he later changed his mind on that, claimed his original quote was a joke, and paid up. (I suspect Queen AND David Bowie's lawyers might have had something to do with that.)

For a few precious weeks towards the end of 1990, nothing could stop Vanilla Ice. During that time, I hated this record. It put me off rap music (which I'd been tentatively dipping my toe into through the likes of Run DMC and the Beastie Boys) for a long time. Ironically, it'd take another white rapper - Eminem - to finally lure me back in, but that was almost a decade later.

Ice, Ice Baby was such a big, big hit that RVW wasn't ever going to be able to match it. As time went by, it became seen as a novelty record, leading the cool kids to turn against it in droves. In just over a decade, it went from being the first hip hop single to top the mainstream chart in America (and much of the rest of the world) to being voted fifth in a countdown of the 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped hating it... and it started making me smile. I'm not going to claim it's a great record: it's not. But it's stood the test of time better than a lot of music from 1990. And when Robert's big ice-skating comeback show - Vanilla Ice On Ice (I'm still not making it up) - was cancelled last year due to poor ticket sales, I felt genuinely bad for him. I guess he must have killed my brain like a poisonous mushroom...