Vanilla Ice is to rap music what vanilla ice cream is to rap music: bland and wildly unnecessary. And you can dress it up any way you want, but underneath all that flash (and chocolate syrup) there's still just a bowl of boringness. When he was finally, mercifully pushed out of mainstream consciousness in the mid-90s, Ice took it hard. Real hard. And how do you bounce back from something like that? You get hard yourself. In fact, you get...Hard to Swallow. Ice was somehow even less nuance than Fred Durst when it came to mixing hardcore rap and metal. The response by critics could be generously called "lukewarm." The response by consumers was worse, with most wishing they've never heard his "edgier" version of his biggest hit, "Ice, Ice, Baby" which he repurposed for Hard to Swallow. From there, a life of reality TV participation and guest spots in box office failures was just a few years away.
