2008Released
4:14

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Ice Ice Baby. By Songfacts®.

For the most part, the lyrics are a boastful rant about rocking a party, but there is a semblance of story starting with the line, "Rollin' in my 5.0." We hear about Vanilla rolling through Miami, checking out the lovely ladies when a shooting breaks out. Vanilla is armed (with his 9mm), but doesn't use it, instead hitting the gas and getting out of there. When the police show up, they ignore him ("They passed me up, confronted all the dope fiends"). Problem solved. Ice says that he wrote the lyrics in 30 minutes, and they the are based in fact. He told Entertainment Weekly in 2016: "The song tells you the story. It's me, with my top down, in my 5.0 Mustang, cruising down A1A Beachfront Avenue. It's a weekend experience that turned into an amazing song. It's timeless. I still love singing it, and it never gets old."

This samples the 1980 song "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie, but Vanilla Ice never got permission to use it. No lawsuit was filed, but it is likely that Vanilla Ice agreed to pay Queen and Bowie a settlement. According to industry insider Hans Ebert, Brian May of Queen first heard this song in a disco in Germany. He asked the DJ what it was, and learned that it was #1 in the US.

A rapper for Death Row Records, Mario "Chocolate" Johnson, claimed that he wrote part of this song and was not given credit, leading to a story that has become hip-hop lore. Label boss Suge Knight, along with Johnson and a football player for the Los Angeles Raiders, visited Vanilla Ice and convinced him to sign over the publishing rights to Death Row. It is rumored that part of the convincing involved hanging Vanilla Ice over a balcony by his ankles, but Ice denied it, saying the story got exaggerated and that Knight was polite in his request. Knight made a lot of money from those publishing rights, which went into Death Row Records and the development of artists like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Ice Ice Baby.
DKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
116BPM

Album

The album Ice Ice Baby is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Ice Ice Baby.
X-Ray Records
2008 X-Ray Records

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