POPFESSIONS

Stuart Dredge

In 1990, tens of thousands of people were happily getting off their boxes to repetitive beats in fields and warehouses around the UK. Not this 13-year-old. I was captivating every girl at the school disco with awesome dance moves to Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’ in my best shellsuit.
 
Vanilla Ice may be a figure of fun, fit only for mildly exploitative reality TV shows nowadays, but back in 1990 he was Tha Bomb for middle-class white children whose sole prior experience of hip-hop was that novelty single by Morris Minor & The Majors. Which is a whole other Popfessions post.
 
Ice flowed like a harpoon. He waxed chumps like candles, bum-rushed speakers and killed brains like poisonous mushrooms. He cooked MCs like bacon, went crazy when he heard cymbals, and his friend Shay had a gauge.
 
(Whatever that was. I thought my dad had one in the garage for the car, but it surely wouldn’t be as cool as Shay’s.)
 
Which is how it came to pass that later that year, I was part of a spontaneous flashmob of boys doing the ‘Ice Ice Baby’ dance – it involved lots of leg-crossing jumping as I recall – to attract the girls who were… Well, they were somewhere in the room. The DJ was a little over-keen with the dry ice button.
 
In the longer term, though, I’m proud of my teenage bad self. It was the first time I ever danced in public, after all. A thrill mixed with an early sense of belonging to something – even if that something was a raggle-taggle of boys giving the school’s fire safety officer a nervo with a combination of polyester friction and flammable hair gel.
 
I’m still word perfect on ‘Ice Ice Baby’ on SingStar, magnetising friends with my mic while I kick my juice. Well, I say “magnetising”…