

One evening he visited City Lights, a South Dallas nightclub, where he was dared to go on stage by his friend Squirrel during an open-mic. Ice used his beatboxing and breakdancing skills as a street performer with his friends at local malls during this time. After breaking his ankle during a race, Ice was not interested in racing professionally for some time, using his spare time to perfect his dance moves and creating his own while his ankle was healing.

In 1985, he was focusing all of his energy on motocross, winning three championships. The lyrics describe Ice and Shay on a drug run that ends in a drive-by shooting while praising Ice's rhyming skills. Ice wrote " Ice Ice Baby" at the age of 16, basing its lyrics on a weekend he had with friend and disc jockey D-Shay in South Florida. When Ice was not learning to ride motorbikes, he was dancing as a street performer with his breakdancing group, now called The Vanilla Ice Posse. When Ice's stepfather was offered a better job in Carrollton, Texas, he moved back to Texas with his mother. However, when he became a member of a breakdance troupe, Van Winkle's stage name was "Vanilla Ice" combining his nickname "Vanilla" with one of his breakdance moves, "The Ice". Shortly afterward, Van Winkle started battle rapping at parties and because of his rhymes, his friends started calling him "MC Vanilla". Although he disliked the nickname, it stuck. I was just heavily influenced by that whole movement and it's molded me into who I am today." Between the ages of 13 and 14, Van Winkle practiced breakdancing, which led to his friends nicknaming him "Vanilla", as he was the only one in the group who was not black. Van Winkle was affected by hip hop at an early age, saying "It's a very big passion of mine because I love poetry. Afterward, he grew up moving between Dallas and Miami, where his new stepfather worked at a car dealership. When Van Winkle was four, his mother divorced. Van Winkle has never known his biological father he was given the family name of the man his mother was married to at the time of his birth. Robert Matthew Van Winkle was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 31, 1967.

Born in South Dallas, and raised in Texas and South Florida, Ice released his debut album, Hooked, in 1989 on Ichiban Records, before signing a contract with SBK Records, a record label of the EMI Group, which released a reformatted version of the album in 1990 under the title To the Extreme which became the fastest-selling hip hop album of all time and contained Ice's best-known hits: " Ice Ice Baby" and a cover of " Play That Funky Music". Robert Matthew Van Winkle (born October 31, 1967), known professionally as Vanilla Ice, is an American rapper, actor, and television host.
