Damn. I just looked for some video, and none to be found. It's always nice when huge corporations stomp on people sharing data that they themselves refuse to share.
You've got to first watch Behind the Music: Vanilla Ice. This shows what a fucktard he is. You start off thinking, "He got screwed by the industry," but they show how much of a Flornbi or a Liefeld he is. A couple of especially great bits show him telling the same story three times over a ten-year period, all shown back to back, and you can see how much the story changes.
He was apparently too stupid to realize what a punk bitch he'd been made to look like, since he appeared on The Surreal Life not too long afterward.
On The Surreal Life, he was this angry motherfucker, probably because no one had bought any of his albums in ages. Dealing with folks like Erik Estrada and Ron Jeremy and the late Tammy Faye Bakker, he actually seems to come to grips with his past and be on the road to becoming "normal." Maybe even coming back.
Then came Remaking, a short-lived show where they take totally washed-up artists and reinvent them. The first one was on Vince Neil; they helped him lose weight, update his sound, get a makeover, and hire a new band. He was totally receptive to the ideas of the experts VH1 hired, even when he didn't actually use them. IIRC, he actually was going to get a new record contract out of it, but Motley Crue reformed the next week.
Remaking: Vanilla Ice may be the funniest thing ever filmed. It starts off showing him at a gig. Swear to God, he's playing a shitty heavy metal version of "Ninja Rap" at a county fair, and people are throwing beer bottles at him. He seems to think it's cool, and that's just the way his real fans show their affection.
So they bring in experts, and, for every single fucking thing, he simply refuses their advice and says, "I've been there, done that, got thrown under a bus." Even for wardrobe. He's wearing slouchy denim shorts and a t-shirt with a backward cap. (He goes through various modes trying to ape whatever's hot, but apparently got stuck in Fred Durst mode and wasn't sent the memo that Limp Bizkit was no longer popular.) These guys weren't telling him to boof up his hair and wear a shiny metallic suit. They just wanted him to look less like a trailer park loser.
The absolute funniest part of the show is when they bring in some big producers (I think the Neptunes), who lay down a beat, and he starts freestyling. And everyone's saying stuff like, "Wow! Who knew Vanilla Ice could freestyle like that?" So he takes the lyrics to his band, so they can rehearse the live version of it. The drummer (who's portrayed throughout as a sympathetic guy who wants Ice to reinvent himself, and is tired of putting up with his shit) says, "He started rapping, and I thought it was good at first, and then it hit me: that's a song I wrote for our last album!"
In the end, Ice gets this gig at a big Hollywood club, with all these producers and executives who are supposed to see the reinvented Vanilla Ice and start this bidding war over him, and he comes out in his Fred Durst clothes and does a shitty heavy metal version of "Ninja Rap." Needless to say, nothing changed with his career.
Yeah, he got totally used at the beginning of his career, but so did guys like Billy Joel and John Cougar Mellencamp, but you don't see them bitching and making idiots of themselves.
