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Today we take a look at the time rapper Vanilla Ice ripped off legendary rock band Queen.

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#queen #freddiemercury #vanillaice #underpressure #iceicebaby

What’s going on my fellow rock n’ rollers don’t forget to hit the bell notification icon to be notified every time I put out a new video on my channel. This day and age sampling has become commonplace and it’s much harder for musicians to lift or use other artists' music without permission because of the internet That wasn’t the case in the 80’s and 90’s as artists wouldn’t even know their music had been used without their permission until they heard it on the radio. So what happened when rapper Vanilla Ice ripped off the rock band Queen offf and what was freddie mercury’s reaction? Stay tuned to find out!

I had previously talked about Led Zeppelin not even knowing their music was sampled by the beastie boys on their debut record License to Ill and follow up Paul’s Boutique and while they could have pursued legal action against the trio they didn’t. That wasn’t the case for Queen and Vanilla Ice.

Rapper Vanilla Ice became a household name in the early 90’s because of his song Ice Ice Baby. The rapper claimed he came up with the track years prior in 1983 when he was in high school. The song was notable because it was the first hip hop song in history to top the billboard hot 100 charts. It would start a trend that persists to this day. Even though Vanila Ice made history he still had his detractors with some accusing him of cultural appropriation. He had embelished his rap credentials claiming he grew up in the rough streets of Miami and won motorcross championships for Honda when in fact he grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, had a middle class upbringing and Honda had never heard of him. When a Dallas morning news checked his claims and confronted him with this his response was ”None of your (expletive) business,” Apparently Ice’s record label helped concot the story of his rough upbringing to give the rapper more street cred.

That wasn’t the only problem for Vanilla Ice as even though the internet wasn’t around in 1990, people immediately noticed the similarities between Dallas Born rappers song “ice ice baby’and the 1981 Queen & David Bowie collaboration ‘Under Pressure’. They shared pretty much the same bass line. Vanilla Ice never credited Queen & David Bowie so they didn’t make any money off the song’s royalties initially. Vanilla Ice claimed he didn’t sample Queen directly because he added extra beats to the bass line. Here’s him explaining himself so elloquntly.

Only a few years ago we learned former Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s reaction to the song from his former assistant Mercury's Peter "Phoebe" Freestone, who recounted Mercury’s first time hearing the song on his official blog

Freestone would claim that Freddie thought he was listening to "Under Pressure" at first — and as reality set in, he seemed more confused and puzzled than angry remembering "He carried on eating his breakfast and suddenly stopped, frowning. I thought there was a problem with his food but he said ‘no,'". "He started listening intently and couldn’t believe his ears. He was smiling when he said that he couldn’t believe what he was hearing ... a blatant ripoff."

According to Freestone Mercury proceeded to call the band’s manager and according to his former assistant "left it at that, always remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" —


During an LA Times interview in 1991 with guitarist Brian May he would say the following:

A: At first I looked at it as a big joke. Someone played Ice’s single for me and I said I didn’t think it was that good, but I don’t think anyone is going to listen to it, so why worry about it? But then I was told it was about to be No. 1 in the United States and I thought, “My God. Is this what music has come to?” He was a naughty boy for not asking us first whether he could use the song. We weren’t going to get any money from it, but Hollywood Records, which had just bought our catalogue, got upset and sued his record company and a settlement is in the works. So he’s out there earning money for us now.
I’m not the best judge of a song like Vanilla Ice’s because rap doesn’t really appeal to me. When it comes to music, I’m really narrow-minded and bigoted. I like real songs, with singing an

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