Samsung taps Vanilla Ice to help cool the planet with some ice-cold cringe

Samsung is rolling out a marketing campaign to accompany the promotion of its bespoke fridges, which basically function like Tetris blocks in that they are made up of configurable parts for maximum customization. For the campaign, the company is teaming up with Vanilla Ice, of all people, to release a re-worked single, “Reduce Your Ice, Ice Baby,” and a music video to boot.

This isn’t the first time Vanilla Ice has done something like this. Sure, a collaboration with Samsung to encourage the general public to increase their freezers’ temperature is technically new, but there’s a familiarity here. The late ‘80s to early ‘90s icon has an affinity for participating in campaigns with South Korean consumer electronic companies. For what it’s worth, “Reduce Your Ice, Ice Baby,” feels perfectly attuned to the twilight of a fading celebrity’s career: An unabashed pursuit of the bag.

The genesis of the project? — Samsung apparently conducted a study based on existing European Commission data, which deduced that a one-degree temperature increase in our freezers could save over one million tonnes of CO2 emissions. In other words, if we all set our freezer’s temperature one degree higher (in Celsius), we could be reducing CO2 emissions by the equivalent of the energy used by 120,000 homes in a year. That’s the equivalent of 217,000 cars being driven for an entire year.

Not as bad as expected — “Reduce Your Ice, Ice Baby,” is, as you can probably guess, a re-imagined version of Vanilla Ice’s smash hit “Ice, Ice Baby.” Usually, when an artist becomes this removed from their commercial or artistic peak (it will be 31 years since the original song was released this October), the drop-off is upsetting and noticeable. However, with this climate change PSA/advertisement hybrid, the decline in Vanilla Ice’s ability is not as pronounced. Make of that what you will. He’s using the same flow and rhyme scheme as before and while it’s certainly not good, it doesn’t sound awful.

I wonder how long this song can be stretched for commercial use. Any piece of intellectual property that has endured three decades is immediately vaulted to the top of some kind of list. But we’ll probably remember “Ice, Ice Baby,” for its ability to sell products rather than its place in the history of rap history. So sit back, relax, and continue to press play on “Reduce Your Ice, Ice Baby.” Or at least until the Galaxy S22 comes out.