Vanilla Ice made it perfectly clear that he wanted nothing more in this life than to make an appearance in Michael Bay’s reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie franchise. As the host of The Vanilla Ice Project, the rapper/actor and Wellington’s Citizen of the Year constantly refers to himself as a ninja while he’s fixing up run-down mansions, and he even adorned one home’s theater room with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze movie poster. Oh, and there was also that recent commercial for Kraft Mac & Cheese, in case you needed any reminder at all that Vanilla Ice gave us “Ninja Rap” and he was desperate to recapture that magic.
Unfortunately, Paramount and Atlantic Records decided to go in a more modern direction with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, enlisting Juicy J, Wiz Khalifa, Ty Dolla $ign, Kill the Noise, and Madsonik for “Shell Shocked.” Needless to say, Vanilla Ice isn’t very impressed.
“With respect to all of the artists, the song doesn’t really do it for me. It feels a little artificial—what I mean by that is that it sounds like a bunch of executives in the corporate world put it together. It really does not fit the theme of the Ninja Turtles legend. I think you have to understand, and be a true Ninja, to possess the Magic to really pull off the secret sound.” (Via GQ)
He’s not wrong about that “artificial” feeling, because it’s a rap song that was made specifically for a TMNT movie. I mean, the fact that it’s called “Shell Shocked” and not “Paycheck” is simply miraculous, especially with such groundbreaking lyrics:
However, with all due respect to Vanilla Ice, if “Shell Shocked” is artificial and created by a bunch of executives in the corporate world, then “Ninja Rap” is basically the opening video for every corporate executive retreat that has ever been hosted.
