Sunday Music: Young Black Teenagers

Vanilla Ice blows up and surpasses MC Hammer on the Billboard charts in 1990.

It might seem trivial now, but based on chart position alone, Mr. Van Winkle’s #1 hit did what “Walk This Way" (#4), “I Need Love” (#14), “Parents Just Don’t Understand (#12), “Wild Thing” (#2), “Bust a Move” (#7), and “Fight for Your Right to Party” (#7) couldn’t do.

The chase was on.

There’s always an element in the wake of growing popularity where the hopeful promises meet the “old scene is the new kitsch” reality.

The Vanilla Ice moment is a great reminder to just how weird stuff can get in the wake of a majorly popular and super strange feeling cultural moment.

(Are you reading between the lines? I hope you are. You’re supposed to.)

(Are Hammer Pants a harbinger of weird? Well, yes, but—the in between line reading I’m encouraging here is: when you see popularity spiking PLUS you feel peculiarity creeping in, don’t get mad, get exploring).

One of the first big strange moments post #1 hit was when Russell Simmons and Quincy Jones teamed up to try and broker a deal between The Source and Time, Inc. You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. It’s a tale as old as time. Opportunity doesn’t knock so much as it dares you to pick the lock.

But that deal fell apart, because new media consolidation is as messy as it is essential. And still, it’s the social movements underneath, that are always bigger and way more important than the attempted cash grabs.

And to tell that story, we have to look back to 1989, before the #1 hit.

Deep inside the Public Enemy camp, group member Professor Griff made some very odd and very anti-Jewish remarks. I say “very odd” because the rest of the group seemed genuinely shocked. They were, after all, friends and very much in business with several prominent Jewish and white professionals (uh, Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin, just for starters?).

The Professor Griff comments caused a rift, dividing group members and label staff alike on how exactly to handle it, and caught in the center was The Bomb Squad, aka the production team renowned for the sonics of Public Enemy’s sound.

Hip-hop was wrestling with the race and geography question. The public response to Griff was harsh. The private reaction to Griff, but the growing in popularity labels and artists, was full of reflections, questions, and counter-strategies.

By the time Vanilla Ice was climbing the charts, the Public Enemy’s label was already looking for white rap artists to capitalize on. But, because they were Public Enemy adjacent, they didn’t want pop-rap, they wanted political rap. This is the post-Griff reaction worth paying attention to.

Chuck D ended up taking a step back from artist development and production for Def Jam/SOUL Records after the Griff statement. Bill Stephney, their label imprint president, and Hank Shocklee, a key member of The Bomb Squad, decided they would forge ahead on a new idea: a white rap group with the name Young Black Teenagers.

The group was… problematic. But, in a weird moment of post-Vanilla Ice spacetime, we got a glimpse of almost what Rage Against The Machine would chase a few years later. Bomb Squad produced, non-PE, semi-commercially accessible rap music. 

It was a swing. It wasn’t a a swing and miss, but it also didn’t connect. And still, it’s not worth totally forgetting.

If you can ignore the problems, and I’ll blame the label a bit more than the artist in this case, this was a pretty wild response to Vanilla Ice if you really think about it.

A few years later, in a song you might even remember (since it got kind of big):

Or, if you’re a movie nerd, there’s this scene from a timeless classic film:

But it all didn’t work. It didn’t last. The name was weird, some of the stuff they said was, not well taken if not wrongly spoken, and a brief moment of time came to its natural halt.

The music is worth revisiting, if nothing else, for the short-lived variation on Public Enemy sonics in another groups hands.

But, Young Black Teenagers are also a reminder that when people chase a loosely understood mainstreaming idea en masse, weird s*** happens. Some of it will be good, some of it will be tragic. All of it will be considered “live” in real-time, and later reconsidered philosophically in hindsight.

If you pause to look at how many times stuff like this has happened in the wake of peculiar feeling uber popular moments in human history, you can start to appreciate how normal these bizarre moments are. Get curious about these inevitable reactions, responses, and very real moments. They’re almost always happening too, which can help explain A LOT.

Happy end of 2024. There are definitely some YBT level shenanigans going on out there, so do be careful. Then, tap some bottles and twist some caps, you know?

h/t to Dan Charnas, because when I realized I wanted to write about them, I immediately pulled The Big Payback off the shelf to get some of these stats and stories.