The War On Vanilla Ice!

(1991 was both a great and a terrible year for the ice man...  April Fool's Day!  Youtube version is here.)

Answer Record Week Day 3: Kid 'N Play vs Run DMC

(Youtube version is here.)

Kid 'N Play's Decidedly Non-Demos

"Once again, this is rumor control..."

Ok. There's a lot of misinformation on the internet. I can remember downloading a Cage and Chino XL duet on Napster, only to find out it was a portion of the Siah & Yeshua da Poed "Day Like Any Other" remix featuring El-P. How you could confuse the two, I have no idea. Some people just don't know what the heck they've got and come up with some craziness.

The problem is that it spreads. And all of a sudden even the biggest sites are giving out false info like it's candy. Heck, at one point my discographies had a few "false positives" in them, and I had to ultimately institute a policy where I didn't post anyone's additions/corrections without actually seeing the record in question, because unfortunately finding corroborating sources online doesn't mean a whole anymore.

So, this latest bit of untruth didn't come as that much of a surprise to me when I first saw it pop up. What does surprise me, though, is how it's taken off all around the internet, and no fewer than four (reputable!) blogs and god knows how many message boards have all posted the same handful of tracks as "unreleased Kid 'N Play demos."

I don't know what jokester actually started this, but the legend circulating these six songs seems to be something like: Kid 'N Play hooked up with the Beatnuts to record these six songs as a demo tape to pitch to labels a fourth album after being dropped by Select Records. Somehow, some behind the scenes music ninja found a copy and ripped them onto the 'net for the world to finally hear these totally super-exclusive unreleased jewels. Wowee!

But actually, these are just six songs ripped from the House Party 3 soundtrack, back when they were still on Select Records. In fact, one of the songs ("Make Some Noize") is from the big musical number in the middle of the film with TLC. I mean, come on. How much less underground or rare can you get than a House Party soundtrack? Here's a link where you can buy the soundtrack on Amazon for under $1. I actually recommend it, because the rest of the soundtrack isn't bad either. It features an exclusive Red Hot Lover Tone song, nice tracks by Sylk Smoov and AMG, plus the only released song by a pretty cool group the RAS Posse.

What's more, one of those six tracks - "Bounce" - even came out as a single. Nice hot pink lettering on that picture cover. There's four versions on the 12", including the LP Version, Instrumental, "KNPmental" and the Video Version. Wait a minute, there was a video?



Yeah... full of clips from the movie and everything. I don't know how much more released this "unreleased" joint could be, short of a FEMA-funded operation to drop CD singles out of helicopters across the nation.

Now, my point here isn't to to shame anyone who's passed this misinformation along (and I won't post any smarmy, finger-wagging links)... Like I said above, I've been guilty of the same thing in the past, and allowed a few bits of misinformation onto my site as well, that took me a long time to weed out. My point is just to hopefully, once and for all, kill this one damn stupid rumor dead, and maybe serve as a gentle reminder to all of us hip-hop bloggers and webmasters the importance of fact-checking the information we receive in our in-box before posting it. Because the internet should be the place people can go to clear this kind of nonsense up, not perpetuate it.