The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 23

THE GUARDIAN Thursday June 20 1991 REVIEWPROFILE 23 The Robocop of rap How to succeed in business- speak Ice boasted that he'd grown up in Miami with bad black street- Judith Williamson document on Enterprise, Employers and Higher Education was packed like a crunchy bar with impenetrable nuggets of "projected goals" and "determinable "pro-active decisionmaking skills" and so on. For years this has been making my head spin. What does it all mean? The point is, it doesn't mean anything, it is a mantra which, if repeated often enough, is expected to bring about results (it's like those people who go "OMMMM I will be very rich" every morning). The idea of language as a tool, not merely for describing reality but for creating it, has connections as far apart as witchcraft (words as spells) and post-modernist theory (language creates subjective experience). But what is so interesting about the magical quality of business language the idea that if you say Enterprise or Success often enough you will succeed is that it functions in a realm that's supposed to be relentlessly material, measurable, down-to-earth, the nitty-gritty of the social network.

This is not to say that actual businesses aren't real, although and perhaps this is linked with the whole phenomenon they are going bust every day. As business becomes increasingly precarious, "Business" becomes a lifestyle, a language, an image. I recently saw a British Airways magazine called Business Life "Europe's Magazine for Decision-Makers" which, distributed among economy class passengers, must be aspirational rather than in any way referential to people's actual working lives. The implication is that everyone is self-employed in the business of their own life we are each our own boss, programming our goals and aims. Indeed, the Neal's Yard Agency for Personal Development offers in its brochure a "Personal Audit: a quick run through your assets, liabilities and aspirations with a psychotherapist" one's inner being A haircut with foot in mouth disease? Adam Sweeting on Vanilla Ice was only last December I that British newspapers 1 1 were describing Vanilla JLL Ice as "an unknown as his single Ice Ice Baby exploded into the charts at No 2.

When he signed his recording contract with SBK Records just a year ago, Ice (whose real name is the stranger-than-fiction Robert Van Winkle) was still working at his step father's car dealership in Dallas. But this week, the whitest man in rap comes to Britain with 15 million sales of his debut album, To The Extreme, under his belt, with a cameo role in the next Ninja Turtles movie (The Secret Of The Ooze) in the can, and part-way through filming his very own flick, Cool As Ice. Recently, the chisel-jawed rapper handed over some of his loose cash for a new house on Star Island, Miami, where local ratepayers include Gloria Estefan, Don Johnson and Julio Iglesias. He has a 2m endorsement deal with Coca-Cola, whose research has shown him to be a "role While not piloting his rare 52,000 Honda Acura NSX, he drives around in the world's largest tour bus, a 60ft vehicle which cost 300,000 and features a double bedroom, lounge, gymnasium and a chapel. This is fast work, even by music-biz standards.

No wonder Ice does not yet feel entirely secure in his role. While the 23-year-old performer was feverishly battering out his autobiography Ice On Ice, a tactless spokesperson for the Ice organisation revealed that "Ice is terrified fans will have forgotten about him by the time the book is finally published." Rarely has so short a showbiz saga been so jam-packed with rancour, name-calling and sheer absurdity. In Ice's case, it isn't a matter of "if the facts don't fit, print the it's "print The posturing Robocop of rap first blundered into trouble when it was revealed that the biography being punted about by his record company was codswallop. Ice bragged that he'd been a motocross hero won three national championships for Team but Team Honda had never heard of him. DECORATE your office with Great Ideas! exhorted the cover of my last in-flight magazine.

Intrigued to know what an idea looks like when it's at home (or rather, at work) I turned the page to find The Performance Collection "It is a proven fact that top achievers surround themselves with symbols of success. It was with this in mind that we produced the Performance Collection, a series of limited edition lithographs on such themes as Excellence, Teamwork and Achievement. These superb lithographs combine important performance principles with stirring graphics to create a series of wall decor designed for success." The lithographs themselves are six pictures of, eg, a climber "Challenges" with a piece of text "Accept the challenges so that you may feel the exhilaration of "Journey" (picture of boat at sunset) claims "Success is a journey, not a destination" while, rather contradictorily, "Teamwork" insists that "Working together means winning What struck me about this ad was that it overtly recognised something I've been pondering for a long time the ideal nature of contemporary business terms: the fact that they are a symbolic language which refers, not to any actual economic or organisational practice, but to ideas and fantasies. And somewhere at the heart of their use is a particular, pre-Enlightenment notion about language: that instead of referring to already existing things it can somehow invoke what it speaks of. I started thinking about this when my (almost bankrupt) Poly received a million pound grant for an Enterprise Programme.

Suddenly, while other jobs disappeared left, right and centre, we had five Enterprise Officers. It was unclear what they were supposed to do, but large numbers of documents started circulating, full of abstract nouns which again, in a quaintly medieval way were capitalised thus: we know that Enterprise has to lead by example at one end of the scale Enterprise feeds into the teaching programme and at the other, Enterprise is a vehicle for generating contact with outside organisations some staff and students say that Enterprise has not affected them yet Initiative became another capitalised concept (frequently married to Enterprise) and these words raced across forests of paper and chased us in and out of endless meetings without ever appearing to have a concrete referent in terms of anything anyone did. It is the words themselves that, seem concrete; a recent DRAWING: PAUL HAMLYN vice-president Daniel Glass adds his own assessment of Ice's appeal. "He's like the pulse of the inner city. He knows what the kids are doing, what the crack addicts are doing, what the juveniles are doing, what the homeless people are all about, and he raps to it but he sees the good side of people." Sounds like they're already grooming Ice for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Meanwhile, lock up your daughters and tune to Radio 2. Vanilla Ice tour dates: Bournemouth BIC (Thursday June 20), St Austell Coliseum (21), Wembley Arena (22), Whitley Bay Ice Rink (26), Peterbor- SMI ah AfralnwJ Dnt OTk one of the best." But Vanilla Ice's cheekbones and bullshit can't account for his extraordinary success. That's down to the new SBK label, one of the world's fastest-growing record companies with sales last year worth $70m. SBK's successes to date have included dance act Techno-tronic, the platinum-selling soundtrack to the first Ninja Turtles movie, and the vapid but carefully-calculated pop-MOR of Wilson-Phillips. SBK's signings are hand-picked by label-boss Charles Koppelman, a 50-year-old music business veteran who was instrumental in selling 10.

million copies of Tracy Chapman's debut album for Elektra. "If I like it, everyone will like it," says Koppelman, blithely consigning Vanilla Ice to the evil-smelling vat of the lowest common denominator. SBK start pumpin', sweat pours down my chest, and dot's when you know Vanilla Ice is the Form an orderly line, girls, because "this is your fantasy, your highest dream, fulfilling all your pleasures to the utmost Then there's Ice Cold, in which he warns: "Be on the lookout in your vicinity, I'm robbing virgins of their virginity I'm just a pimp and you know, snatching women so yo!" He keeps a "Little Black Book" containing the names and phone numbers of 300 girls, with stars next to the ones who are "really Rolling Stone magazine explained: "He says that ninety per cent of the names represent actual conquests." Ice says: "Girls follow me everywhere I go, begging me to take them to bed. It's like a dream come true to me. I am a very good lover, definitely German Nazi" from his lumbering version of Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music.

An appearance on Mastermind is out of the question. Ice technique is to fit his sneering, drawling raps to riffs pinched from other people some metal, that bit from Queen, some Steve Miller, some Jacksons. Ice has picked up plenty of the violence and misogyny of the black rappers, without displaying any mitigating iota of social, political or personal awareness. Ice's horizons are bounded by bonking and cars. An exception is his tribute to reggae, Rosta (sic) Man, a track so risible that it ought to make Ice think twice about visiting Jamaica.

Ice's grotesquely inflated sense of his all-maleness sometimes makes his "songs" sound like a rapist's charter Life Is A Fantasy, for example. "As we kids, when in fact he attended a middle-class school in Dallas. His allegedly lawless past amounted to not having the right documents on him when stopped by traffic police. Still, his Ecuadorian step-father, Byron Mino, says: "He has a heart the size of America." Biggest whopper of the lot was Ice's yarn about being "stabbed five times in one so that he "lost half the blood in my But although Ice dropped his trousers on prime-time TV to reveal a knife-scar on his bottom, Chris Upchurch, who claims to have been a boyhood friend of the act, says: "He got the scar from my terrier Sam, who caught him trying to steal money from my trouser pocket while I was asleep." never heard of this guy," counter-claims Ice.) Being the first white man to bring rap to the mainstream, where hysterical white teenage girls have been flinging themselves in his path, Vanilla Ice presumably feels he needs to establish some credentials as a tough, streetwise young person who doesn't run away when somebody shouts "yo, mo'fo' Rock stars of earlier generations have not taken kindly to the young newcomer's stroppy demeanour. Ice Ice Baby was swiftly hauled in for legal scrutiny thanks to its glaring rip-off from the QueenDavid Bowie hit Under Pressure, and the matter was settled when the QueenBowie camp received a share of the royalties plus writing credits.

More recently, Mick Jagger was less than delirious over Ice's version of the Stones' stalwart Satisfaction (though he has not publicly renounced his Rubberlips sneered: "Ice is just a good haircut." Ice has problems with his contemporaries too. While Ice was supporting MC Hammer on his US tour last year, his album knocked Hammer's off the No 1 slot. Ice promptly insisted he should be the headliner, Hammer angrily refused, and Ice pulled out of the tour. "I'm a better rapper, a better dancer, and a better looker," preened Ice. Hammer branded him "a cheap Hammer has a point, since the only thing that's genuinely novel about Ice is his willingness to open his mouth and shove both feet into it.

Thanks to his manager, Dallas club-owner Tommy Quon, Ice has removed his notorious line about "steppin' so hard like a 111 "ir muni i mna as a kind of credit zone! It's as if only by using the language of banks can a process, no mat ter how tar removed from banking, be given credibility. And just when words have regained their ancient status as beings (Enterprise "does" this or that: Initiative appears to have thoughts and plans of its own) money also seems no longer just a currency but an entity in its own right. I remember the moment when it got its own page in this paper; my bank has a special magazine called MoneyCare (which makes me imagine articles on keeping your notes crisp, or how to polish pound coins). In both cases, the currency seems more powerful than what it stands for words outstrip the reality they represent, money seems more exciting than what it can buy. The material world which both language and money mediate comes a poor second in our supposedly materialist culture; a paradox to be explored further.

Devil with both feet in the grave i LylU.il." chester Apollo (28), Birmingham isainourgn Playhouse (30). Ice's album Extremely Live is released on June 24. hooded super dragging a crucifix across the stage in a parody of Christ's agony. It looks good but it strikes me as purely rhetorical and the gesture is rendered absurd when the actor has to negotiate the cross offstage like a Pickford's removal-man. And, while on the subject of absurdity, what is the point of playing Brachiano's son, Giovanni, whose lines bespeak boyish pathos do the dead do, as a strapping lad well past puberty? Mr Prowse, as we know from his work at Glasgow, is expert at handling Wilde, Coward and O'Neill.

But his White Devil at the National wastes good actors and is marked by a strenuous dullness that comes from treating Webster's sinewy text as if it were simply a set of captions to illustrate tableaux of death. dissembles death from a bullet; but it is typical of the production's profound insensitivity to language that his real death-speech is delivered with a strangulated hoarseness. Going against the directorial grain only Claire Benedict's Cornelia brings real resonance to the language in her distracted dirge over her murdered son. That it is possible to combine death, eroticism and felt emotion is proved by David Pount-ney's masterly production of Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk at the Coliseum. In contrast, Prowse takes a play that is partly about the gulf between show and substance and swathes it in external effects.

A case in point is the Papal coronation of Cardinal Monticelso (played, at the last minute, by Tristram Jellinek with a nice dry irony) here symbolised by a GOG ATTJILA Obviously Webster was fascinated by mortality, but death is only meaningful if accompanied by a strong sense of life; and that is precisely what is missing from Mr Prowse's vision. The starting-point for Webster's cynical study of fake worldly glory is the mutual lust of the murderous Brachiano and Vittoria but this production is about as sexy as a eunuch's tea-party. Denis Quil-ley's Brachiano seems more like a grizzled bank president than a figure of insatiate lechery and even Josette Simon's imposing, swan-necked Vittoria lacks the defiant sensuality she brought to After The Fall. The only hint of sex in the whole evening comes when Lo-dovico finally stabs the heroine; but it is surely perverse, even by Webster's standards, to suggest that death is the only way of achieving multiple orgasm. Mr Prowse's most striking innovation is to present the white devil and her family as black: as a persistent advocate of integrated casting, it is a decision I applaud.

But the gesture is nullified by Mr Prowse's refusal to mine and explore Webster's prose which, in Agate's phrase, "ripples like the muscles in a statue of Dhobi Oparei brings to Fla-mineo a gaunt, sinister presence and a nice touch for comedy in the scene where he Michael Billington argues the National's dull White Devil wastes good actors PHILIP Prowse handles the stage with the freedom of a painter. But his new production of The White Devil at the Olivier, though better than his last one at Greenwich in 1984, is still a pretty dismal affair: one in which the actors seem dwarfed by the monumental setting and one which surrenders totally to the old, tired Eliotesque notion of Webster as a poet "much possessed by death." Mr Prowse transforms the Olivier stage into a vast, encircling brick mausoleum dominated by a demolition ball and chain. Black catafalques, doubling as altars, define the acting-space. Characters emerge from watery, sunken pits. Hooded figures, looking like members of the Roman chapter of the Ku KIux Klan, process across a gleaming marble floor.

If you froze the action at any single point you would a stunning picture. But it remains a fundamentally static piece of design that shrieks at us and not so much expressing the text as pre-empting it. HIP IBMffiMia JJU A 'Wl aw mu. n. 1 I ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM OUT NOW ON FIRST NIGHT RECORDS CD: CAST CD23 CASSETTE: CAST C23 LIMITED EDITION LP: CAST 23 For full listings of the best Cinema, Theatre and Music in your area plus Weekend TV.

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