Or is it that song, Ice Ice Baby, the infectious worldwide hit that has proved the most enduring and irritating of ear worms, thanks, in part, to it constantly featuring in television adverts, radio jingles and tacky 80s party albums?

Chances are what doesn't spring to mind is the fact that Ice Ice Baby, for all its overproduced awfulness, was the first hip hop song to hit No 1 on the US Billboard charts, or that the album from which it was lifted, To the Extreme, became the fastest-selling rap album.

Today, Ice is considered a pop-history joke, up there with contemporaries such as Milli Vanilli. But it's salient to remember that before Ice, hip hop was a relatively minor player in the music world. Despite Ice's much-ridiculed claims to a gangster past, a look at his back story shows he was at least steeped in hip hop culture, unlike his more celebrated fellow white-rap pioneers, the Beastie Boys.

Born Robert Matthew Van Winkle in Miami, Ice never knew his father, taking the name of his stepfather, and spent his upbringing shuttling between his estranged parents' homes in Florida and Texas. He dropped out of school and gravitated towards music, mainly through breakdancing, with which he'd become obsessed in his early teens.

By the age of 16 he claimed to have written the song that was to make - and break - him, the product of battles he'd begun joining at hip hop parties. 'Everybody knew him for his feet,' fellow rapper and recording partner Earthquake, or Floyd Brown, told The New York Times after Ice rose to fame. 'He would demolish other dancers.'

On the strength of this he was offered a record deal by the owner of a club he often performed at and recorded the now (in)famous Ice Ice Baby. It blew the charts apart. Welded to the looping bass of Queen and David Bowie's hit Under Pressure from a decade earlier, the song about drive-by shootings in Miami caught on all over the world.

Ice then did what all young pop stars do: he dated the hottest women, including Madonna, and crashed all the right parties. His downfall, however, was swift.

A string of lame follow-up tracks and his half-hearted claims to have come from a tough urban background backfired on him. He was exiled from mainstream pop and his career foundered.

Ice fell into depression and attempted suicide with a heroin overdose; when he recovered he decided it was time to change his life. He moved from Los Angeles back to Florida and took up his old forgotten love of motocross.

He's since made a comeback of sorts, the baggy trousers replaced by muscle T-shirts and tattoos, but he still betrays the na?ve garrulousness that lost him fans in his first incarnation.

'I will never be a puppet for the industry again,' he declares on his website. 'From this point on I will be myself and keep it real. I am not running from anything or trying to hide. I want people to know that I face my adversaries.'