Ice Spice Can’t Handle the Spice, Taps Out on Hot Ones, Reveals Origin of ‘Stop Playin’ with ‘Em, Riot’ Tag

“I actually love spicy food, so yeah,” Ice said right at the top, which immediately had us a little worried for her. As she and Sean made their way through the wings, we kept getting little kernels of confidence from her, which only made us start sweating for her.

By the time they hit the fourth wing, she’d opened up about her approach to songwriting and laid out how her signature tag, “Stop playing with ’em, Riot,” first came about.

As it turns out, fans probably shouldn’t look forward to a massive vault of unreleased Ice Spice music, because she says she approaches every song like it’s going to be a single, hinting that most of them have or will get released.

She also shared that she usually builds from the hook backward, teasing that there is a track on her upcoming Y2K album that will break that trend, and in fact doesn’t have a hook at all.

As for the phrase that’s becoming as associated with her as “Another one” is for DJ Khaled, Ice said it happened almost by happenstance. She and her longtime friend and producer Riot were hanging in the studio when she started making fun of his old tag.

“He was just like, ‘Oh, make me a tag,'” she recalled. “So it was like my first time in the booth, really, I feel like. And I was so nervous, I didn’t know what to say and he was just like, ‘Just say anything,’ and then I was just like, ‘Stop playing with ’em, Riot.’ And that’s how that happened.”

When they got into the fourth sauce, the Los Calientes Verde, Ice was feeling super confident, telling Evans, “I feel like I’m gonna get through this.” By the sixth sauce, the Morita Bourbon Maple Reaper sauce from Cantina Royal, Ice was definitely feeling her oats, telling Sean, “I feel like I’m handling it better than you.”

One bite into the next sauce, La Pimenterie’s The Forbidden Fruit and she said, “Ooh, I spoke too soon.” Declaring her “mouth on fire,” with her nose running. Sean assured her she was “almost to the finish line.” Little did he know.

Number eight was the infamous Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity sauce. Sean explained that in 20 seasons, they tend to rotate the lineup a bit with each one, but they’ve not been able to “get that one off the table.” It kind of has a legendary reputation of its own at this point.

And that reputation got a little stronger this week, as Da’ Bomb took Ice Spice down hard. It was the first sauce she couldn’t even get through an answer with. Her eyes bulged when it hit and all she could say at first was, No!”

“Oh my god, that’s so disgusting. That is so spicy. F–k. Bro, my mouth’s on fire,” she lamented. “Wait, breathing makes it worse! I’m crying now.”

Ice started apologizing for her reaction, but Sean assured her it was all good. She should be proud that she just took on “one of the hottest hot sauces on the planet.”

“On the planet, for real?” Ice said incredulously, while attacking her chocolate milk.

“This one got me shakin’,” she decided. And with one whiff at the next sauce, Monoloco’s Matasanos sauce (more than four times higher on the Scoville scale), Ice was again reduced to a one-word response.

“No.”

And this time she meant she was out. “Yeah, I’m not gonna do that to myself,” she declared, as Hot Ones aired a montage of the 12 celebrities who’d tapped out before her, adding her officially to the “Wall-Most Made It” wall of shame.

Thankfully, she had one more question in her, which allowed Sean to ask her about some of the terms she used in her music that he wasn’t as familiar with. And so, we all got to enjoy Ice Spice explaining to a man 13 years older than her what a “Jaddy” is, and “smoochi,” and even “Blue.”

Our favorite, though, was when she defined “with my b—h getting deddy,” by telling him it means, “We safin’,” which didn’t clarify a thing for him at all. You can check out all the fun and terminology in the video above.