Show Preview and Comment: Vanilla Ice

Tonight at Rocbar (to which I have never gone and can make no comment on, other than to claim you are “Houston’s only true Rock and Roll Club” surely makes you not) there is a free show starring none other than the long disparaged Vanilla Ice. In the pantheon of LOLstalgic live music opportunities, I can’t quite think of anything closer to the top than one by His Vanilla Majesty. Indeed, several years ago, similarly motivated, I purchased a $5 ticket to see Mr. Ice at the open again closed again Bob Popular on Austin’s 6^th street. When, after hours of reassurance by club managers that he would be there soon, Vanilla finally phoned to say he was not coming, the drunk, sweaty, overcapacity crowd got, well, destructive. I had never seen riot police in Austin before, and never felt quite so good to be on the other side of them once I finally squeezed my way out. So yes – Vanilla Ice, or rather his failure to appear, caused a riot. That, my friends, is Extreme.

That concept, the Extreme, is one that is pervasive thru out Vanilla’s career – he has stuck to it beyond fads and fashions, before the dream and after the nightmare of superstardom. Indeed, his desire to be associated with that concept has its roots in his earliest days and played a pointed role in his rapid slide from relevance to irreverence.

Something that Mr. Van Winkle picked up on early on, earlier than most MCs, was the need for a backstory – an official biography that constructed him as the organic result of a set of experiences rather than a self (or corporate) created pop star. As part of this personal history was a claim that Ice was a national Motocross Champion of some sort – a claim aligning him with an Extreme sport over five years before the first X-Games and certainly long before the Extreme Sports cable TV channel. A signature lyric, impossible to forget, and one that includes the title of his debut album: ‘To the Extreme, I rock a mic like a vandal.”

And if you think about it – if you can remove the ruining ridicule that time’s perspective has equipped us with, in 1990, Vanilla Ice was doing some rather extreme things: he sold millions of records by rapping over a Queen sample; he incorporated the fashion of glam and disco into a genre whose worship of pauperistic street fashion was already a sham; he broke perhaps the last remaining color boundary in pop music. And then – it started to crumble; and of all things, the edges around his parachute started to fray fastest when the portion of his bio that claimed he was a motocross champ were revealed to be fictitious – the Extreme that was the ramp beneath his wheels suddenly became the brick on his back.

Granted, the public is fickle. Even with his back-story intact, Ice may never have made another hit record. Actually, most assuredly he would not have. If we’ve learned anything about second acts in American pop music life, they usually involve a pairing of two talents. But one thing you’ll notice about Extreme sports: none of them are team events. Who knows if a Vanila Ice/Jimmy Jams collaboration might have been the Timberland/Timberlake of their day – Van Winkle’s embrace of Extreme simply would not have allowed it.

To be Extreme is to do your own thing. And, as his appearance on VH1’s Remaking clearly illustrated, Mr. Ice refuses to heed any advice, assistance or creative input from beyond the Extremely narrow options that he himself has had a hand in. Some might say that to appear on such a program and refuse to take advantage of it is the height of bone-headed douchieness, but they forget that to open oneself up to the latest and greatest and then decline to embrace it is the opposite of what is known as ‘selling out.’

So, I suppose, there will be many of us there at the show tonight for, well, laughs. To watch someone who once performed for tens of thousands shake it, for free, to hundreds. And as we bitch and moan with every new and previously unheard new song (which, I have heard, are of the Extreme rap-rock variety), we shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that it is us, and not him, who have failed to move on. Afterall, even if, by some chance, 50 Cent, Slayer, Danzig and TuPac were all at the show tonight – only Ice could make the claim that he was banned from MTV’s studios for life. Extreme.

Info: Vanilla Ice live at Rocbar Thurday, January 25th. Free. Doors at 8pm.