Vanilla Ice

I've always had a lurking urge to burst Kool-Aid man style through the door of a boardroom in the midst of heated negotiations and shout, "Stop! Collaborate and listen!" Unfortunately, some dreams will never be realized, and this action would likely brand me as clinically insane. For Robert Van Winkle, though, these words were his ticket to inexplicable 90s musical fame.

You may think that breakdancing with a side of big hair is not a major marketable skill, but perhaps its a matter of timing. That is, if someone happens to catch you breakdancing wearing your big hair at just the right moment, well who knows, maybe you can make a career of it. Throw in some alleged "rapping", and you've got yourself a brand.

Before Eminem, before 303, the original white rapper ("vanilla"-hued, if you will) was Vanilla Ice. In the late 80s and early 90s, hip hop was just emerging as a credible musical genre. It was still primarily a black phenomenon, as most cool things are before they are hijacked and subsequently beaten into boring submission by stuffy white people. Hip hop was new and edgy and indicative of all thing youth culture related, but it had yet to be fully packaged by music executives. At this point, notoriety and street cred were the major forces guiding the emerging hip hop culture. While Vanilla Ice was a serviceable* rapper, music moguls saw him as an outsider on the fringe of hip hop who could be sufficiently packaged for consumer enjoyment and their own rising stock.

Vanilla Ice was commodifiable, and music execs fully recognized the potential of breaking into the hip hop business. He even managed to unintentionally earn himself some notoriety by means of a scuffle with some of Suge Knight's associates, one of whom claimed to have written Ice, Ice, Baby. We all can see that the "Ice, Ice" in Ice, Ice baby refers to Mr. Vanilla himself, so it seems unlikely this would have been penned by anyone else. To be honest, take a good hard look at the lyrics and you'll see immediately that money could be the only possible explanation for the boldfaced lie; this wasn't exactly poetry we were dealing with here. Let's take a quick peek at what would become the first hip hop single to top the Billboard charts:

Yo, Vanilla, kick it one time Boy
Yo, VIP, Let's kick it!
Ice Ice Baby, Ice Ice Baby

Okay, off to a good start. Well, the use of that "yo" is questionable, but I'm going to let it slide.

All right stop, Collaborate and listen
Ice is back with my brand new invention

Who said rap isn't innovative? Before I heard this song, I had no clue whatsoever that the words "listen" and "invention" rhymed.

Something grabs a hold of me tightly
Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly

I'll concede this is a more respectable rhyme, but how many raps do you know of that reference harpoons? And/or their (that is, the harpoons') flowing tendencies? Is that some sort of misplaced weapon reference to build street credibility?

Will it ever stop? Yo! I don't know
Turn off the lights and I'll glow
To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal
Light up a stage and watch me jump like a candle.

As the owner of many jumping candles, I particularly enjoyed this imagery. Later I was disappointed to learn that, like the Mexican jumping beans, this movement was a mere farce. At least I could always watch Vanilla Ice and his graffiti stylings on a nearby sound-enhancement device.

Dance, go rush the speaker that booms
I'm killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom
Deadly, when I play a dope melody
Anything less than the best is a felony

I didn't realize how much I yearned for someone's ABAB rhyme scheme to kill my brain until Vanilla kindly illuminated the point. I imagine that lame "felony" reference is an attempt to badassify his lyrics.

Love it or leave it, You better gain way
You better hit bull's eye, The kid don't play
If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it

This doesn't make that much sense, but at least in this case it does rhyme. Also, the hook he refers to was sampled from earlier favorites such a David Bowie and Queen. So yes, Vanilla, I will check it out. I appreciate the suggestion.

Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby
Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby

This was when the best breakdancing took place, just in case you're considering choreographing your own version.

Now that the party is jumping
With the bass kicked in and the Vegas are pumpin'
Quick to the point, to the point no faking
Cooking MCs like a pound of bacon

Nothing says "street" like referencing a good old fashioned home cooked breakfast.

Burnin' 'em if you aint quick and nimble
I go crazy when I hear a cymbal
And a hi hat with a souped up tempo
I'm on a roll, it's time to go solo
Rollin' in my 5.0
With my rag top down so my hair can blow
The girlies on standby, Waving just to say Hi
Did you stop? No -- I just drove by
Kept on pursuing to the next stop
I busted a left and I'm heading to the next block
That block was dead

Thank, Vanil, for the play by play. I, too, go crazy when I hear a cymbal. Traumatic wind-up monkey incident as a child. It's still tough to talk about.

Yo -- so I continued to A1A Beachfront Avenue
Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis

Less than bikinis...could we be a little more descriptive? That's like saying, they were wearing more than nothing. I'm a visual learner, dammit, give me some adequate cues here.

Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis
Jealous 'cause I'm out getting mine
Shay with a gauge and Vanilla with a nine
Ready for the chumps on the wall
The chumps acting I'll because they're full of Eight Balls
Gunshots ranged out like a bell
I grabbed my nine -- All I heard were shells
Falling on the concrete real fast
Jumped in my car, slammed on the gas
Bumper to bumper the avenue's packed
I'm trying to get away before the jackers jack
Police on the scene, You know what I mean
They passed me up, for runnin' on the dope beans
If there was a problem, Yo, I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it

Okay, so here's the drive-by part. What I'm wondering though is why police came to the scene? Didn't you hear? If there was a problem, Vanilla would solve it.

Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby
Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby

Take heed, 'cause I'm a lyrical poet
Miami's on the scene just in case you didn't know it
My town, that created all the bass sound
Enough to shake and kick holes in the ground
'Cause my style's like a chemical spill
Feasible rhymes that you can vision and feel

I often brag about my best traits by illustrating their close likeness to chemical spills. It's a major selling point. Try it at your next interview.

Conducted and formed, This is a hell of a concept
We make it hype and you want to step with this
Shay plays on the fade, slice like a ninja
Cut like a razor blade so fast, Other DJs say, "damn"
If my rhyme was a drug, I'd sell it by the gram
Keep my composure when it's time to get loose
Magnetized by the mic while I kick my juice
If there was a problem, Yo -- I'll solve it!
Check out the hook while DJ revolves it.

I'm a bit concerned about being magnetized by the mic. After all, I had this recorded off the radio on cassette tape, a magnetic force of that magnitude would straight up erase it.

Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby
Vanilla Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice Ice Baby Vanilla Ice

Yo man -- Let's get out of here! Word to your mother!

AHA! So that's where we got that. Touché, Vanilla.

Ice Ice Baby Too cold, Ice Ice Baby Too cold Too cold
Ice Ice Baby Too cold Too cold, Ice Ice Baby Too cold Too cold

I do like the inclusion of the informative temperature gauge here. It really speaks to my inner meteorologist.

For your viewing pleasure, Ice, Ice, Baby:

Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby [Kobra]
Uploaded by Tanegashima

He still had a few good years before fading into obscurity, putting out records no one's ever heard of and appearing in shame-inducing reality shows. There was also Cool as Ice, a movie that was sort of like Rebel without a Cause only distinctly more terrible. If its any indication of complete lack of quality, the movie's score on composite review site Rotten Tomatoes is a whopping 8%. It was posthumously (I use that word largely in reference to the death of Vanilla's career) disowned by the director, which isn't quite the positive retrospection one could hope for. If nothing else, the movie did leave us with an outstanding pickup line:

"Drop that zero, and get with a hero!"

Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Vanilla Ice did a lot more than just sing "Ice, Ice, Baby" and appear in a god-awful film people will someday with disdain unfairly refer to as a "period piece". He's 41 years old, certainly he's put out something else we would have heard of.

Oh, yeah. This:





*For the time, people. Standards have changed.

Baywatch

Let's be honest here: lifeguards are heroes. They're out there every day, protecting vulnerable swimmers from all manners of ill-fated ocean encounters. Their watchful eye allows us to enjoy our carefree time at the beach, knowing we are safe under their care.

Also, they sometimes run in slow motion.

I don't know about you, but while that initial job description is nice, I doubt 1.1 billion people would tune in to watch it on television. The slow motion thing, though, well, there you've got yourself a series.


Baywatch taught us all sorts of valuable life lessons, namely that beautiful women are largely interchangeable when dressed in the same signature red swimsuit. Men, on the other hand, are our true mainstays. We learned that if you were a woman who appeared on a plotless show mainly as eye candy, you could later land some lucrative Playboy covers or release sex tapes. If you were a man, you could eventually serve as a judge on America's Got Talent and battle rampant public alcoholism. Of course, if you weren't lucky enough to meet any of these grand fates, you could feel free to fade into the general obscurity that comes with people's waning interest in slow-motion footage of you in swimwear.

Remarkably, Baywatch is the most-watched show of all time. I'm not quite sure that you caught that, but either way it bears repeating. The most-watched show of all time. Lifeguards. On a beach. Limited, repetitive plotlines. Knight Rider running down the beachfront at bottom speed (is that the opposite of top speed? One can only assume.) Really, truly, how much drama can these lifeguards face on a weekly basis? The show's producers (Hasselhoff included) would contend that the answer was indeed quite a lot.

The Hoff made it happen

How many times have you been at beach anywhere, ever, and seen someone in a truly risky near-drowning situation? For most, the answer is rarely or never, but for the ol' Baywatch gang it was just a constant drownfest of careless parents and vicious undertows. Sharks encircled swimmers close to shore, bomb threats loomed like a dark shadow over the beach, and murderers roamed the premises on a regular basis. I'm not saying TV has to be just like real life, but at least make some effort to calibrate the premise to the plot lines. If we were dealing with marine biologists, CIA officials, or police detectives, then sure, these story lines could seamlessly integrate into the character's everyday encounters. However, these people are lifeguards. Lifeguards. They hold a giant red piece of foam and sit in a crappy makeshift elevated chair.

To be honest, I never watched the show in much detail, but it didn't take a dedicated viewer to pinpoint the improbability of these plots. While certainly the interpersonal drama between the male and female characters was substantial and there is certainly action off the beachfront, a great deal of the show relied on increasingly repetitive and formulaic scenarios. Have you ever wondered how many possible ways people could encounter danger in the water? Unless you get really creative (read: insane) with it, there are not too many permutations. Thankfully, the Baywatch writers were imaginative, though not necessarily in a positive way.

The show's initial run lacked sufficient financial backing, and was canceled after a single season. Lucky for those among us who appreciate a good slow-motion beach run sequence, the show was down but not out. David Hasselhoff, the male lead, believed in the show enough to come on as a producer and keep it afloat (sorry, I didn't even see that pun coming.) I guess the 80s German pop music scene was pretty lucrative, putting him in a fair position to make waves with Baywatch (that one was unfortunately intentional).

Repackaged and rebranded with a catchier theme song, the show quickly established itself in the ratings.



Little things other shows valued such as character development, consistency, and story variation seemed obsolete as Baywatch snowballed to success. It was camp TV at its best. It was cheesy, montage-rich, and often segued aimlessly into tangential melancholy music video-esque segments a la Ace of Base's Don't Turn Around.

The show had no shame, but it also had no pretension. Audiences accepted the fact that a steady stream of beautiful women (including Pamela Anderson, Yasmine Bleeth, Carmen Electra, and Gena Lee Nolin) had nothing better to do than get crappy jobs with the Los Angeles County Lifeguards. No one would call the show deep or insightful by any stretch of the imagination, but it did present a pleasingly idyllic form of escapism. Sometimes, after a bad day, watching scantily-clad attractive people bounce around in slow motion is just what the doctor ordered*.

It was, in short, a guilty pleasure. Many people did not want to admit that they were captivated by this cheesefest, but the ratings didn't lie. Baywatch was at the time recorded as the most-watched TV show of all time. Unfortunately, it couldn't hold its audiences forever.

As with many long-running series, the show dragged on and lost many of its original characters. The shark-jumping in this case was not only literal, but became more frequent and shameless. The early-90s dramatics evolved into late-90s near-comedy. It was that sad sort of premise that wasn't supposed to be funny, but it was unintentionally gut-bustingly hilarious. Acting fell completely by the wayside, as the equivalent of cardboard cutouts of female models chattered their lines with all the expression of reading the dictionary. The show managed to stay on the air and slide by on its purported reputation, but the magic of those Hasselhoff music video moments had dissipated.

Despite its wane in quality and popularity, its notoriety remained intact. It may not have been the smartest show or contain the most substance, but it was pure fun. They must have been doing something right, as we can only hope 1.1 billion viewers can't be wrong. The show may have been an easy target, but it generally seemed to posses redeeming qualities as well.

At the very least, a whole generation of young boys aspired to be lifeguards.



*What, your doctor never prescribed this?

Tetris

As you came to on your living room couch, your panicked mind frantically tried to recollect the events of the past day. These blackouts were becoming increasingly frequent, and more and more time was passing unaccounted for. You were concerned over these lapses in memory, seemingly jolted back to reality in a cold sweat and wondering what exactly had happened over the last several hours. You held some vague recollections, but on the whole it seemed pretty fuzzy. Ashamed to admit your addiction to your friends and family, you began to try hide your usage and downplay its increasingly prominent role in your everyday life.

No, your problem wasn't drugs or alcohol. It was Tetris.

In a distant time before lifelike 3D video games and their complicated nuances, we could sit intently for hours on end, eyes glazed over at the innumerable self-directed rotations of the confounding tetrominoes that lay before us. Over and over, we orchestrated our little shapelets into interlocking patterns. Left, clockwise, down. Right, right, counterclockwise, down. Right, Right, down. Left, counterclockwise, down. The interlocking pieces fixed together in a satisfying manner, all while playing their trademark siren song:




Even just hearing the song catapults my mind back to its scheming, strategizing, anxious Tetris-engaged state.

Regardless of whether or not you personally lay claim to an original Game Boy, it's likely at some point you were exposed to the addictive contagion of Tetris. When you woke up in the morning, there was Tetris. When you daydreamed aimlessly during lectures about Tuck Everlasting or prime numbers, there was Tetris. When you lay down to sleep at night, there was Tetris. Try as you might to deter Tetris from infecting your brain, your mind began to morph into a singularly Tetris-strategizing way of thinking. Every problem or dilemma you encountered suddenly broke down in your head into "L-shape. Square. Squat "T". Line. Square-edged S. Square-edged Z." These were your tools now, and they overtook your mind like a robotic-music-soundtracked parasite. Though some may have tried to fight it, resistance was inevitably futile. Eventually, we would all come to worship at the great shrine of Tetris.

The original video game was released in 1985, but it really gathered steam with the release of the original Game Boy. First of all, let it be known that Game Boys may now seem fairly pedestrian and unimpressive, but upon their launch these things seemed relatively remarkable. I mean, imagine, parents now had a way to keep their children occupied and could now combat whininess with quiet personal gaming. While other handheld system had been available previously, none reached the cult of video game personality that surrounded Game Boy.


When one purchased the almighty Game Boy, it contained a cartridge of the game Tetris. "Tetris," you may have thought to yourself. "Why, I've never heard of it. Perhaps I should give it a go."

And suddenly, without warning, 12 hours had passed.

The game seemed simple enough, but it truly lured you unsuspecting into a series of mental aerobics. At first glance, Tetris was deceptively benign. Seven different shapes (tetraminoes, for anyone out there who would like to one day drop this word casually in conversation at a cocktail party and alienate friends with their undeniable geekiness) descended slowly down the screen. Your mission, should you have chosen to accept it, was to maneuver these shapes by rotating them in 90 degree increments to fit together and avoid gaps between shapes on the bottom of the screen. When you succeeded in creating a solid line without gaps, the line disappeared and the stacked tetraminoes shifted downward.

If you have never played Tetris, you may be thinking, "So? That doesn't sound so captivating. It actually sounds mind-numbingly boring."

Au contraire, my Tetris virgin friends. The true hook of the game was the progressive expedience of the falling shapes. They began slowly, lulling you into a sense of false security. "I'm mastering this!" You would marvel. You reckoned yourself a sort of Tetris savant, wondering what all the fuss was about. Why, this wasn't tricky at all!

But then.

Shapes began falling faster and faster, both efffectively obliterating your game and crushing your can-do spirit. "Well," you thought. "That wasn't much fun at all. Maybe if I just try it one more time..."

And so it went. You could never play "just one more time". For many, Tetris became a way of life, counting down the minutes until you could get your next fix. Games would replay continuously in your head, as you mentally shifted and manipulated the shapes into an interlocking configuration. You could so easily see where you'd been drawn astray; how could you have thought the L-shape should lay downwards and horizontal? That should have been vertical, dammit.



In my household, it was only my mother who owned a Gameboy. She would sit long nights on the den couch, with the glow of the sidetable lamp illuminating her glassed-over eyes and quick-moving fingers. She also liked to play the music (rather than selecting the more polite you're-in-a-shared-space-for-God's-sake mute option), and I believe she had a strong preference for Melody B. My mom was actually a pretty ace Tetris player*, but she was totally stingy about it. Ocassionally on road trips when she tired of it. we were allowed to have a go. Soon both my sister and I were hooked, and the nightly bickering over our one measly Game Boy led to the institution of a scheduled rotation. It was that important to us. Really, it was. I treasured my time with that game, down to the last second. We all boastfully recounted our high scores, and delighted in our autonomy at selecting our own music track. And if we made it into the hall of fame, well, that was just the cherry on top.

I never did get my own Game Boy, but I did get a graphing calculator. In middle school I was briefly able to resume my Tetris dependency during alleged learning time in class until I was outed by a fellow classmate when I failed to pay attention during a class discussion. I had been called on by the teacher, but I was justifiably immersed in my record high score, thank you very much. Thus ended my once-stellar Tetris career. Just think. I could have gone pro, if it weren't for teachers questioning my perfectly legitimate use of a calculator during an English lesson.

There is, however, good news for all of us. Tetris is back and in more forms than ever before. No longer must we wait our turn for the family Game Boy. Not only is it available in numerous forms for free play online, you can now discreetly play on your phone as well. You even have this to make sure a coworker doesn't tattle on you playing at the office.

Happy playing, children of the 90s. Just don't blame me when you find yourself emerging from a Tetris-induced blackout. You've been warned.


*In case you were curious, she now highly recommends Bejeweled and Bomp Bomp Ball


Check it out:
Play Tetris Free Online (note: while checking out this site, I got roped into playing for 27 minutes. Like I said, I warned you.)
Tetris for iPhone
Tetris T-Shirt, Anyone?