▼ Music The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive Vanilla Ice knows he’s cool again. BY EVA RAGGIO E veryone wants a do-over. Maybe a second chance to go back and not say that utterly stupid thing we said at the worst possible time — that awk- ward moment from your past that pops up in your mind to haunt you when you’re about to fall asleep. Sorry to bring it up. And then there are those far deeper, bitter re- grets. Vanilla Ice, however, is perfectly at peace with his past. In fact, he celebrates it. He also sort of still lives there. The rapper, whose real name is Rob Van Winkle, is spreading the ’90s-specific cheer with a nationwide party tour. On April 15, he played with Young MC at Dallas’ Statler Hotel, which had a “property-wide ’90s party,” meaning a party at every bar and restaurant in the hotel. The event was an ode to nostalgia, with retro arcade games, a ’90s costume contest and themed drink specials. He may be a longtime Floridian now, but this is still a homecoming for Van Winkle. “Dallas is always home,” he says. “I was born in Baylor Hospital and that’s home. You know, I got a big ol’ Texas tattoo on my leg.” In his childhood, Van Winkle split his time between Miami and his hometown of Dallas. The day we speak, he’s calling from Palm Beach — where he’s lived for the past 30 years — as he calls it, “on daddy duty” on the drive home from picking up both his daughter from school and her Happy Meal. “So I grew up a lot out here in Florida, [but] I always have roots there, my whole family is there in Dallas,” he says. “So they’d disown me if, you know, I wasn’t a Cowboys fan.” Years before the word “vanilla” became an interchangeable descriptor for sexually bland, the rapper blew up the world with the still ubiquitous “Ice Ice Baby,” becoming an indisputable icon who danced (in harem pants) so Eminem could run. There was a time that the whirlwind left him spinning with depression, and in 1994 he attempted suicide by overdosing on drugs. These days, he seems to know well that anyone who’s ever called him a has- been is probably a never-been. And he is not one, at any rate. Ice channeled his fame into a successful run as reality TV star/ home renovator with The Vanilla Ice Project, which aired for nine seasons and is still film- ing. Plus he’s still touring. Despite his con- tinued success, he’s not fond of the new millennium. “Well, we have a blast,” he says of his up- 20 coming shows. “First of all, we show people what it was like to live in the ‘90s, which is a better time. ... I feel sorry for these kids to- Of everything he’s done, without ques- tion, this is, to him, the pinnacle of his pro- fessional career. “Ninja Turtles — I’m covered with [their] tattoos head to toe, right?” he says. “I’ve sold for over $480 million [in] re- cords, 48 million records worldwide, and other than my kids being the greatest ac- complishment of my entire life by far, when you look at career-wise, I am serious as I can be when I say my greatest accomplish- ment is the Ninja Turtles.” His favorite, he says, is “Raphael proba- bly. Michelangelo, Raphael. Yeah. Now isn’t it funny? We have our favorite song turtle to identify your character, right? “I’m a fanatic. I have the hugest collec- courtesy Vanilla Ice Vanilla Ice brought fans back to the ’90s with a show at the Statler with Young MC. day; it was just a better world when when we were kids.” Van Winkle says those who come to his shows “have a very broad demographic, from 9 to 90s” and are looking to relive the best of the decade: a simpler, more politi- cally neutral, financially naive era — be- fore we became entirely dependent on our devices and looked to social media for val- idation. “I get it because it’s infectious,” he says of the revival of ’90s culture. “It was the last great decade before computers ruined the world. I mean, all of our shoes that are sold today, they’re from the ’90s, the [Nike] Air Force 1, the Air Jordans, the Vans, the shell-toe Adidas, you know, ev- erything. The fashion — the fanny pack is back — and, you know, it’s not soccer moms doing it, it’s every generation. It’s college kids rocking them.” For him, the ’90s and late ’80s had an “en- ergy that moved people.” “It just has an electrifying magnetism that people are drawn to, and even though we’re in 2022, you know, there really hasn’t been any fashion or anything that’s changed from the ‘90s at all in 30 years,” he says. “It’s crazy. We are stuck in the ’90s still. If you go in the mall, you see neon col- ors everywhere, even the bathing suits for the girls are all like the ones they wore in the ’90s.” The style comeback is hugely rewarding for Van Winkle. He has achieved what few parents have: His kids think he’s cool. “My kids are early 20s,” he says of his el- dest, Dusti Rain and Keelee, “and they think I’m cool. They think, like, ‘Man, you are the coolest. I love those clothes and all those neon colors.’” “Even my 3-year-old, which is awe- some,” he continues, “because I thought all that fashion had ran its course. I look back at it like, ‘Oh that was so funny and cheesy, haha’ and I kind of laughed at it, like those pictures your grandmother pulls out of you that you don’t want to show your friends. Yeah. ‘Put those away, Grandma.’ I kind of was embarrassed a lit- tle bit by some of the Z Cavaricci jeans I wore, and now it’s the coolest thing. My daughters are Googling pictures of me go- ing, ‘Dad, look at these pants you used to have, wow.’” Vanilla Ice is also a hit with other people’s kids, he says, who learn about him after watching The Vanilla Ice Project or through parents introducing the rapper to their chil- dren via YouTube clips. “I play a lot of colleges,” he says. “A lot of kids that were not born during ‘Ice Ice Baby,’ so I have very broad demographics. It doesn’t cater to the obvious.” Thanks to his constant presence on TV, Van Winkle is still easily recognizable, even if we best remember him for his signature pompadour and ’90s flair. “A lot of people come up to me that are younger and they go ‘Go ninja, go ninja, go,” he says with a near-maniacal laugh, “’cuz I’m a big part of the, you know, the Ninja Turtles.” Vanilla Ice performed the song “Ninja Rap” in a scene for the 1991 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. “I play all the comic cons and stuff and the Ninja Turtles outsell everything,” he says, “even Spider-Man, Superman. Like ev- ery superhero out there, times 10, just the memory of their memorabilia of the Ninja Turtles is unbelievable. And it’s still going. I mean, you can go into Walmart today and they have their own row of toys of Ninja Turtles.” tion of Ninja Turtle stuff back from ‘84 — from cassettes to all kinds of VHS stuff to, you know, even the cereal bowl with the straw in it that you can soup the milk up. I told everybody, I said that I would remove every tattoo on my whole body, except for my Ninja Turtle tattoos.” Fashion is an important element for Van Winkle. It’s not just a way to retroactively impress his children, but an easy way to identify kinship, especially among those who like the same kind of music. “Pop culture was a real thing and that’s where you could identify how people dressed in the fashion with what kind of music they listen to,” he says. “You can easily spot the punk rockers wearing the leather jackets and the Mohawks and the guyliner. You knew they were listening to Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. You could tell the stoners over there, they were lis- tening to Motley Crue and all that stuff. And then you’ve got the jocks and stuff, you can easily tell how they were dressed what they were listening to, and the hip- hoppers, which is me. The fashion for hip- hop was huge.” Van Winkle does not care for smart- phones, computers or any screen outside of the one for which you used a remote to turn on MTV. He refers to the pre-internet era as “before the time we ruined the world.” There is hardly anything useful he finds in modern technology and nothing he would take back with him. “I would leave all the apps and smart- phones and ‘Snapcraps’ and computer screens, I would leave all that and never bring that back to the ’90s,” he says. “I wouldn’t want an electric car in the ‘90s. I wouldn’t want a Tesla. I’d rather burn rub- ber and put in a louder exhaust.” He remembers his days cruising down Forest Lane, when kids carried around screwdrivers so they could take out their car’s back seats to put in a subwoofer box, “You know, because you could pop the trunk and dance — anywhere. A parking lot could now turn into a dancing lot. That’s the ’90s; 1 dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 APRIL 21-27, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
