I've been making it a habit to catch "The Surreal Life" every Sunday night, which has quickly evolved into my latest guilty pleasure. Yes, I've been known to make a few disparaging remarks about Reality TV shows in some of my past columns--but the thing is, I currently don't have cable. (It's a long story, but let's just say "I fought Comcast and Comcast won.") And let me tell you something, you'd be surprised at some of the shit you end up watching when you have a mere seven channels to choose from. Just the other day, I had an unholy urge to watch a fucking soap opera! Thankfully I came to my senses, but I had to club myself about the head with a shoe until the urge passed. ("Bad brain!" WHACK! "Bad brain!" WHACK!)

I find the "The Surreal Life" interesting on several levels--for one thing, it's quite a novelty to see a WB network show that has a few white people on it. Also, the show has Ron Jeremy, Tammy Faye Baker, Erik Estrada, the black broad from "Baywatch" and a blonde piece of ass from one season of "The Real World" all living in a house together. This in itself is fascinating--but when you throw Vanilla Ice into the mix, you've got yourself a recipe for some true "Must See" TV! (That's right, NBC, I ripped off your tagline. So take your shitty "Frasier" episodes and shove them up your collective asses.)

Vanilla Ice, aka Rob Van Winkle, is a quite an interesting guy. His behavior on the show ranges from humorous to demented, and he has some definite anger management issues. When he's not complaining about the lack of Jimmy Dean sausages in the house, he can usually be found angrily defacing old pictures of himself that decorate the wall. He also broke into a forbidden pantry to obtain some salt and explained to Tammy Faye that humans are, in fact, descendants of aliens from outer space. Then, he carried Gary Coleman into a restaurant's kitchen and threatened to throw the little fucker into the deep fryer. And this is only three episodes into the season!

To people that don't know any better, it would seem that Ice really doesn't have much to bitch about. He has a hot wife and a little girl. He's also still young and supposedly pretty wealthy, with a huge house and plenty of cars. (Unlike his mentor, that idiot MC Hammer who pissed
away his money in record time.) He even had the "Real World" hottie make a drunken pass at him while cameras rolled--so why is this motherfucker SO bitter and pissed off? Well, for those of you under the age of twenty, here's a little pop culture history lesson for you....

YO VANILLA! KICK IT ONE TIME, BOYEEEE!!!

Before Eminem, there was Vanilla Ice--likewise, before "The Marshall Mathers LP", there was a rap opus by the name of "To The Extreme." This was back in 1990, when people were still listening to shit like Warrant and sporting some pretty funky mullets. I was in high school at the time, with my jean jacket and a perfectly sculpted mullet that would have made Jerry Seinfeld green with envy. I can still remember that day when I sauntered into the lunch room, checking out the chicks and thinking I had shit ALL figured out. That was the fateful day I first heard "Ice Ice Baby" on the radio.

When the song started, I was pleasantly surprised--as in "How cool, they're playing 'Under Pressure' on the radio!"--but once Vanilla started rapping over the hook, my pleasure immediately turned into immense pain. Some dickhead was ripping off a Queen song and rapping over it! I was floored by this flagrant act of blasphemy. I mean, this was WAY worse than MC Hammer ripping off "Superfreak". Queen was, and still is, one of my favorite bands. You can call Freddie Mercury a homo all you want, but that guy could sing his ass off. (And it wasn't long after "Ice Ice Baby" hit the scene that Freddie kicked the bucket. Coincidence? I think not!)

Imagine my terror when I looked around at my fellow classmates and saw that they were actually ENJOYING it! I couldn't believe what I was seeing! Within thirty seconds of the song starting, I was wanting to gut the nearest person with a ginsu knife--but everybody else was singing along like they'd never heard anything so cool. I didn't even know who the fuck Vanilla Ice was... I guess I was too busy listening to The Beatles' White Album. But hearing "Ice Ice Baby" that day convinced me that maybe I didn't have things figured out after all. I mean, hey, if this was the kind of shit people my age were listening to, I must be hopelessly out of touch--even with my ultra-cool mullet and stone washed blue jeans.

"This won't catch on," I tried to reassure myself. "Nobody could possibly take this shit seriously... could they?" Well, it goes to show you what I know. Four months later, "To The Extreme" had sold in excess of SEVEN MILLION COPIES. (That's right, seven million copies. Chew on that one a while.) It was a difficult period in my life, because I could not for the life of me understand why people were listening to Vanilla Ice. For a time, I nervously checked the craniums of my fellow classmates, looking for lobotomy scars. (Which would have explained a LOT.) I felt like I was living amongst pod people, many of whom took to wearing Vanilla Ice t-shirts and even sporting his ridiculous, pompadour hairstyle. It was like the whole world had suddenly gone retarded.

I tried reasoning with some of them; "Look he just ripped off a Queen and David Bowie song!" I'd vainly protest. "Aside from that, he fucking sucks! CAN'T YOU SEE HOW MUCH HE SUCKS??"

They always had the same robotic, mindless responses, such as "He's a good dancer", "He's hot" and "He's a good rapper." I would inevitably get frustrated and start berating them and their apparent lack of even moderate intelligence. You know, it's a wonder that I had ANY friends in high school, seeing as how I spent a good portion of my time telling my peers what idiots they were. "I'll tell you this much," I used to lecture them, "In another year, you'll deny that you ever listened to that guy." Of course, I was wrong about that--most of them were denying it within six months.

Yes, that's right--Vanilla Ice went from being arguably the biggest star in the world to complete laughingstock in just under one year. What went wrong? Well, it's really quite simple. Vanilla Ice, trying in vain to attract black listeners, concocted a bullshit tale about how he'd come from "the streets" and used to hang out with the hip black kids. He told wild stories of being in gang fights and living as a street kid in the rough parts of Miami. In reality, he grew up in a middle class suburb and was every bit as "hardcore" as my deceased grandmother. Maybe even less so--my granny was BADASS and made some mean french toast! But seriously, did anybody actually believe that this dude was "tough"? Yeah, right--it wasn't all that long ago that Ice got his ass handed to him by Todd Bridges in Fox's "Celebrity Boxing". (Ha ha! Word to yo mutha, Willis!)

This shouldn't have been a big deal, but once Ice's ruse was discovered he lost any shred of "street cred" that he once had. And in the rap world, that's the death knell--for you see, if rap fans don't believe that you might actually shoot somebody, they won't buy your shit. And suddenly, EVERYBODY stopped buying Ice's records. His loss of "street cred" was part of it, but his oversized, red, white and blue glittery pants weren't helping matters, either. Not to mention having one of his songs in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie ("Go ninja, go ninja, GO!"). And let's not forget his hilariously bad turn as an actor in 1991's "Cool As Ice". If you haven't seen this cinematic classic, I HIGHLY recommend a rental. Not only is it a riot, it also stars the guy that played Steven Keaton on "Family Ties"! How can you go wrong with that?

In essence, he went from being the hippest guy on the planet to being the lamest. And now, even though he sold a grand total of fifteen million copies of "To The Extreme" worldwide, you'd be hard up to find anyone that admits to owning it. But I know better--I know that many of you out there still crank "Ice Ice Baby" in the privacy of your own car... and you can still sing along with every lyric. But you won't admit to still digging the Iceman... and you'd certainly never give the poor guy a second chance, not even fourteen years later. He could release the greatest rap album ever made, and it won't make a bit of difference. Why? Because he's Vanilla Ice, that's why. Come on, people, it's not like he did anything THAT terrible--sure, his "faux wigger" voice was annoying and he may have committed some crimes against fashion with his baggy pants, but we're all guilty of shit like that. Hell, I once owned a pair of parachute pants and I thought they ruled. And if you lived through the 80's, you had a pair, too. Would you wear them now??? Of course you wouldn't. But can you imagine being judged based on shit you did fourteen years ago? Sounds like a bum rap to me.

So, you see, THAT is why Rob Van Winkle is so bitter. I can't say that I blame him. But for what it's worth, I'm finding myself being entertained by him for the first time. Sure, it's on a TV show, but that's better than nothing. Keep up the good fight, Ice. And keep on playing that funky music, white boy.

-JTL

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