Ice Ice Ba...WTF?

So, I’m driving down the road watching people in my rear-view mirror and I realized that people really do some ridiculous stuff in their cars. The lady behind me was squinting like a far-sighted fat man at a strip club as the sun shone in her windshield. She had the visor down. Had she flipped the visor up, she would have found her sunglasses. I laughed at that for about 8 miles.


As the novelty of that wore off I started flipping through radio stations. It must be a guy thing – TVs, radios, it doesn’t matter because we’re just not satisfied with whatever station the thing is on. Anyway, I’m pushing 'seek' like a madman desperate to find something in English that doesn’t feature roosters crowing and I hear a familiar bass-line from what I think is a Queen song.

No such luck. It turns out to be Vanilla Ice’s, “Ice Ice Baby” from 1989 or whatever. My first instinct, as is often the correct response, is to turn it off in favor of something less obnoxious like Tony Basil’s “Oh, Mickey” but there just aren’t that many stations on the dial.

And here’s the thing – I left it on and Vanilla Ice turned out to be therapeutic in its own vapid fashion. The song is now funny in a feel-good way – much the same as Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” It appears that 20 years and a heavy dose of nostalgia have the ability to make old rappers into Smurf-like characters. Who knew?

I always used to think Vanilla Ice was sad and a bit pathetic and so, on the verge of feeling a little sympathy for him, I looked him up under “where are they now?” and it turns out that Ice has a new album which debuted Feb. 1 and apparently is laugh-out-loud awful. The title: “WTF-Wisdom, Tenacity & Focus.” I’d give you a run-down of the song list but my curiosity only compels me to go so far.

Among the many things I never thought I’d hear in my lifetime, Vanilla Ice in the same sentence as wisdom, tenacity and focus, may be the most far removed. I even fancy that I thought I’d hear “congratulations Mr. Bushey, you’ve won the lottery” before I heard Vanilla Ice and wisdom together. I mean, consider some of the lyrics to his ’89 offering:

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

Well, as I was “checking out the hook as his DJ revolved it” I looked in the mirror again – just in time to watch another woman (while driving mind you) take out a deodorant stick and rub it under her nose. I couldn’t make this up with a gun pointed at my head.

She wasn’t sniffing it – she was rubbing it under her nose. I was trying to think what could be so bad that it would lead to someone doing this when I thought better of it and just let it go.

There are some things in life we’re better off just not knowing – like the fact VI has a new album.