Funk
Chunk #11
A Column
by Old-School Archaeologist
Gretchen Federlein
Vanilla
Ice Waits For God's Time Machine
Deity
Due between Y2K and 2008, Says Caucasoid Rapper
When the
millennium comes, Vanilla Ice will be waiting
for God to land on earth in his time machine. He's
pretty sure it will happen, provided the Western
calendar system hasn't been screwed up in the last
couple thousand years; this is what he came to
believe after a 
1995 drug overdose
that nearly killed him. After his friends doused him
with buckets of water, he turned his life around, and
got a tattoo of a new leaf to prove it.
As Rob
Van Winkle sits across from me and casually airs his
newfound opinions, I just can't help staring at him
and wondering: has this man gone nuts? And by the way
his manager keeps shooting the Iceman warning glares,
it looks like I'm not the only one who might think
so.
It would be easy to dismiss
Vanilla Ice as a washed up sellout turned batty with
fame. To be sure, the astonishing backlash he endured
would be enough to send anyone to the rubber room.
After sellout stadium tours, To The
Extreme's 15 million copies, and despite
unrivaled beat box skills, fans dismissed Vanilla as
a sellout, and critics dubbed him with the kiss of
death in the hip hop world -- "white, white,
baby." Amazingly, despite all this, he seems
upbeat and optimistic. And among the litany of
often-contradictory convictions Rob tosses out every
several minutes, I found him surprisingly earnest,
introspective and eager to please.
Funk
Chunk: I saw you open for MC
Hammer and En Vogue years ago. When you came on, my
girlfriend kept hitting me and screaming...What have
you been doing since then?
Ice:
(laughs) I'll take you for a ride from the past
since 1992 real quick ...Everything blew up and I was
doing a lot of drugs as an escape route more or less
and it's been three years now since I've been sober.
I've been married for a little over a year, and I
have a baby daughter. It's hard to be away from them
on tour.
FC:
Congratulations. The drug thing seems to happen
all the time. What kind of drugs were you in to?
Ice:
You want me to go into detail? God. Heavy. Heavy.
FC:
Like Coke, Heroin?
Ice:
Anything that was available. You know, it started
with ecstasy. In the music industry everything's
available, all the time, so if I was high on X and
there was Coke or heroin around I'd do it. But the
main thing was X. I overdosed one night and my
friends were dumping buckets of cold water over me.
It was pretty crazy. They thought I was dead. I woke
up the next morning and haven't touched anything
sense. I was just happy to be alive and I said, hey,
thank you Lord Jesus. I made a promise to God that
I'm not gonna turn around and go back into that. I'm
going to face a lot of my problems and everything and
I did. And since then he's been blessing me
tremendously. I have a wife and my baby and I've been
touring around the country for the past nine
months.
FC:
How's the tour going? And what about your new
record? On Universal, right? Called Hard to
Swallow?
Ice: Pretty
much all the shows have been sold out and been going
off the hook and the new record is so awesome, better
than I ever expected. God's just putting people in
front of me. I don't question the way he works but
it's a trip because right now. I'm working with this
guy named Ross Robinson on this record and the
Producer of Korn and Limp Bizkit. Like a high energy
stage diving mosh pitting type. The new record is
gonna freak everybody out.
FC:
Are you singing or rapping?
Ice:
I'm still rapping. That's my thing. [The album's]
got break beats and stuff on it, but it's gonna be
more hard edge, with a band playing, like a bass
player, drummer, guitar player and a DJ. So it's hip
hop mixed with not grunge or alternative, but like,
skate rock. Do you know what I'm talking about?
FC:
What music do you listen to?
Ice:
Oh man, mostly the east coast stuff. I listen to
a little bit of Ice Cube and stuff like that, west
coast, but mostly east coast stuff like Biggie, I
love Biggie and Red Man, and I could go on and on.
FC:
Would you let your daughter listen to Biggie?
Ice:
No, because of the influence. The music back in
my days wasn't; it wasn't as gangster. All those
records should be sold to eighteen year olds and up.
Music has an influence whether people accept it or
not, it does have an influence.
FC:
Tell me about your religion.
Ice:
I don't believe in religion. Do you want to hear
my story on that? (laughs) All right. Basically,
religion is man made. Because if you look in the
bible, it doesn't say Catholic, it doesn't say
Methodist, the words didn't even exist. That tells
you it was man made. All those religions are reading
the same books and have different views on it, so
basically they're all confused, so how do you know
which one is right? But I am a Christian. I also
believe that we are not true earthlings and it's a
fact because if you check statistics, or whatever
they call it, the dinosaurs were here for millions of
years before humans ever got here and that means that
we are not from this planet. We're all aliens.
FC:
You think we're all from another planet?
Ice:
Absolutely. There are meteorites that were sent
here, there's one in Ireland five miles out from the
coast, and there's one in Arizona. They both hit the
earth at the same time. So that means that's what
killed the dinosaurs. It's a fact, so where did we
come from? We've only been here for a few thousand
years, right?
FC:
Okay...
Ice:
And look. We've built cities because the Egyptian
sun god Rah came down and taught people how to be
civilized. (To his manager) What are you shaking your
head for? I can say that, man. Anyway. They say in
the bible that God travels through light. God is
light, so what does that tell you? That he has a
frickin time machine! So God visits this planet every
two thousand years.
FC:
Are you saying He's coming at the Millennium?
Ice:
Could be, but the calendar could be messed up by
7-8 years. 2000 is counting from Jesus, you know what
I'm saying? And China uses a different calendar. So
it could be anywhere between 2000 and 2008. I don't
know which calendar's right or wrong, but it is a
fact that we did not co-exist with the dinosaurs.
FC:
I have to ask you about Suge Knight. What
happened?
Ice:
Back in the day Suge came and took 3 points off
[To The Extreme] by saying that he did some kind of
work for it. He showed up in my hotel room one night
and made me sign some papers. I didn't call the
police or anything, I'm not a fool. I didn't want a
target on my forehead. But this guy at ABC, Dick
Walters calls me up and says, "hey we know about
Suge Knight and how he took your money and started
Death Row Records." He did start Death Row
Records with the money he took from me. He came in
and basically had me sign an agreement which was
worth about 4 million dollars
FC:
What is your biggest regret?
Ice:
The biggest? Probably the Madonna Sex book thing.
I went out with her for a while, and she asked me
over to the house. She said "A photographer's
coming over. Do you mind taking some pictures?"
I was like, "I guess not, no big deal." And
they guy starts taking pictures, she starts taking
her clothes off and running around. I wasn't thinking
much of it, and then all of a sudden, this huge metal
copy, $100 book came out. It just put me into a
slutty package that really wasn't me.
FC:
And you got nothing for the book?
Ice:
No, I didn't get shit off of it. And I have other
regrets, as far as people that I trusted. And a lot of the criticism I
got came from being a puppet for record companies.
When I was first coming up, I was playing black
clubs. I never played a white crowd in my entire
life. Fat gold rope chains, hardcore lookin',
Fila-wearin', I was all juiced out.
And the
record company wanted me to cross over to the pop
market, which had never been done. We sold 15 million
records, but depending on how you look at it, I still
wasn't accepted. Because they said to me, "We
want you to clean up your image. Go more
mainstream," and all this shit. "Do this
slow song." It was stupid, I didn't want to do
it. But executives from the record company would say
"Will you do it for a million dollars?" I
did, I took the money. But I think anybody in my
shoes would have done the same, cause I was broke as
hell.
But it's hard for me to sit
here and complain, after all I got. It's still way
beyond all my expectations. After To The Extreme,
I'm financially set for the rest of my life. So if
you've got stuff printed about you, whether it's good
or bad, at least you're doing something and people
are talking about you. So spell my name right on the
check, I'll send my daughter to college, you know
what I'm sayin'? You can't please the world. The
president can't even do that. You know? Look at him,
he's up shit's creek without a paddle.
Send me your Vanilla
fantasies!
mmslanty@nwlink.com
More Chunks
of Funk:
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Funk Chunk #2 -
Brand New Heavies
Funk Chunk #3 -
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Funk Chunk #4 - No
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Funk Chunk #5 - The Funk
Chunk Pimp-O-Matic
Funk Chunk #6 - Lets
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Funk Chunk #7 - Sweat the
Chunk
Funk Chunk #8 - Steve
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Funk Chunk #9 - Dumb
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Funk Chunk #10 - Doomed
Hairdos of the Rich & Famous
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