Fucking Day: Vanilla Ice's Now & Forever

What’s your favorite ’90s? Mine is 1994 because I had discovered The Mighty Mighty Bosstones but hadn’t yet learned about global warming. But 1994 was the low point for some icons of America’s last sane decade. By now I see you nodding at my reference to Vanilla Ice’s sophomore album Mind Blowin’ and its least single-worthy track, "Now & Forever," so let’s get to it. But to be clear: I come not to bury Vanilla Ice but to praise him one time boyyyyeeeeee!

I’m wholly agog at how our culture mocks Vanilla Ice, a man who conquered four different fields before he was 30—

--and who, according to Bianca Butthole, sports a massive icicle. He slept with Madonna at a time when that meant something! Even if you wave away his album sales as a media creation, he wrote “Ice Ice Baby” when he was 16! Compare it to the poetry you wrote your sophomore year about the darkness inside, and tell me again that he sucks. Public Enemy never scrambled to get its label to sign you.

He’s not the loser you claim him to be; shuck that shibboleth right now, because Vanilla Ice can never lose. Vanilla Ice is successful on levels none of us will ever sniff, while simultaneously making us grateful every day God chose to give us more depth than a penny loafer. His curse is to win at anything he tries, forever denied the growth that comes with failure. This midas touch has made him an inveterate jabroni, and “Now & Forever” is the proof.

Also, Santa Claus was real, but died when you stopped believing in him. Sorry you had to learn this way.

Now that you understand your whole world has been a lie, let me introduce you to the horny Vanilla Ice, here to seduce you (a Dallas 9 or above) with the full power of his “dope” rapping-song lyrics.

I know you’ve never heard of Mind Blowin’. If you even do a ’90s in your VR memory mainframe, your two impressions of Vanilla Ice are his young-Elvis state when he looked like the wall of the cool hair salon—

—or the 1998 iteration, when he reached the more-or-less final Fred Durst state by which we all recognize him today at our Mar-A-Lago superspreader parties.

But in 1994—the lost midpoint—Vanilla Ice put out a sophomore album that wanted to reinvent him as Venice Beach’s freshest corpse. And everything about the liner notes will trick you into thinking Korn had a Pete Best.

With crispy hair and crispier grunge flannel covering up his yin/yang scorpion tattoos, Vanilla ’94 may yet turn out to have been Ben Stiller playing the lost Lenny Kravitz tambourinist. This photo was used in test prints of the world’s least scratched & sniffed bong-water-scent sticker. This is the Vanilla Ice that wanted to lay you down by the trash fire…

“Now & Forever” is fat, bouncy pimp music that challenges whether Vanilla Ice realizes that Vanilla Ice has had sex. This was the “Popozao” of songs even more obscure than “Popozao.” It makes the exact impression of Speed Buggy farting during sex on a first date. Sorry, I don’t have any current cultural references for you. This album has a restraining order put on it by the 21st century.

Wait, let me smuggle one in for you: imagine someone tried to run G-Eazy.exe on a Compaq 286 with a bent motherboard, and you’d have a vague idea of this song.

It starts as a standard boasting, persuasive number. Let all fair maids who hear his cry know that this young rapper enjoys sex: freaks only need apply, your pleasures not guaranteed. Vanilla has a bevy of food and drink that he would like to eat off your body in the year of our lord 1994. At the time, that was crrraaaazy! America had only recently recovered from the shock of Basic Instinct, a scandalous movie that dared to suggest a woman could be on top. And now THIS?? It’s extremely unhygienic!

But rapwise, none of that is 2 Live Crew territory. Is an Ice not entitled to the sweat of his skinz? Plainly yes, but not if he collapses into lyrical nonsense out of the gate:

Homeslice said WHAT…?

Yes, yes, we all understand the mechanics but the longer you think about it, the less this metaphor functions in sex or symbolism. Something feels innately misunderstood, like when you ask a genie for a ten-inch pianist, and instead you get a 10” penis, but it’s attached to Vanilla Ice playing the keyboard, and also the coconuts are at the bottom of the tree? Are you lost? I’m already lost.

And it’s not just me! At this point the song smashes its brakes, narrowly avoiding a rear-ender with common sense. It’s like DJ Zero simply couldn’t believe what he just heard and forgot to keep doing that turntable hand scrub move that makes records play. (Mom, I know you read these articles; DJ Zero was Vanilla’s co-writer. Stay alive, I will come home with supplies if I can find work telling jokes among the badger-pelt furriers this spring thaw.)

The song stops cold at four junctures in three verses, each more “OOF!” than the last. Also, OOF isn’t an exclamation, it’s an acronym for “Oof! Obstetrically Forbidden.”

“She comes equipped to lead the I.C.E. stuck,” he continues, “The kind of woman who can make my volcano erupt.” And brother-man, I am just so confused. This is starting to feel like when you buy a box of fleshtone crayons, but all of them are shades of grurple.

He describes his ideal woman (no uggos) and then we get our second hard pause:

This rhyme profoundly misunderstands vaginal penetration—it’s the direct cause of a paper in Urology Today that concludes, “The urethral blockage appeared to be a crude paste of clotted blood, rapper’s tears, and clitoral scrapple.”

There’s simply no resolving it, and you can tell the mayor of Raptown I said so. I stand my ground because once again the song flat-out stops to shake its head incredulously at its own creator: a man blessed with a dick that hangs to the floor, but doomed to trip over it.

Are we still in the car metaphor? Because now his penis is both dipstick and battery cable, neither of which is the image of turgid male power that 1994’s unshaven hot sluts crave—at least, not the way *I* recall the 400px JPGs we used to download over the course of a weekend. Oh, sir! It was a savage time.

I’m not going to lie to you, the next line has a nice snapback with “Pump ya with the juice to keep the engine running.” Then it wanders off the ranch, because Vanilla Ice is not interested in this “Now & Forever” crap. That’s just a line fed to you by his wingmen. The refrain tries to confer emotional commitment, but the lyrics obstinately block it. Every time the VIP (=Vanilla Ice Posse: come on, this is basic stuff, kids) coos “Now…and for-EVER…” this clown jumps back in to hoot, “I gotta HAVE it!”

After informing us that he’s the type of man who likes to get it off (which is really any man prior to our 2017 Revelation of the End Times), Vanilla unveils his two-point plan for YOUR orgasm:

Navel tongue baths: you know there’s a rainforest of bacteria in there? Real nice example for our kids, Robert.

The song goes down for the count as this verse reaps the whirlwind, and that’s hardly a mixed metaphor compared to this stanza. Vanilla wants to do graphic sex kisses to a real woman sex goddess, but he won’t take a hooker onto his boat, but the boat is also a penis and now it’s 53’ long oh nooooo that will kill any human female! Unless it’s a whaling vessel, and he’s been seducing a sperm whale all this time? Life is very confusing here in Vanillaville, and I don’t have my jabroni’s license yet.

After your choice of hot tub or Jacuzzi (the hot tub’s hot tub), Vanilla offers to put on his head gear to explore your cave. That’s very considerate, but I think we all know this is not a condoms & dental dams relationship. You can’t describe a raging Aphrodite that your posse wants you to marry and pretend anyone’s being responsible. This is a couple that absolutely orders room service mid-coitus just to make the bellhop see something he shouldn’t.

The very next line is “See, you can make the Ice cream. Come here girl, and take a lick of this ice cream.” These are the second and third times Vanilla has invoked ice cream, rhyming a word with itself even though handier pairings like “nice dream” or “sliced peen” were right there.

Folks, this song has vexed me since 8th grade. We know Vanilla Ice fucks because he dated Madonna for 8 months, and Madonna’s sexuality has neutron-star gravity. Quick: call up the person you lost your virginity to. If they don’t answer, they were probably Madonna under an alias. Anyone who has ever shaken hands with her is technically party to an orgy that’s been running since 1986.

So why would Miami’s rap apollo cap off a long period of fuckin’ with the affected ignorance of not-fuckin’? Why is he trying so hard to convince us he has no idea what a breast feels like? There’s only one explanation.

Everything this song knows about sex it learned from watching late-night cable TV through the scramble. Who might be into that? Only some ball-stomping domme telling the world’s most successful goofnugget that he’s a toad who doesn’t know how to please a woman.

We all want what we can’t have. I think this is an artistic attempt to taste humiliation by a man with no losses and no shame. This is what Vanilla Ice imagines it feels like to be mortal.

Sure, you’re veteran Hot Dog. You’re used to sad losers selling you get-laid-quick schemes. By lunchtime every Fucking Day, you’re clawing at the bear mace in your eyes again and cursing the Polish robot that plagiarized the e-book Sex Babesz Doing YOu the Most Pickuip Vol. XISV: Famous Lyrics by Rappist Vanilla Man like a professional. But you had no preparation for the Shakespearean tragedy of a man who can only win, turned on by the allure of failure. Its lessons are as fraudulent and simultaneously aroused by public humiliation as an Anthony Weiner apology.

I think we can all agree that a 26-year-old motocross star was never going to write the next “All Along the Watchtower.” But if he did, the Joker would absolutely be a moneypig for the Thief.

...

Brendan is still trying to finger a B-chord to perfection. You’re better off reading his comic about a pop star and imagining the music.

If these images are borked you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.