When I was in 8th grade, my Spanish teacher taught our class how to sing “Ice Ice Baby” in Spanish. She played that song so many times during that one semester that 25 years later, I still remember more than 50% of it. Vanilla Ice has spent his professional career post-one hit wonder doing 90s nostalgia tours and flipping houses. Most recently, he served as a mentor on Amazon Prime’s new reality series KPopped. KPopped, which is produced by Megan Thee Stallion and Lionel Richie, challenges KPop artists to reinterpret Western songs as – you guessed it – KPop tracks. Ice showed up on the third episode of the season to perform “Ice Ice Baby” with the group Kep1er. There’s an entire sequence beforehand that shows the women in Kep1er learning the song, which really tugged at my 90s kid heart.
Ice just did an interview with Yahoo that was full of nostalgia for the good old days. He described the 90s as “the last of the great decades.” He also called out the world before computers and then shared the five fads that he wishes he could revive. A lot of what he lists hits hard. Here’s what he had to say about bringing back the 90s as well the fads he’d like to see return.
Life before computers ruined everything: “[W]e can remember all the greatness of life before computers ruined the world, you know? And the kids are gonna sit there and enjoy it with us. We’re gonna go, ‘I remember that.’ And they’re gonna go, ‘Well, I love this.” It’s kind of been lost for a while — so let’s bring it back with the ’90s,” he says.
Z. Cavaricci pants and zigzag hairdos: Z. Cavariccis need to come back. I can’t find a pair in my size anymore, and I’d buy them all day.
I miss all those zigzag hairdos. Well, it’s kind of coming back! A lot of stuff is coming back. All the lines I used to put in my hair. Do you remember that? I shaved my eyebrows. There were so many crazy things. The fanny pack is back, and the ’90s are in full effect. It’s all gonna come back, and I love it.
5.0 Mustang: I want the ragtop down so my hair can blow. That car is the most epic there is.
Blockbuster Nostalgia: Oh my God, I’d go back to Blockbuster. It was so much more than going there and just getting a movie. It was about getting out of the house. Studying the back of the [movie] cover just to see if it was a good one. A bag of popcorn. It was about just getting up and out of the house, to come back with something and really sit down and watch it.
Cassettes are the best: The cassette deck is still the coolest. I lived during that generation, and I’m honored to be there for that. The patience it takes to rewind and find that one song — it creates patience. These kids today, I don’t think they could handle the cassette. I found my old collection [of cassette tapes] in a box of construction equipment. I found everything. Nothing is as valuable as those tapes. When I popped [the box] open, it was like the holy grail. I don’t care if I had the Hope Diamond in there, it would never be as valuable as those tapes! I had [my] studio sessions, all kinds of stuff. I have cassettes and a cassette player. A collection of old jam boxes, actually.
I’m an elder millennial who grew up with all of the things that Ice talks about. I long for those simpler times in which I spent an hour after school playing Chip’s Challenge and sneaking TRL on MTV. Back in my day, my biggest goal was taping the different versions of My Heart Will Go On off of the radio and onto a cassette that my 13-year-old self would then relisten to on my Walkman. I agree with Ice; I also don’t think kids today could handle the cassette tape. They’re so used to instant gratification and being able to press “skip.” A cassette would be culture shock. I think present-day fashion is better, but I otherwise miss the analog world.
We’re in the process of clearing out a lot of little kid toys to make space for gaming systems. My kids and our neighbors are super into games on the Wii, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and early PlayStation consoles. This amuses me because the only system I had growing up was a GameBoy. I would love to take them to a Blockbuster. I’ve always heard the phrase ”Everything old is new again.”. Let’s bring back zig zag parts and Cavaricci pants. Those were the days.
Photos credit: Robert Bell/INSTARimages.com/Cover Images, Aces/Backgrid, Getty
And if the younger generation was faced with a cassette that got eaten by the player? The careful untangling, the straightening, the rewinding….
They’d lose their minds.
What about 8 tracks. You HAD to listen to a couple of songs before it got to the one you wanted.
Oh yeah.
The glory days of the 8-track tape.
Where you’d get a BzrrrrrKerchunk right in the middle of a song.
Right!! My parents always bought used cars, so we had 8-tracks longer than most people. My dad would buy grocery bags full of old tapes for $5 a bag. It was fantastic. Loving this little trip down memory lane with Vanilla Ice (I got his cassette from Santa one year).
Something that I think started getting lost with CDs and has become worse with streaming is the art of the album. Albums were sequenced very deliberately and the album as a whole was considered a work of art, not just a collection of singles. Now even if you get a full album on itunes or wherever you can skip around in it, you can listen to it completely out of order, etc. If you wanted to do that with a cassette you had to try really hard.
anyway its easy to say “kids these days will never know,…..” and thats true but there are things from the 50s and 60s that I’ll never know, thats just how it goes.