Vanilla Ice, nostalgia, hidden guns, banned songs and White Sanction

Welcome to another Deep Dive edition of Are You Sitting Comfortably?

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Sit back, settle in, and read on…

Like any other Geriatric Millennial (anyone born at the early ‘80s end of the Millennial spectrum), I know pretty much all the words to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice.

It’s an occupational hazard of having lived a childhood in the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s: to have committed rap hits of the day to memory at a time when hiphop in the mainstream was still a major novelty.

So when not too long ago I was driving around listening to the radio and ‘Ice Ice Baby’ came on, I couldn’t help but, stop, collaborate and listen, before joining in with a wry smirk on my face. It’s pure cheese, but the core memories of 10 year-old me vibing to that quiff-haired one hit wonder are too strong for me to ignore.

Part way through the song, I heard myself saying something that made me stop in my mental tracks for a moment, planting a seed of intrigue that would eventually grow into this article. It’s that part where Vanilla Ice says: 

Shay with a gauge and Vanilla with a nine.

Hm.

As a child, I had no idea that a ‘gauge’ is reference to a 12 gauge shotgun, while a ‘nine’ refers to a nine millimetre automatic handgun, knowledge I have gained via a lifetime of consuming American media. Vanilla Ice goes on to describe a poetically violent scene: gunshots, rained out like a bell/ I grabbed my nine, all I heard were shells/ Fallin’…

Gun culture is something that is tragically common across the general North American lived experiences. Add to that the macho, street, outlaw credentials that hiphop leaned into as it grew into adolescence, and you get a genre of music (gangsta rap) where gun talk is fairly prevalent. It’s part of an ongoing construction of black masculinity as threatening, something that mainstream culture has long promoted, partly as a way of dehumanising black identity.

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