After Playing Mar-a-Lago, Vanilla Ice Is Part of the Culture War

Vanilla Ice has come a long way from his City Lights days.

After rising through the hip-hop ranks during the genre’s golden age, the artist born Rob Van Winkle catapulted onto the national scene with a polarized reception. Contemporaries like KRS-One did not respect him, but Chuck D from Public Enemy did. This divisive celebrity blossomed (or festered, depending on how you feel about it) well into the early 1990s, and long story short, his hometown show during his first headline tour was at the 8,500-capacity Fair Park Coliseum.

Everything else of note in his life soon followed, if not happened in complete tandem: a romance with Madonna, the highly regarded Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the ill-regarded Cool As Ice (not “ill” as in Licensed to Ill or Illmatic — we mean “ill” as in “U.S. culture contracted C. diff because of that movie, and the life-saving fecal transplant was not nearly as repulsive to the senses as that monstrosity”).

Anyway, the ebbs and flows of Vanilla Ice’s professional trajectory most recently landed him at a gig that, to another celebrity, would be their street cred’s Battle of Waterloo: a New Year's Eve gig at Mar-a-Lago.

I always wondered if he just sang his one song over and over. I’m pretty sure he does. I don’t think Trump is watching Mr. Ice. pic.twitter.com/2KnGawt9wT

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 1, 2024

In fairness to Mr. Van Winkle, he contends that he is apolitical when it comes to these gigs, and this is not the first time he played the same event at the Trump family's personal playground, Mar-a-Lago. On New Year's Eve 2020, back when most of us we were still in lockdown as a precaution against COVID-19, Ice responded to the backlash for his performance in a January 2021 statement that read: “The New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago was awesome. We danced we celebrated. We had a great time. It was a very classy event at a beautiful Palm Beach landmark. Everyone was cleared from Covid test prior to the event. I think everyone just wants to get out and dance and have fun. We’ve all been marinating, trapped in our houses. It’s not about politics at all. This is about dancing and enjoying New Year’s. And I wish everyone a very happy new year.”

Although Vanilla Ice’s Sunday night performance at Mar-a-Lago did not have the same burden of health precautions, it is nonetheless a culture war offensive. The same night at Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in New York City, Green Day performed a revamped version of one of their signature hits “American Idiot,” wherein they changed the “redneck agenda” lyrics to “MAGA agenda.”

Thus Vanilla Ice and Green Day came to face off in a culture war when the following day U.S. Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia tweeted his erudite estimation of the relative talents of the two acts:

Vanilla Ice > Green Day

— Rep. Mike Collins (@RepMikeCollins) January 1, 2024

This, of course, boils the issue down to which political faction has the better music. We would like to think that political discourse should have more substance than whose appointed pop culture warriors make better music, but this is also the music section, so we will have that conversation.

As you can probably gather from our past coverage of Vanilla Ice, we aren’t as cynical and dismissive of the rapper as perhaps everybody else is. Sure, he’s come out with some clunkers and was hilariously adamant that the bassline in “Ice Ice Baby” was different from that of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” But he has also consistently demonstrated unwavering respect for hip-hop, a self-evident fact considering the time he put into the local music scene. Plus, he is a good dancer with rapping skills that, while not mind-blowing in the slightest, are far from the worst. He’s certainly no Nas or Rakim, but he’s also not Timothee Chalamet’s SoundCloud rapper character on Saturday Night Live.

So is he better than Green Day? Not exactly, but we’re not going to pretend that Green Day is beyond artistic reproach.

Like Vanilla Ice, the members of Green Day also come from humble and honest beginnings. As teenagers, they were proteges of Larry Livermore of Lookout Records and regulars at DIY punk venue 924 Gilman, where they would play local, pro bono gigs with some of California’s finest, including Neurosis and Samiam. That was during a time when The Offspring could open for Fugazi and Beat Happening and Operation Ivy could open for Thinking Fellers Union Local 282. In other words, they were exposed to a wide range of music at a young, impressionable age.

And even though Gilman famously has a policy that says bands signed to a major label are not allowed to play the venue without expressed membership approval (which is stupid, but we digress), Green Day played their old stomping grounds as recently as 2015 and have continued to express appreciation for it.

While no doubt the real article, Green Day also has its share of musical misses. Everything since American Idiot has been either gaudily overblown or offensively unimaginative, and the boomer-coded marketing campaign for Green Day's Father of All Motherfuckers (which included a billboard reading “No features[.] No Swedish songwriters[.] No trap beats[.] 100% pure uncut rock”) hyped itself up beyond any semblance of credibility.

Green Day’s earlier records, such as Insomniac and Kerplunk, have some obvious merit, but somewhere along the way, the band decided to scope in on ostentatious rock operas and a bloated album series. And as post-2004 precedent has it, they go into insipid territory every time they exceed that scope. The boundless gulf between an artist’s good and bad music is a gamut almost as old as music itself, and Green Day embodies it perhaps better than Neil Young and David Bowie, who themselves came out with terrible albums.

So is Green Day better than Vanilla Ice? Yes, but it’s not exactly a Reagan-Mondale landslide victory.

Speaking of historic upsets and living in 1984, watch this video of the former president himself watching the Vanilla Ice set with what looks to be mild intrigue at best, or cold indifference at worst.

Lol, Trump is looking miserable at the Mar A Lago NYE party watching......Vanilla Ice.

I'm sorry, but MAGA isn't cool. It's lame.

Unimaginable lame. pic.twitter.com/XxUOCAf18L

— Peter Henlein (@SwissWatchGuy) January 1, 2024