How Vanilla Ice got me blacklisted from the NZ music industry
A story about how my very first piece of published journalism got me into big, big trouble.
Hello,
Thanks for reading my last interview with Malice K.
Let me know in the comments if you enjoy that kind of musician X musician interview stuff - as I am keen to keep that ball rolling if you are!
Now for today’s yarn.
A fact about me: Before I became a musician I was a journalist.
My very first piece of journalism (written in 2017 at age 20), was a behind the scenes glimpse at a VIP meet-and-greet for the ‘I Love 90s’ musical nostalgia tour which included; Vanilla Ice, Coolio, Salt N Pepa and a bunch of other musical has-beens.
Certain punters had paid hundreds of dollars to meet the celebrities in person. My role was to take photos of them smiling next to the celebrities during their allocated 15 seconds, before hurriedly ushering them from the room.
The event was such a shit show and I had not signed any NDA. So I thought it would be a funny exercise to write an article about it for New Zealand publication The Spinoff.
This fateful decision eventually caused me to have someone scream down the phone at me that I “SHALL BE FOREVER BLACKLISTED FROM THE NEW ZEALAND MUSIC INDUSTRY!!!”
Let’s revisit how I got there, and how this blacklisting has affected my music career to this very day.
Article republished below - heavily edited and updated as it was written by a 20 year old idiot.
Love,
D.C.
Waiting for Ice…
I was born in 1996. This gives me, the ability to remember the 90s – though only through the haze of my dimwitted toddler memory.
If the recent I Love The ‘90s tour is anything to go by, it may be for the best that my brain was not developed enough to harbour clearer memories of that decade.
The tour was a blatant rehashing of ‘90s nostalgia – acts included Salt N Pepa, Coolio, Tone Loc, Colour Me Badd, Young MC and, the big ticket, Vanilla Ice.
These artists had all seen better days, as I was about to see as I got up close and personal ushering punters through a VIP meet-and-greet.
For some paying guests it was not enough to get the chance to see bloated and wrinkled 90s pin ups gingerly phone in their previous hits.
Some superfans needed to get up close and personal, and were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a VIP ticket.
That was where I came in.
My role as a VIP usher was simple:
The guests would enter the conference room at the rear of the arena and would be handed a giftbag including: a I Love 90s beer stubbie and an pixelated poster on A4 printer paper.
The guest would then hand me their phone and we would together walk the length of the room.
At stations along the room the VIP guests would have 5-10 second to take photos with each of the celebrities.
At the end of the room was a door, through which the VIP guests would then be unceremoniously kicked.
The room itself was large and unvacuumed, with high-wattage fluorescent lights flickering strobe-like causing pain to the eyes. We ushers stood around dazed, packing the lacklustre gift bags as the Celebrity musicians filed in.
First came R&B group Color Me Badd, in matching white sequinned suits and sparkling fedoras.
Then came Tone Loc, dressed in summer Hawaiian print, his voice a low, oscillating grumble, somewhere between Tom Waits and Whoopi Goldberg.
The baby-faced Young MC arrived next, who looked very unhappy.
Then came Salt N Pepa, who stood tall and beautiful. They were the only ones of the assembled celebrities to even have the vaguest hint of that excitable electricity that distinguishes the famous from the dour regular masses. They stood in a kind of star-power pose to await the first guests.
Suddenly from the back of the room, a loud squeal erupted.
From the direction of the squeal stood a short man with black braids held with wire to burst out of his cap like reindeer horns or a cartoon victim of electrocution. He wore reflective sunglasses and had a large mouth currently ejecting high-pitched obscenities.
It was Coolio. The rapper behind ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. And he was squealing into the unimpressed faces of Salt N Pepa.
His squealing was neither aggressive nor particularly friendly. It looked like a scene I had witnessed many times at high school: a class clown using low and loud humour desperately attempting to attract female attention. Salt N Pepa looked on unamused.
Vanilla Ice was nowhere to be seen. But before this could be questioned the VIP guests began to arrive.
They shivered giddily with nervous excitement. There was something proud in their faces as they queued up outside the room. Like a consumer rights expert at an ‘all you can eat buffet’ just daring the staff to tell them they are not entitled to a fifth plate of food. They were reading to gorge themselves on celebrity interaction, no matter the consequences.
I took my first pair of VIP guests along the gauntlet of 90s celebrities. They were a middle-aged couple smiling with the wide-eyed disbelief of a child at Disneyland finally presented with irrefutable evidence that Mickey Mouse is real.
The first celebrity on the line, Young MC, was of little interest to most of the VIPs, and was passed over quickly. As he posed for quick side-hugs and smiled for the camera I detected a deep resigned sadness behind his eyes.
Tone Loc was more energetic, sporadically bursting into unintelligible mumbles between photographs.
Color Me Badd were professionals and obviously used to this sort of thing; they formed themselves into a variety of group poses to break up the monotony with finger guns and garish squats.
Salt N Pepa were the picture of kind professionalism to their VIP guests, taking the time to have quick conversations with big smiles that really seemed to make their fans feel good.
Coolio was a different story. His behaviour seemed purely designed to disrupt the flow of VIP guests, and make the night obscenely difficult for the ushers.
He broke the rules by not standing in his clearly demarcated area, and instead roamed the room causing trouble and interfering with other VIP guest’s pictures.
He lay down on the unvacuumed carpet and assumed a pose of a reclining royalty, then rolled onto his stomach and banged his hands and feet on the ground like a baby, screeching a strange high pitched wail. Suddenly he jumped up and grabbed a female fan, and aggressively pulling her towards him. The fan smiled with the hint of panic in her eyes.
Coolio treated his female fans this way throughout the night. He wrapped his arms around them, gruffly grabbing and spinning them into position. The women laughed uncomfortably while their partners looked on, star struck.
By the time I had walked my first group through the VIP gauntlet, I noticed that the guests were refusing to walk through the exit door.
They stood immovable and uncertain like cattle escaped from the paddock, proud of their daring but unsure of the next step.
The punters looked around, confused. Asking again and again a question that would be repeated many times over the evening.
“Where is Ice?”
Vanilla Ice had not turned up to the roll call of Celebrities. The crackle of walkie talkies among the venue staff was growing increasingly unhinged as time ticked on and the famed rapper did not appear.
To the plaintive faces asking for Ice, all I could do was shrug my shoulders then run back to the entrance to get the next group of VIPs.
Soon the VIP meet-and-greet descended into chaos.
Fans got tired of waiting their turn and began pushing through the line to take their own photographs without the aid of a friendly usher.
Coolio became a cumbersome roadblock in the flow of guests as his antics grew more unhinged.
People rushed past the sad-eyed Young MC and grumbling Tone Loc, only to find the line bottle-necked by Coolio wanting to spend as much time as he could with the more attractive of his female fans.
Soon the thin veneer of professionalism vanished and the meet-and-greet turned into a free-for-all, a horrific selfie-soaked den of madness. The meek and soft-spoken fans were trampled and pushed around by the drunk and boisterous.
The rule-breaking group at the exit door grew in volume. Asking the same question with growing righteous indignation:
“Where the hell is Ice?”
A more militant faction of the VIP guests began to loudly announce they would not leave the room until they met with Vanilla Ice.
Word of their protest spread quickly and their numbers swelled with grumpy boomers, arms folded tight and faces reddening.
The VIP meet and greet room was not intended for this many people. The room grew hot, the oxygen depleting as the guests grabbed anyone with a walkie talkie and demanding to see Vanilla Ice.
Sensing a storm coming, the venue management quietly withdrew the artists from the room, leaving the young ushers to try and calm the mob.
Then suddenly, when all hope was lost, Vanilla Ice entered the Trusts Arena VIP meet-and-greet conference room.
He stormed through the door, with a fast past stomping strut swinging his muscular arms wildly. His skin was red as all hell and pulled tight across his skull. His soul patch was jet black and looked like it had been applied with a sharpie pen. He was our saviour.
I never thought I would be so happy to see Vanilla Ice.
He ripped off his sunglasses and raised his arms, screaming:
“WHERE THE PARTY AT PEOPLE?!”
The answer still eludes me, but I know it was not there. I left the 90s behind me that night, walking happily home in the beautiful year of our Lord, 2017.
What happened next:
When the above article was published in The Spinoff I was ecstatic.
They were going to pay me $100. In that small financial exchange I had become a writer. A paid, published writer!
I got up and danced around the library where I had received the email in an annoying and garish way quite unbecoming of that quiet space of learning.
But when the article was published a very different feeling overcame me: Fear.
The woman who had hired me to be a VIP guest usher at the I Love 90s Tour, was outraged.
She called me up thoroughly apoplectic. Her spittle ridden rage-speak wet and screeching on the other end of the telephone.
In an instant I was taken back to memories of primary school, where I was often be scolded in this way.
My face flushed bright red and I visibly shook as I tried to explain that I hadn’t signed any NDA, that everything I said was true, that Coolio really had behaved like a pest, that Vanilla Ice really was hours late causing mayhem in the VIP meet and greet room.
She did not care. As the high of my first publish article wore off, I began to feel a bit bad that I had raked up the I Love 90s Tour’s private muck for entertainment and glory. When all this poor person had tried to do was give a student a job.
In my defence: it was far too funny not to write about!
But the outraged person on the other end of the phone was not moved. She called down a final curse upon my trembling ear:
“YOU SHALL BE FOREVER BLACKLISTED FROM THE NEW ZEALAND MUSIC INDUSTRY!!!”
While at the time I uneasily laughed off this curse, I see now the effect it has had upon my life.
I did not win Best Independent Debut at the 2024 Taite Awards.
I was not nominated for a single Aotearoa Music Award, or the Silver Scroll best song award.
I have never been asked to open for a Strange News tour, no matter how many times I badger and whine to Matthew Crawley.
But now, after revisiting this story, and remembering its grim curse-ridden outcome I realise that all of these events have nothing to do with me or my music.
They are all the result of a curse called down upon me due to my story about Vanilla Ice.
My only hope is that having recently moved to Australia, I will be able to start again, curse-less, and attempt to live to my full music potential without the burden of having been blacklisted from the NZ music industry.
Just nobody tell Vanilla Ice.
POST SCRIPT:
Currently listening to: On the Beach - Neil Young
Currently Reading: The Year of the French - Thomas Flanagan (very lit Irish historical epic that is making my Celtic heart boil with hatred for the English)
Currently watching: What we do in the Shadows - the TV show (Is Matt Berry the greatest comedic mind of our generation?)
If you want to support my music these are a few options:
Buy the album/merch from Bandcamp!
Share the songs with a friend who might be into it!
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Someone should ask for DMs about who the screaming woman was, just to... note that in our heads. The words "You'll never work in this industry again" are the meanest thing to say to a young person, terrifying. "Let me end your dreams here!"
Funnily enough, all people who said that to me ended up leaving the music industry shortly after, so it was evidently more about them than me. I may be a weirdo, but I do work hard when someone hires me. Saying "You'll never blablabla..." - SO out of line.
I was at this show and … ugh it was so bad. Young MC didn’t perform, Coolio had lost his voice, Vanilla Ice played next to a person in a turtle costume … only Salt N Pepa emerged unscathed. Great to hear it was a shambles backstage too!