Remembering The Ice Age
Vanilla Ice was trending recently because it is 1990. Wait, no, that was 30 years ago. Dang. Has it been that long since I first checked out the hook while his dj revolved it?
In any event, I always enjoy seeing Mr. Robert Van Winkle making the rounds in the news. It’s usually to do with a new reality show or criminal charge, but not this time. This time it was about his big concert he had planned in Austin, Texas for the Fourth of July, which he canceled when someone told him something about a virus going around.
Seeing Mr. Van Winkle takes me back to a simpler time, a time when I was a young, rebellious girl in a sea of New Kids on the Block fans. Sure, I thought Jordan was kind of cute, but their milquetoast repertoire was not for me. I preferred something edgier. Something a little less poppy. A bad boy. Vanilla Ice, with his gravity defying, skunk streaked pompadour was just the thing for my pre-pubescent heart. To this day, I bet I am one of the few people who know the words to more than one Vanilla Ice track.
I had the tape, you see. And I listened to it repeatedly. Even after my little Sony Walkman ate it, and I had to grab a #2 Ticonderoga and wind it back up. I had posters. I bought his unauthorized biography. I think I had a T-shirt. Sadly, I missed out on his movie. Yup yup, the Iceman made a movie. I could probably find the full film on YouTube, but this trailer should tell you all you need to know.
Note: the girl he’s after is supposedly a high school student. Ice was 24 when the movie was made. That’s gross, but what can you expect from a dude who regularly wore white denim shortalls with his own face airbrushed on them?
This sartorial choice was unacceptable even in 1991. Or at least it should have been, had I not been blinded by the beauty of his chiseled jaw, perfectly arched eyebrows, and precision-razored stripes shaved into his hair.
I really should have known better. He was widely perceived as a joke and it was not cool to like him. Even my parents tried; they mocked my love for Ice and belittled my taste in music, but I would not be swayed. Not even when Kurt Loder played the beginning strains of Queen and Bowie’s “Under Pressure” to compare with the beat of “Ice, Ice, Baby“ and the musical thievery of which Ice had been accused was undeniable. I told myself it would be ok; if there was a problem, Ice would solve it.
Solve it he did, by fading out of the picture and into obscurity for several years, only to resurface as a regular on a variety of reality shows for has-beens: Celebrity Boxing (where he sparred with Todd Bridges of Different Strokes fame,) Dancing with the Stars, and the Surreal Life, to name a few. Enough time has passed, though, to move Ice from cringe to nostalgia, and to evoke a smile when those first strains of Ice, Ice Baby start up on a Spotify 90s station.
And though my musical tastes have evolved, I must admit I have not lost my taste for Vanilla. When I hear that song, something grabs a hold of me tightly and I cannot resist belting out the lyrics verbatim with unironic joy, the embarrassment of my family be damned.
Will I ever stop? I don’t know.
Word to your mother.
Don’t feel bad, I always had a thing for Cyndi Lauper.Report
I liked her music when I was a high schooler; my respect for her musicality has grown in recent years. I still like her music.
I really laughed when she reprised/rewrote “Goonies R Good Enuf” to be the ending song of the Bob’s Burgers parody/homage to that movie. Some singers would get all hoity toity and either not want to remember they did a goofy song for a goofy movie, or be unwilling to essentially parody it….but she did it.
That said: “Time After Time” has become my favorite piece of hers.
I also liked Duran Duran when I was in high school, though that was partly because a friend of mine was super into them.
I was actually the weird kid who listened to classical music and some jazz, so I barely knew pop music….Report
Cyndi Lauper is pure awesomesauce. She’s a magnificent person.Report
1990 was not 30 years ago. It was 20 years ago.Report
I’m not the goodest at math, but I used a calculator. Definitely 30.Report
I immediately thought that it was only 16 or 17. 20 was a compromise.Report
Who can know how many years ago 1990 was. It’s literally incalculable.Report
Depends on how you do math.Report
There is a theory that our chronology has been polluted with 297 years that never occurred.
It’s not 2020. It’s 1723.
I submit: 13-14 of those years got into the last 30.
It makes sense, when you think about it.Report
It’s equally true that 2 + 2 = 1.
+ 0 1 2
0 0 1 2
1 1 2 0
2 2 0 1
* 0 1 2
0 0 0 0
1 0 1 2
2 0 2 1Report
Perhaps she’s channeling Quine, who suggested that even our fundamental beliefs about logic are open to empirical challenge, should our systems extensively fail empirical test.
Note, “1+1=2” seems pretty safe, even if it took Russel 34980238840923840932840 theorems to prove it. (I sometimes exaggerate.) That said, many notions of classical logic have been challenged in interesting ways, specifically the various flavors of constructivism and intuitionism, although those programs aren’t driven by empiricism. To find examples of empirical challenges to logic, there are programs of “quantum logic” that weaken the law of excluded middle to account for quantum theory.
To summarize the latter, the statement “X is either true or false” doesn’t apply in quantum systems. Building a consistent logic that includes that fact is challenging.
(I’m more familiar with intuitionist approaches than I am with quantum logic, given that the former is heavily used in type theoretic approaches to computer science.)
In any case, out of context, that tweet sure looks dumb. I wonder if she has a more interesting argument.Report
That’s the thing, there is a context there, but it’s not something that can fit in a tweet. Maybe a tweet thread, but probably better suited for an academic seminar.
I mean, saying “the statement “X is either true or false” doesn’t apply in quantum systems” depends on the reader having a decent understanding of quantum systems, etc. And if you were to further reduce it to “the statement “X is either true or false” doesn’t matter because of quantum mechanics”, well then you just look stupid.Report
Honestly, I was being super charitable to her. In all likelihood, she is probably one of those lunes who think math has a gender or some dumb shit like that. It’s all rather unfortunate and cringy.
My take, as a non-philosopher: the “continentals” has some really profound insights into how language and power work, whereas the “analytic” crowd were a bunch of nerdlings trying to turn philosophy into math.
Oversimplistic — yes! Wrong — meh, I think I’m capturing a kind of zeitgeist.
Anyway, all this was happening before cognitive science took off, so the continentals has limited tools to analyze how language and power actually work in an empirically valid sense, so instead they turned to garbage like psychoanalysis and whatnot. The damage was severe.
Anyway, Thabo Mbeki evidently studied a lot of “postcolonial” philosophers, who told him that science was a “western way of knowing.” He didn’t like that. After years of apartheid, he was understandably mistrustful of all things western. That skepticism unfortunately extended to the germ theory of disease. You see, he concluded that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, but instead “poverty” did.
He wasn’t totally wrong about the poverty thing. AIDS, like most diseases, will hit vulnerable communities harder. We can speculate as to why. Perhaps poor people fuck more (not that I blame them — fucking is fun). Whatever. The point is, he fell into the anti-HIV-causes-AIDS conspiracy.
The results were predictably bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism_in_South_Africa
There is a western way of doing science. It should be criticized. Westerners, and in particular western men, have certain preconceptions and preoccupations that effect what science gets done, how results get interpreted, and so on. The whole notion that western scientists are brave pioneers searching for unadorned truth is in fact a pretty Western idea. It’s sort of true, kinda, but not totally. In fact, listen to any minority person trying to make their way in science. They have stories.
That said, 1+1=2. It just does. Quine teaches us that we should be open to change any belief if experience tells us we must. I agree with him. However, nothing has yet challenged 1+1=2, nor do I expect anything to do so. In fact, I can’t even imagine it. It would bend my brain.
Here’s an idea for the author of that Tweet: find a single non-western culture that doesn’t believe that 1+1=2.
Oh look, I’m requesting evidence. How perfectly Western of me — because I’m sure non-westerners don’t want to see evidence of provocative claims.Report
I was nine in 1990. The changes that occurred from them to now seem incalculable. From 1980, when I was born, to now innumerable.Report
So much for Global Cooling…Report
When he dies, will the headline be “RIP Van Winkle”?Report
*applaudesReport
In the early/mid 90’s, we young dorm-dwelling airmen would often engage in musical hijinks involving trading songs back-and-forth at high volume on our stereo systems and drinking (and lots of that). “Ice Ice Baby” was my go-to. At some point I was disarmed when my buddy definitively answered the question, “Will it ever stop?” by liberating my copy of “To the Extreme” from my room, never to be seen again.
Good times.Report
I was reminded that he was involved in the first white-on-white rap beef. 3rd Bass really took umbrage to Ice.
The past is another country.Report