What: Back to the '90s Tour with Vanilla Ice, Rob Base, Young MC, and Freedom Williams from C+C Music Factory
Where: Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre
When: Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018
Rating: 1 star (out of five)
For a night of music nostalgia to be successful, it’s a delicate dance for the artists involved.
Try too hard to appear relevant, and you’ll have audiences longing for a 16-CD set of Wang Chung. When the tone is right, however, trips through throwback territory can make for guilty pleasures of the epic variety. Believe me, not everyone who digs Tone Loc does so ironically.
The Back to the ’90s Tour didn’t exactly get the tone right on Wednesday night at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. It was a clumsy marketing ploy with a quartet of artists who — wait for it — each had their biggest hits in the 1980s, not the 1990s.
But if a tour featuring the one-hit wonderment of Vanilla Ice, Rob Base, Young MC, and Freedom Williams from C+C Music Factory is wrong, I can think of 3,741 music fans in attendance Wednesday who didn’t want to be right.
Let’s start with Freedom Williams, who was up first. It took the first few seconds of his 20-minute set to realize that former C+C Music Factory frontman was guilty of impersonating an artist, let alone one whose name is attached to several massive ’80s hits.
Williams didn’t bother pretending that he had backing from a DJ or anyone with a musical instrument at their disposal. He simply ran through a few badly pre-recorded songs (Things That Make You Go Hmmm and Gonna Make You Sweat being the only notable ones) on stage alone.
Singing? Rapping? Williams did neither with any effectiveness. Instead, he populated his verses with nonsense and talk of the cold temperature in Victoria. His appearance was refund-worthy.
DJ Capone, who spun tracks between sets, was the early highlight. He did an exemplary job of engaging the audience with a never-ending supply of party tracks, from Kenny Loggins and Guns N’ Roses to Michael Jackson and Naughty By Nature. No one should be surprised that his sets ran longer than those of every act but Vanilla Ice, because these were highlight-reel spins through the era of baggy pants and Reebok hi-tops.
Young MC, in the night’s second slot, wasted no time promoting his new music, which might have seemed like a good idea on paper. Three songs of new material? That’s self-immolation on a tour like this. Fans are there to hear your hits, and your hits only — especially when your new material leaves you out of breath. When he played the Royal Theatre in 1988, he represented the future of rap. Three decades later, a 20-minute set like the one he turned in Wednesday proved his promise was wasted.
Young MC wasn’t without a sense of entertainment, however. Bust a Move, one of the great pop-rap tracks in history, was a slick piece of rubbery funk with a singalong quotient that sent the audience through the roof. The rapper did his best banger proud on this night, so it wasn’t a total loss. But his set was missing a heavy dose of theatricality.
At this midpoint of the show, a lingering question: Do those in the audience have to work in the morning? This was nightclub madness writ large, with more dirty dancing than Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey combined. It was a refreshing sight, seeing fans of music from the forgotten pop-rap era getting some time to shine. And the audience arrived in style, with track suits and ’90s-friendly costumes being the order of the evening.
It was perhaps the liveliest crowd ever assembled at the arena. One shudders to think what the bar grossed on this night.
Rob Base — now there’s a guy who took his job somewhat seriously (I never thought I’d be so happy to see a DJ and hype man back up a headliner, but it was refreshing to see more than one person on stage an hour into this trainwreck). The crowd bought what Base was selling, even if he did little more than hype the crowd with versions of more established artists, from DMX and Ol’ Dirty Bastard to 50 Cent and Montell Jordan. Base played his lesser-known hit, Joy and Pain, to an overwhelming response, but nothing could match the insanity that was the crowd’s reaction when he played his hall of fame hit, It Takes Two.
That was good news, because had the volume been a few decibels lower, fans would have been shocked to hear a rapper that sounded nothing like the Rob Base of 1988. The audience was oblivious; I wouldn’t be surprised if the arena foundation moved a few centimetres during the raucous rendition. Kudos to those who can overlook artistic shortcomings in favour of having a good time.
So we come to headliner Vanilla Ice, the biggest name on the bill and the artist who at least has some modern-day credentials, even if it is as a reality TV star (believe me, though dubious, The Vanilla Ice Project reality series matters in the lives of some).
He brought musicians on stage, which was refreshing. Two DJs and a Travis Barker-like drummer put some thump below Ice’s raspy raps, and he did a respectable job of giving the audience a reason to care two hours in.
“Make some noise if you got your movies at Blockbuster!” Ice bellowed. “That’s my ’90s people right there. There’s too many options today.”
The Back to the ’90s Tour gave fans a few options on this night, but only one arrived with any sense of import. And who would have thought, in the late ’80s, when his name was much-maligned, that Vanilla Ice would be the one standing tall today?
Maybe life really was better in the old days.
