If exploding beer is your problem, yo, he’ll solve it.
Here is a sentence I never thought I’d write. I answer my phone and there is a man on the line; that man is Vanilla Ice.
This is especially striking as I am receiving the call in my house, which is located in a small hamlet in a small corner of Central Otago. It’s about as far from South Dallas, where Robbie Van Winkle AKA Vanilla Ice was first discovered popping and locking on the dancefloor in the City Lights nightclub, as you can get without crossing the Southern Ocean. It’s also very far from London, which was where I was living in September of 1990, when Vanilla Ice’s debut album To the Extreme dropped and his single ‘Ice Ice Baby’ became the first rap song to top the Billboard Hot 100.
Dancing at City Lights, a young Vanilla Ice could never have dreamed that one day someone would be holding up a tiny pocket-sized computer in a backwater town at the southern end of New Zealand and listening to his voice. I don’t think my 20-year-old London self could have dreamed that either. For one, I was way too cool back then to admit that ‘Ice Ice Baby’ is a genuinely good song. Yet here we are. In the intervening years, To the Extreme has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.
Beer and the rural-urban divide
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If town halls are the hearts of small communities, pubs are their churches. They are places of ritual where locals gather weekly, sometimes daily, to hear music, share gossip, pull pints, watch sports, complain about the government and eat hot chips from baskets. There’s almost always a meat raffle on Friday. All of this is lubricated, not by Pinot Noir or whiskey sours, but by beer. Preferably lager.
Do New Zealanders drink a lot of beer? Yes and no. According to industry research, beer is the most consumed alcoholic beverage in Aotearoa. Globally, when it comes to consumption per capita, the 2020 Kirin Beer University Report put us well behind Czechia (they each knock back an average 298 bottles of beer per year versus our paltry 96), but ahead of Japan, Canada and Denmark.
Alcohol consumption in general is higher in rural New Zealand than in urban locations, and highest in the South Island. According to a study published in the Asian Chemical Editorial Society’s Chemistry – An Asian Journal, recent wastewater testing found that the average New Zealand adult drinks the equivalent of 12.2ml of ethanol each day, which is about one standard drink. But places like Westport and Tāhuna Queenstown had annual mean results of 16.6ml and 13.5ml, versus South Auckland and West Auckland, which had means of 8.2ml and 8.4ml.
There are probably a number of reasons for this, one being that in remote communities meeting for a pint can be one of the only social activities on offer. It’s also cultural. Think of the tropes equating beer with manliness, especially rural manliness. The ‘How to be a Southern Man’ poster, which was part of a Speights advertising campaign, is still displayed proudly in many a South Island roadside watering hole. The “Southern Man” it reads, will “never ask to see the wine list” and “will never leave beer in his glass”. Which brings us to Vanilla Ice.
Who deserves a DB?
A text comes first. “Yo VIP. It’s ya boi Vanilla Ice!” And then another. “Hold tight, and I’ll hit you back in 34 minutes, when the time is right.” This is followed by three emojis: two ice cubes and a baby. I am, to be honest, thrilled.
It’s all part of an ad campaign DB Breweries ran over summer to promote their Export Ultra low carb lager. Based on research done by DB’s Head Brewer Dave Eaton, the “34 minutes” refers to the time it takes for a room-temperature beer chilled in a -15°C freezer to an optimal drinking temperature of 5°C.
The Export Ultra Cold Call Back Service went like this: pop your beers in the freezer, text ‘ICE ICE’ to 423, and precisely 34 minutes later the phone rings with a message from Vanilla himself. “Yo yo, it’s Vanilla Ice … I’m dialling your digits to remind you to get your Export Ultras out of the freezer before they explode.” Speaking of the rural-urban divide, this is very much an issue when you live half an hour from the nearest supermarket. Unless you travel with a chilly bin in your car, your beers are inevitably warm by the time you get home, you will inevitably pop a couple in the freezer to speed up the chilling process, and at least 30% of the time you will forget about them. As Jonathan McMahon, chief creative officer at Special New Zealand (the agency behind the Cold Call Back campaign) puts it, “You put beer in the freezer to chill while you chill. But you chill too much, and they chill too much and then … BOOM.” Hence my text, at the end of a summer’s day, to the Iceline.
DB has a history of memorable advertising. “That man deserves a DB” has gone from a slogan to a pre-internet meme to an idiom in Aotearoa. In case you were not privy to this collective cultural moment in the 1990s, the ad in question went like this. Three men sit up at a bar. One is dressed like an All Black, one like he’s fresh back from Gallipoli, and one like a farmer from the 1920s. They are the Patron Saints of Beer Drinkers, and they start watching video replays of dudes going about their days. The first guy, who brings to mind a Hemsworth brother with a Southland accent, is late to the bar because had to take a detour in his enormous dump truck to single-handedly put out a grass fire. He extinguishes the last ember with a well-aimed spit. He, the Patron Saints agree, “deserves a DB.” The next gentleman gets all muddy playing rugby, so he gets a beer, obviously. The last guy, though, arrives in a suit (!), and the replay reveals he spent his day lingering in a toilet stall at his office reading (!) the paper. No DB for him.
Not unlike the aforementioned Southern Man, it all manages to be both homophobic and homoerotic at the same time. It’s also brilliant marketing. The campaign has been absorbed into the New Zealand vernacular to the point that when someone is said to “deserve a DB”, you know they have done a spot of good honest work.
Cold as ice
You probably have questions. Like, is 34 minutes really accurate? In my case, Vanilla Ice nailed it. My beers came out just right, and, crucially, neither frozen solid nor splattered all over my ice cream.
Also, you might ask, what has Vanilla Ice got to do with a beer brewed in Aotearoa? Not a lot, although To the Extreme was certified Gold here and ‘Ice Ice Baby’ sat at number one on our charts for eight weeks in 1990, four more than Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ and five more than Bon Jovi’s ‘Blaze of Glory’. Also, Jono from Jono and Ben named the track as his second favourite song of all time, after the Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’.
But maybe it’s bigger than that. It is a universal truth that, controversies about cultural appropriation and uncredited samples notwithstanding, ‘Ice Ice Baby’ is a banger. And the lyrics paint a picture of a man going about his business in a way that I think the Patron Saints would approve of. He is flowing like a harpoon daily and nightly; he’s deadly when he plays a dope melody; he’s cooking MC’s like a pound of bacon; if rhyme was a drug he’d sell it by the gram. This is a man who deserves a DB.
It is also a universal truth that there is nothing like an ice-cold beer at the end of a hot day. But to cool a beer quickly comes with risk. Not to worry. As Vallia Ice raps, “if there was a problem, yo, I’ll solve it”.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
