The flavor isn’t changing at LAX’s popular Throwback Thursdays party, but it is going to get bigger and deeper. The Luxor nightspot has been blasting favorite dance and hip-hop tracks from the ’80s and ’90s for a while now, but this week, when “Ice Ice Baby” booms throughout the club, it’ll be performed by Vanilla Ice himself. The rapper and reality TV star is the first headliner for the relaunched Throwback Thursdays, which will bring in iconic artists from those bygone decades every other week.
A frequent Vegas visitor and performer, Vanilla Ice is ready to rock LAX. “We always bring them back to the old school,” he says. “The people who come to these shows want to relive a certain time, they want to dance and have fun and smile and be happy. That’s what we do, bring that thing back where that feeling originated from.”
The man behind that unforgettable track—“still one of the greatest karaoke songs ever,” he says with a laugh—has been a prominent piece of the Legends of Hip-Hop Tour, which teams Ice with acts like Salt-N-Pepa, Tone Loc, Naughty by Nature and Rob Base. The experience has strengthened his connection to that era of music and its fans, who aren’t exactly who you’d think. “This tour is playing huge arenas—you go check out the crowd and it looks like a Justin Bieber show. There’s a line around the building and so many of them are high school kids, dressed like Cyndi Lauper or Madonna or in spandex from the ’80s. They weren’t even born yet!” Throwback Thursdays with Vanilla Ice, January 21, LAX at Luxor.
