UPDATED 7/2, 2:50 p.m. ET: After announcing his plans to throw a show this week in Austin despite the coronavirus pandemic, Vanilla Ice has subequently canceled the show.
"Hey guys, gonna give you a little update about the concert in Austin... Uh, basically I'm not going," he said with a laugh in an Instagram video. "I listened to my fans, I hear all you people out there. I didn't know the numbers were so crazy in Austin, but we were hoping that it would be a lot better by fourth of July because we booked this concert a long time ago. Basically, just wanna stay safe, you know we do take it serious and we wanna keep everybody safe."
He said that he hopes there will be a cure for this "corona crap" by the end of the year, wishing his fans a happy fourth of July
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People are going to risk their lives and the lives of those around them by seeing Vanilla Ice perform on Friday in Austin, Texas.
Ice, thanks to a legal loophole spotted by the Austin Chronicle on Wednesday, is set to do the usual '90s throwback thing at Emerald Point Bar & Grill on July 3. While Gov. Greg Abbott did indeed announce an executive order earlier this month in which all bars were ordered closed due to COVID-19, the Ice event—billed as the "Independence Day Throwback Beach Party"—isn't affected due to the venue's categorization as a restaurant.
Bars remain closed, of course, but restaurants are allowed to move ahead as long as they agree to reduce capacity by 50 percent.
In a peculiar IG caption earlier this week shared in anticipation of the event, Ice lamented the fact that we aren't currently in the 1990s.
"We didn't have coronavirus, or cell phones, or computers," he said. "We had 5.0's, Blockbuster, Beavis and Butt-Head, Wayne's World, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan." Ice also declared that Mortal Kombat "is still better than" Fortnite.
Tickets for the Ice event range in price from $25 to $300. According to a promoter, the capacity has been set to 2,500. And though it should go without saying, there is no amount of nostalgia for a decade without COVID-19 that will somehow magically provide protection from the virus in present-day reality.
Texas has set multiple recent records for COVID-19 numbers. As of Thursday, the total case count was nearing 170,000.