90's Baby: 1996
"... Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape." - J.G. Ballard
If there’s one singular idea I’m trying to get across in this blog series, it’s that a lot of stuff happened in the 90’s. And by “stuff happened,” I mean a lot of good TV and movies and music came out. It was important to me back then, as it was the primary lens through which I experienced and discovered the world. It was important to a lot of other people too, at the time, and I seem to remember some argument about it being proof that we were so vastly superior to the Communists, and later, the Muslims. Because we were allowed to watch Steve Urkel. I wasn’t aware of them, but apparently there were some people that disagreed, even when all the good TV shows were still coming out. I’ll get to them later.
Still, there were bound to be one or two off years. When I started writing these, I considered doing a separate playlist for each entry. But then I forgot. So when I set out to finally compile my corresponding playlist, it seemed like I had made a tragic error. Turns out everyone just kind of coasted on their previous work in 1996. The year fell in between Radiohead’s The Bends and OK Computer, between Green Day’s Insomniac and Nimrod1. I had a bunch of rules in my head for how the playlist should operate, because the goal is to transport you, the reader, into my young mind. Basically, to be included it has to be something I remember seeing that came out that year. Or if not something that was actually released in 1996, then a live version of older music someone was performing that year. It’s not a perfect system, but I believe it achieves what I set out to.
It also had to be a good playlist above all, so there some notable omissions if a song was impactful, yet bad. I am curating a vibe, after all. Some of the songs I left out are: “The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson, “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica, and “One of Us,” by Joan Osborne.
Speaking of Joan Osborne: I’m pretty sure one of the meta-narratives pushed by MTV at the time was that 1996 was YEAR OF WOMEN or YEAR OF THE WOMAN, or something like that. They loved those. 1997 was supposed to be YEAR OF TECHNO but for their retrospective they admitted they got it wrong and it was actually the YEAR OF SKA. 1996 was the Year Of Women mostly because of Alanis Morrisette and No Doubt, who released popular albums the previous year that they were touring in support of. I haven’t included any Alanis on the playlist because her shit has reached the level of saturation where I can’t stand to listen to it anymore. If I did put one on the playlist, it would have been “Hand In My Pocket,” but it was released in 1995.
One woman that I liked that year, and I still like, is Fiona Apple.
In 1996, she released her album Tidal, though I wouldn’t have listened to it at the time, because her only single in 1996 was “Shadowboxer,” which I thought was slow and boring. I love it now, so it’s on the playlist. A bunch of other good songs were released as singles the following year and made into videos, which is the only time when I would have heard them. The big one, of course, was “Criminal.” On the one hand, it feels really incredible now that she wrote that stuff when she was like, 17 years old. On the other hand it is kind of weird that she was that old in the video. I was actually not gooning to Fiona Apple back then, so I’m off the hook. All the women I was into looked like this.
Up to that point, any music I heard was either on TV, at my friends’ houses, on the radio, or something from my parents’ CD collection. I think that year was the year I signed up for one of those CD club deals they advertised in all the magazines, where you got 10 for a penny or something like that. Then once you got all the good stuff, they made you take one shitty CD a month at a massively inflated price. I’m trying really hard right now to think of all the CDs I got in that first drop. I know one of them was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I’m pretty sure I also got Ten and Vitalogy, by Pearl Jam, One Hot Minute, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Collective Soul, by Collective Soul3, then maybe some Green Day and Nirvana stuff I was missing. I also got Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf, because I thought the cover art was cool. Then when I listened to the CD, I was shocked by how it sounded4. So it sat in my collection, more or less unlistened.
I was still languishing solely on network TV at my house. One of the things I watched on Sundays was Siskel and Ebert At The Movies. That year, I remember them reviewing David Cronenberg’s new movie Crash. Here is their review.
I was much too young to grasp the finer points of their conversation, but I understood the part about the characters in the film being sexually aroused by car crashes. It struck me as an incredibly stupid premise for a story. Many years later, I’ve read a handful of books by J.G. Ballard, on whose novel of the same title the film is based. Mentally, I’ve put him in a box with Philip K. Dick, another writer who’s work is mostly science fiction, and is often difficult for me to enjoy because the prose seems a bit clunky or inelegant. I find this to be true of Ballard’s early work. But not for Crash, which is beautifully written, having emerged from his (almost incomprehensible) earlier project The Atrocity Exhibition, in which he sought to create the literary equivalent of Surrealism. And as I now understand - like Roger was trying to tell me - Crash is ultimately a story about our sexual compulsions spiraling out of control.
Like much of Cronenberg’s other work, the film is also about the inevitable marriage of the human form with the technology we created, or the increasingly blurred line between the organic and the inorganic. I’m thinking of 2022’s Crimes Of The Future, but also of eXistenZ, and Videodrome. The themes are very “of the moment” but I find that all of his films are also pretty bad. So Gene and Roger were both right, in their own way.
Back in England, where my extended family lived, some other people were concerned about technology as well.
A new anti-capitalist group had emerged there, made up of former Earth First! activists. They were heavily influenced by the collectivist movements of the English Civil War, as well as the anarchist Hakim Bey’s book Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the itinerant lifestyle of the Irish Traveller community. They called themselves Reclaim The Streets. Other people referred to them as the “anti-roads movement,” “New Age travelers,” or even “crusties,” and “gyppos.” Their motto was “Roads are for cars, Streets are for people.”
Instead of marching from Point A to Point B, they held massive street parties in which they claimed they would create the germ of a new system, without the hierarchies or exploitation of capitalism5.
At the end of the party, everyone went home, and things more or less went back to normal.
And some other people had different ideas about how to oppose the system as well.
That year, I remember getting a phone call from my relatives in Manchester. There had been a bombing in the city center, and I overheard my mother say that the Arndale shopping center had been blown up by the IRA. At the time, the Arndale center was disparagingly referred to by some people as “the biggest toilet in Europe,” because of its white tile work, which I guess reminded them of porcelain.
After the bombing, they rebuilt the Arndale, and once again things more or less went back to the way they were. I even think it looks pretty much the same.
Which is their first bad album, to be clear.
After getting halfway through this post, which revolves around the playlist, I have learned that Substack does not support YouTube playlist embeds. This is upsetting to me even though I know nobody else cares.
They didn’t let you have too many good CDs at once in the intro deal.