90's Baby: 1997
"Welcome to the future. Here's your free porn."
By now, you may be asking yourself if my Substack is just another lame vessel for overwrought think pieces about so-called low culture. That is a fair question. I hope not, and anyway remember I can only write 10 of these, maximum, so please do not unsubscribe just yet.
What is most interesting to me in writing about this period in my life, and the stuff I was watching or listening to, is that it forces me to remember things from a long time ago and think about the nature of my memories.
Sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, we started to get access to the internet in public places. There were internet cafes, which were a thing that still existed up until the 2010s or so. We also got the first computers with internet access at my school and at the public library.
One day I was at the library and I met two kids who I’d never seen before, which probably meant they didn’t go to any of the schools in the area. One of them was more my size and the other one was way bigger and wore a backwards baseball cap. I can’t remember too much about them beyond these details. I think the smaller kid had curly hair.
What I do remember is that after I had been talking to these kids for a little while and more or less getting along, the fatter kid started to look at porn on the library computer. There were signs all over saying not to do this. I wasn’t trying to snitch on him but what he was doing seemed uncool. The porn was pretty intense, Hustler type of stuff where you could see the girls’ entire vaginas and I commented that what he was doing was weird. My comment must have made him pretty mad because he got in my face to push me and later, outside the library, pulled a flick knife on me. This would turn out to be a recurring theme throughout my life.
In 1997, I finally got cable TV at my house. Until then I’d spent my weekends trying to catch up on Nickelodeon, and later on MTV, at friends’ houses. It's difficult for me to pin down details of when a lot of this stuff happened, but I know the year of this particular landmark because it happened to coincide with the final season of one of my favorite shows, Beavis and Butthead, which felt like a cruel joke.
That year, they ran an episode called “Cyber Butt,” where Beavis and Butthead force Stewart to teach them how to look at porn at the school library. The analogy isn’t perfect but I guess in this instance I am Stewart.
One other thing that I have clear memories of was seeing the news that Princess Diana had been in a major car crash, which would later prove fatal. Part of the reason I remember so vividly is because the initial news bulletin interrupted Saturday Night Live. At the time, watching SNL every week was really important to me.
This NBC news broadcast seems to have happened during a different SNL segment than I remember. I thought it happened during Weekend Update. Maybe it’s a time zone thing.
I also clearly remember seeing the first news that the Notorious BIG had been shot in Los Angeles, even though he was barely on my radar as a musician. By contrast, I have zero memories of Kurt Cobain’s suicide happening a few years earlier, despite the fact that I was single-mindedly obsessed with Nirvana and that was basically all I listened to. It has occurred to me that this information was either hidden from me by my parents or the faculty of the school I attended. It has also occurred to me that maybe I was so in love with Kurt Cobain that I repressed the memory. Or maybe that it was just so long ago.
The video for the single “Hypnotize” was all over MTV, but I can’t quite remember whether this was the case before or after his death. I liked the song but didn’t publicly acknowledge it for reasons I’ve already discussed in my other posts. The video seemed odd to me. I thought the beginning where they were being chased by the black helicopters for no reason was dumb. I also didn’t get why there was some other guy in every scene of the video who didn’t really say much besides “yeah” and “uh huh.” I’m posting it here as my way of finally admitting that I like the song/video.
Within a few months, I found out who that guy was, because his name and face were all over MTV, and everywhere else.
The first single from his album Puff Daddy and The Family was “All About the Benjamins,” which I hated. I still think it's a really annoying song. The second big single was “I’ll be Missing You.” This video is from the 1997 VMAs1.
Seeing people use the death of others in a self-aggrandizing way would also prove to be a recurring theme in my life. I have plans to write about that in another post.
At the time, I remember thinking how fishy it seemed that his career as a solo artist blew up right after the Biggie shooting. It felt like maybe he had something to do with it.
This represented a huge leap in my critical thinking. Just a few years earlier, I had seen Michael Jordan in a McDonald’s commercial promoting the movie Space Jam, and related to an older kid that Michael Jordan must really love McDonald’s, because he takes time out of his busy schedule to go on TV to tell everyone about it. The older kid told me that he was getting paid to say that stuff. It blew my mind.
I can still feel the embarrassment of realizing what an idiot I was, but I also think there is something to my hypothesis about the Biggie murder, and I am proud of what a fantastic judge of character I proved to be.
I have conflicted feelings, but I find this performance by the accused sex-trafficker Sean John Combs* to be very moving. Maybe this ability to manipulate our emotions is what made him so effective as a predator and in avoiding scrutiny for so long.
*A.k.a Diddy, a.k.a P. Diddy, a.k.a Puff Daddy, a.k.a Puffy, a.k.a Love, a.k.a Swag