o you think you’re a 90s fan? OK, Rico Suave, can you handle this? It’s I Love the 90s, and this is 1991! The flicks, the fashions, the trends, the TV, the tunes. A totally awesome year that brought us these burning questions:
What were the hidden meanings behind Sonic the Hedgehog?
Evan Chakroff: This evil doctor has made all these robots—which are powered, somehow, by small furry animals trapped inside—which are released (to freedom) when you (Sonic) destroy their outer robot shell. Is this some kind of parable?
And seriously—just what did O.P.P. stand for?
Sam Hunt: Peer pressure being what it was at the delicate age of 11, I had no choice but to blindly declare myself “Down with OPP”. Indeed, I didn’t want to be left out of something that included “every last homey”.
Because you love the 90s, because you still know the “November Rain” guitar solo by heart, admit it: this is 1991!
*** Clarissa Explains It All*** Jeffrey Dahmer*** Naughty By Nature*** JFK***
*** Metallica*** Shoegaze*** Thelma and Louise*** KLF***
*** Jerry Springer*** Robin Hood*** Sonic the Hedgehog*** Rico Sauve***
*** Silence of the Lambs*** GBH*** Indie Dance***
*** Guns ‘n’ Roses*** Rodney King*** Slacker***
*** Terminator 2*** Fresh Prince*** Right Now*** Rollerblades***
*** Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?*** Nirvana***
Kareem Estefan: Clarissa Explains It All was about a popular teenager named Clarissa Darling (played by Melissa Joan Hart), her nerdy brother, her parents, who can only be described as “parents”, and her boy friend, with emphasis on the space between “boy” and “friend”.
William Swygart: Unleashed Melissa Joan Hart on the world. Super.
Gavin Mueller: Melissa Joan Hart before she became completely insufferable.
Kareem Estefan: Clarissa, as the title suggests, served as a sort of older sister to all her pre-adolescent viewers, as she learned to deal with school, family, and friends in her charmingly dated-in-the-early-‘90s-and-catering-to-an-audience-of-ten-year-olds manner.
Sam Bloch: Explains what? What it's like being a rich 13 year old? Get the fuck out of here.
Tom May: Ah, bosomy teenage smart aleck of a girl dispenses one-liners and conventional wisdom. I remember most of all the irritating canned laughter, yet did enjoy it really.
Chris Dahlen: Something about Melissa Joan Hart's confidence made her seem like an older sister-type—even though she was younger than me—and I liked the idea that she was on television to "explain it all" instead of just flouncing around and giggling.
Gabe Gloden: Clarissa was my first crush. I desperately wanted to have a secret ladder leading to a cute, quirky girl's bedroom, yet, unlike her best friend Sam, I also desperately wanted to consummate the relationship.
Nick Southall: This program is almost sickeningly unwholesome, and luckily I’ve managed to block most of it out of my mind. Why did her parents not object to a teenage boy using a ladder to climb into her room at the drop of a hat?!
Evan Chakroff: How did the music go when Sam climbed in through the window? I need that when I enter girls’ rooms via ladder.
Andrew Unterberger: “Hey Sam!” WEEEE-OHHHH-WEEEOOOOH. Lousy lack of audio—I can never hope to recreate the awesomeness of that one wa-wah-ed guitar note.
Nick Southall: And her little brother was a shit.
Kareem Estefan: Nickelodeon’s plot summary to the first episode of Clarissa Explains It All, entitled “Revenge 101”: When Clarissa's younger brother Ferguson displays her training bra in show and tell, Clarissa hatches a plan to send Ferg Face into outer space via helium balloons and a straight jacket. Does it get any better than that?
Steve Lichtenstein: Episode P104E, in which Clarissa dissected string theory and its effect on Daytona Bike Week, is a prime example of this show’s greatness. Clear, accurate, and above all, hilarious.
Ben Welsh: I used to have a crush on this girl. Remember how she popped up again in that Britney Spears video “Crazy” when Sabrina: The Teenage Witch was winding down? You think she planned on becoming a pop star? Sorry that didn’t work out, honey. It’s really too bad because was she any less deserving than Ms. Spears? Clarissa Explains It All was miles ahead of the Mickey Mouse Club.
Chris Dahlen: She never made it far after this show: Sabrina was too family-friendly not to be overshadowed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and—maybe because of that "older sister" look—she got nowhere in the teen movie blitzes that came and went through the '90s. Getting into Can't Hardly Wait was a good start, but playing the nerdy girl was not, and ending up in Not Another Teen Movie was the last nail in the coffin.
Josh Timmermann: I saw her a little while back in Maxim or one of those other magazines with girls all greased up in their bra and panties. She's come a long way, I must say.
Chris Dahlen: I don't even want to bring up her pictorial in Maxim or FHM or whichever magazine ran that. It was like seeing your sister pose naked, and it still bugs me.
Andrew Unterberger: Yeah, that topless pic was pretty hard on me, but not as hard as seeing Alex Mack teenager-ing it up in Ten Things I Hate About You. I’m still reeling from that one.
Ben Welsh: It must have been crushing for her. But, on the upside, I might actually have a shot with her now that she’s a has-been.
Andrew Unterberger: Jeffrey Dahmer—mutilation, sodomy, cannibalism, necrophilia—even for a serial killer, he went the whole nine yards.
Gavin Mueller: With the release of Silence of the Lambs earlier in the year, Dahmer couldn't have timed his killing spree any better.
Ben Woolhead: “I know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels” sang Andy Cairns on Therapy?’s 1994 single “Trigger Inside”. A sick little puppy he may be, but somehow I doubt he knows what it feels like to have a human head in his fridge.
Clem Bastow: What's Jeffrey Dahmer's favourite song? “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”.
Lisa Oliver: The most sinister use of a Hawaiian shirt in history.
Tony Van Groningen: This was a big deal in my community because it happened in a town only an hour or so away from where we lived. The details of the case are sickening, and the media saturation got to a point where I got physically disgusted every time I heard the name Jeffrey Dahmer.
Josh Love: I still can’t get over how fucked up it was that one of Dahmer’s victims escaped, naked, managed to find a couple of cops and told them what happened, and that Dahmer was able to talk the cops into believing that they were just having a little tiff and to let him take the kid back to his place, where of course he murdered him and worse.
Tony Van Groningen: I still don’t comprehend how people can end up like him.
Gabe Gloden: After all the horror and controversy, all you could think about Jeffrey Dahmer was “Ah, poor guy”. He truly was the saddest and least confident of all serial killers.
Steve Lichtenstein: Although an insane man as far as the courts and his victims’ families are concerned, Jeffrey Dahmer was a great influence on me. He showed me, convincingly, that a diet consisting only of root beer and Twix was nothing to be worried or embarrassed about. My teenage insecurities weren’t quite so problematic anymore, and for that, Jeffrey, I thank you, you crazy killing monster man.
Andrew Unterberger: HIP HOP HOORAYYYYY….OHHHHH….AYYYYY….OHHHHHH
Scott McKeating: Pretty poor, and whoever termed that shit they did as Hip-Hop anthems needs to listen to some Queen to hear some proper anthems. And what was all that baseball bat shit about?
Joe Niemczyk: They were black, and they had a baseball bat in their logo, and that was all that it took to convince my twelve year-old ass that they were not to be messed with.
Tony Van Groningen: The album as a whole is consistently good, and gets props for being one of the first acts to truly appeal to hardcore thugs and commercial radio.
Scott McKeating: Treach was like a prototype Method Man; a good looking, funny guy with one foot in the entertainment business and one foot still in the projects.
Gavin Mueller: I've done some research, and Treach is still the "it" guy for certain segments of the black female population.
Sam Hunt: Their big hit was “O.P.P.”. Nobody would ever tell me what O.P.P. stood for, although it sure felt like everyone I know was “down with” it.
Josh Love: When I was in 6th grade, you were totally uncool if you didn’t know what “O.P.P.” stood for...I remember lots of murmuring and giggling during PE as kids passed the secret back and forth.
Adrien Begrand: There were probably some Canadians who thought "O.P.P." was about the Ontario Provincial Police.
Lisa Oliver: Where I work, they run a programme called the YPP. One time, in a meeting with the Programme Director of the YPP, I said "You down with YPP? Yeah, you know me." No one got it.
Tony Van Groningen: My highly impressionable seventh grade mind was obsessed with “O.P.P.”. I was old enough to understand what the song was about, but not old enough to remotely relate to it. Which didn’t really matter because the song was so awesome and catchy.
Sam Hunt: Peer pressure being what it was at the delicate age of 11, I had no choice but to blindly declare myself “Down with O.P.P.”. Indeed, I didn’t want to be left out of something that included “every last homey”.
Gabe Gloden: For a long time, my classmates told me that OPP stood for Other People's Pussy. Then, a neighbor of mine, told me that it actually stood for Other People's Penis. But now I know that it actually stands for both! It's a very versatile acronym.
Tony Van Groningen: The parent-safe definition of O.P.P. was “other people’s property.”
Sam Hunt: Now that I know what it stands for….I just think it’s kinda weird.
Clem Bastow: Even though I hadn't a clue what the fuck it was about (a recurring theme in my life), I thought “O.P.P.” was one of the most irresistible party songs I'd ever heard. I danced to it then, at the school disco, and I'm still dancing to it.
Josh Timmermann: If there is a chorus more compulsively sing-a-longable than “O.P.P.”'s, I sure as hell haven't heard it.
Tony Van Groningen: I’m surprised we got to hear it at dances and rallies and stuff, it seems like a song that teachers and parents everywhere would be vehemently opposed to. But I guess they just weren’t down with O.P.P.
Gabe Gloden: “J, drop a little on 'em.”
Nick Southall: Costner plays The Costner Role again, only this time he’s in a post-JFK assassination world rather than a post apocalyptic world.
Scott McKeating: Kevin Costner looked fuck all like Jim Garrison.
Gabe Gloden: JFK is just an outright classic. The best example of Oliver Stone’s paranoid film collage he’ll probably ever make.
Akiva Gottlieb: I embarrassed myself completely when, in my Freshman year of high school, I wrote a term paper “proving” how Oliver Stone’s theories about the JFK assassination were completely valid. Man, I was such a naïve little prick. That was the last time I base all my research on The Official Viewer’s Guide to “JFK” by Oliver Stone. I’ll bet they’re still laughing that one off in the history department. Fuckers.
Gabe Gloden: It chilled me more than any other horror film when I was younger… because the monster wasn’t lurking in the closet, it was everywhere… it was our own government. Look out behind you! It’s Joe Pesci’s hairpiece!
Michael Heumann: Remember John Candy's role in this movie—the red-faced, sweaty con artist who looked like he was two minutes away from a heart attack? And what happened a few years later? Ah ha! There's your conspiracy!
Nick Southall: Despite being convinced on first seeing this that one day I would discover the truth and save the world from the American military-industrial complex, I still have no idea how much of this is based on fact and how much is wrought from Stone’s fevered imagination.
Andrew Unterberger: The smartest thing Oliver Stone did when making this movie was making it so fucking confusing that it is literally impossible to refute.
Sam Hunt: Who was I kidding thinking that I understood what was going on in this movie. It’s like the fucking Bible! So many names. So much eeevuhl.
Josh Timmermann: As an investigation of the Kennedy assassination, this movie must be taken with a grain of salt. As an active meditation on conspiracy-obsessed American paranoia, it's incredibly telling.
Andrew Unterberger: The court scene with Kevin Costner’s half-hour monologue is more exciting and suspenseful than almost any car chase or gun fight in movie history. That’s the movie’s real accomplishment.
Adrien Begrand: This movie is still enthralling every time I see it. And it was so a conspiracy.
Ben Woolhead: In the early 90s the Scout troop I belonged to was full of fifteen-year-old speed metal nuts whose sole reason for attending each week seemed to be to show off their brand new / impressively faded and aged Iron Maiden / Helloween / Cinderella T-shirts. They all greeted the release of Metallica’s self-titled record as if it was a disgrace and sell-out on a par with Dylan going electric. “There are, like, SLOW SONGS, man!”
Scott McKeating: Old schools fans hated it because they’d gone soft, and were shamed that “Nothing Else Matters” became the song that non-metallers knew Metallica for.
Adrien Begrand: I was 20 when this album came out. One day, my little sister's 14 year-old friend asked if she could borrow it. I didn't listen to Metallica for years after that. Mainstream Metallica was a very difficult thing for some longtime fans to get used to.
Tony Van Groningen: I never was, and still am not, much of a Metallica fan. But there is no denying that this album affected a lot of my peers. It was, along with Nirvana, one of the only rock albums that all the Hip-Hop and R&B kids and even some of the country kids owned.
Clem Bastow: My friends and I used to spend whole afternoons talking like James Hetfield. "I'm going down to the shopsaah!”
Josh Timmermann: Man, do I hate that inspid growl. I mean, I guess the lead singer of a metal band should sound like he wants to rip my limbs off and devour my flesh, but James Hetfield's psycho killer shtick has always just struck me as so phonily affected.
Scott McKeating: Less speed, less aggression and no stupid metal imagery (well, I suppose the colour black is about as metal as you get). Fucking hell, they even played the Freddie Mercury Concert for Life gig. How much more mainstream can you get?
Gavin Mueller: Maybe it's not as "metal" as their previous albums. But with these riffs, who really cares?
Scott McKeating: I love it though; good hard rock, some classic riffs and you seldom find better opening songs than “Enter Sandman”.
Clem Bastow: To my young ears, Metallica were THE hardest band in the world. I felt uber cool with my black, promotional 12" of “Enter Sandman” (which, incidentally, was the first song I ever sang with a band).
Gabe Gloden: “Enter Sandman” was the second scariest video after “Thriller” of course. That part when the kid wakes up in the middle of the desert with that semi bearing down on him, like in “Duel”... that was killer.
Ian Mathers: “Enter Sandman” fucking sucked. I’d never been and probably never will be a metal fan, although I like some of the music. But hearing a million assholes blaring this record constantly, seeing the videos all over the place, and “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters” were both goddamned power ballads, for the love of all that’s holy. Some of us hated them years before Napster.
Tom May: "Nothing Else Matters" is the one I remember... So po-faced and earnest perhaps, yet I was touched once upon a time.
Josh Love: Great how people who weren’t even headbangers bought this album, like I think even soccer moms and members of the Rotary Club dug “Nothing Else Matters”.
Gabe Gloden: For most young'uns, the Metallica breakthrough was their first introduction to the bile and filth of heavy metal, yet most Metallica fans mark the success of the Black Album as the beginning of the end of metal. It was all downhill from there.
Adrien Begrand: By far the most overrated metal album ever recorded. Fewer than half the songs worked, and the rest were a major disappointment. Compared to Metallica's great 80s albums, The Black Album was, and is, a colossal bore. It's watered-down Metallica.
Tony Van Groningen: Between the melodrama of “Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters”, and the undeniably rocking “Enter Sandman” and “Wherever I May Roam”, this album had a special place in the hearts of kids my age everywhere. It was sort of the honorary punk music for a lot of kids I knew that weren’t into punk, the album that they put on when they locked themselves in their room after fighting with their mom over an 8:30 curfew.
Scott McKeating: A Black Album worthy of the praise it got.
Andrew Unterberger: In the early 90s, shoegaze rock—bands playing really loud, distorted guitars that sounded like an ocean of sound with hazy vocals and lazy percussion—really started to take off in the UK.
Scott McKeating: 1991 was the year that the UK music industry seemed to take us (the nation of indie kids with fringes and baggy trousers) seriously and had Happy Mondays and The Cure headline a two night concert which they called The Great British Music Weekend to represent The Brits. Ride were second on the bill at The Cure night (second of seven on the bill). Looking back it seems incredible that so much exposure was given to alternative acts, when it would’ve been much easier to get Sting and Phil instead.
Lisa Oliver: All I really remember about Ride is the hella-hottie who fronted the band. They were the clean-cut shoegazers right?
Scott McKeating: Ride seemed to be the ladies’s favourite, due to Mark Gardener’s floppy fringe, puppy dog eyes and Jagger pout.
Nick Southall: “What’s this? Got a good beat to it!” When I was 12, The Mary Whitehouse Experience were FAR more important to me than Ride.
Andrew Unterberger: Ride fucking rocked. It’s almost unfair to label them as shoegaze—grouping them with the rest of those complacent, but beautiful whiners—they coulda kicked the shit out of Chapterhouse.
Scott McKeating: Chapterhouse had one awesome single “Falling Down” which seemed to be playing at every bar and club we used to hit. I remember Swervedriver were the next big thing for 5 minutes but can’t recall their big tune. Looking back on it, it was like any other indie subgenre in which the good stuff is remembered and the crap sinks.
Josh Love: What shoegaze breakthrough? It never really happened in America, I guess we were busy with our own heroin-induced music craze in grunge-rock...to be honest, I’ve never heard a song from Chapterhouse or Ride, and I didn’t hear Loveless for the first time until about four years ago.
Joe Niemczyk: This was definitely a British thing. Sure, My Bloody Valentine toured North America, and The Jesus And Mary Chain scored a few minor hits stateside, but by the time the movement was in full swing, the U.S. was enamored with grunge and gangsta rap. I’d tell ya I was into Loveless when I was twelve, but would you really believe me?
Tom May: Shoegazing is too little a label for Loveless. It's massive in the truest manner; dream-pop, pop of my wildest dreams. God, listening to this on headphones is as overpowering as music gets. Has the guitar ever sounded as all-engulfing as this? Album of the 1990s? I'd like to see people try to argue for something else...
William Swygart: Loveless—it’s one of those things that I don't listen to much anymore, and I can't remember any specific details about it, any of the specific sounds or notes or even songs, really. But I do know that I've never heard an album like it, or that's created the kind of atmosphere it creates. It does feel like it's just beamed in off an entirely different plane. I can't say why, because I don't know why, but I just sit or lie in awe every time I hear it.
Scott McKeating: I’m sure everyone else will be saying Loveless is a classic, one of a kind LP, which is pretty annoying. But it really is, it has everything; the myth of nearly taking Creation into bankruptcy, the somnambulistic recording sessions, melodies, noise, definitive single (“Soon”), imitators by the dozen and the fact many people just don’t get that its so so beautiful.
Ian Mathers: None of the hype could fully prepare me for Loveless, which I didn’t hear until around ten years after its release. Hearing that an album sounds unlike anything else out there, especially once the album has aged for a while, makes me extremely skeptical; Loveless was the only time I was actually struck dumb by one of these albums. It has some of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard, and great songwriting to boot.
Kareem Estefan: Loveless is the sound of a guitar drowned in a pink ocean of distortion, fading into the distance as a warm female voice hesitates to intone “My bloody valentine”. In other words, this cover art is perfect.
Adrien Begrand: Never has noise sounded so beautiful, and never has music sounded more glorious when played as loud as possible. It's indescribable, it has to be heard to be believed. Loveless will still be blowing people's minds decades from now.
Nick Southall: My Bloody Valentine? What’s this? It’s just NOISE! You can’t even hear the bloody words.
Ben Woolhead: The record the word “ethereal” was simply made for (and yet at the same time it’s so incredibly dense). If anyone ever tells you that some band or other sound like Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine, don’t believe them—it’s impossible, and the person making the claim is most likely a clueless music journalist grasping at straws.
Akiva Gottlieb: Loveless has got to be the greatest sex album ever recorded; some musical artists take their cues from psychedelic drugs, but MBV must have conceived this album in the throes of carnal ecstasy…with each other.
Josh Timmermann: My Bloody Valentine were pioneers in making music that sounds like whales fucking.
Adrien Begrand: As My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and Slowdive have proven, shoegazer always, always sounds better when sung by women. Preferably wispy-voiced women who have difficulty enunciating.
Tony Van Groningen: Sadly I must admit that I was not hip enough in 1991 to have known about this album. But I clued in a few years later, and was happily amazed when it lived up to the insane amount of reverential indie hype it received, repeatedly, from multiple sources. This is an incredible piece of music. Dare I call it timeless? Yes, yes I do. This album brings out an emotional response from me that precious few other albums can. I love it for that.
Ian Mathers: I’ve never really seen a bad word written about this album, and I’m not about to break the trend. Loveless is to modern guitar music what James Joyce’s Ulysses is to the modern novel: its apotheosis, and a feat never fully duplicated by its descendants, even when proper respect is paid.
Michael Heumann: Thelma and Louise—second place in the feminist film critic's favorite movie of the 90s in which women suffer and die awards.
Andrew Unterberger: Put the fear of god into more married men than Fatal Attraction and Lorena Bobbitt combined.
Chris Dahlen: (Shhhhhh, I'll tell you a secret: this movie SUCKED.)
Andrew Unterberger: Thelma and Louise (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, though I have no clue which plays which) set out on a weekend vacation away from the oppressive males of their lives, and end up on the run from the law after killing the guy who raped Geena.
Steve Lichtenstein: The irony for Geena Davis was that, by falling into that large Hollywood ditch, her career was falling with her. Oh wait, maybe that’s not irony, but efficient planning. Doing everything in one trip, that’s my Geena.
Gabe Gloden: Ridley Scott's first good post-Bladerunner film created the entire buddy feminists road sex-scapade genre and introduced us to, what would become, the inescapable sexiness of Brad Pitt. I haven't seen it, but I've been told, “he was very charismatic”.
Nick Southall: Brad Pitt’s chest.
Andrew Unterberger: Isn’t it sort of counter-productive that the primary thing a good deal of the females really remember from this movie is how hott Brad Pitt was?
Gavin Mueller: So if it's the emanicpatory feminist flick it's billed to be, why do they die at the end? Notice that we don't actually see them die. The last shot is a still frame of the Thunderbird at the peak of its leap into the abyss. This was a conscious choice of director Ridley Scott: it emphasizes their escape, and not their demise.
Ben Woolhead: If a man’s default response to getting dumped is to wallow in self-pity in the company of a Smiths record or two, a woman’s is either to go to a club and wail along to “I Will Survive” and “Independent Woman” by Destiny’s Child, or to stay in with friends and watch this film.
Ian Mathers: The Scottish ex-manager of Echo & The Bunnymen and ex-Creation solo artist Bill Drummond teamed up with ex-Zodiac Mindwarp guitarist Jimi Cauty to make… house music? Illegal-samples using, million-dolar-burning, guide-to-how-to-make-a-hit-single writing house music, but house music nonetheless.
Gabe Gloden: The KLF emerged in 1991 to finally deliver the club antidote to “Gonna Make You Sweat”. Finally, after those six long painful months when C+C was rotting from overexposure, “Kaaaay-L-F!!! Uh-HUH-Uh-HUH-Uh-HUH-Uh-HUH!!”, coming with some fucking Sun Ra cosmic spirituality and some rapping and some diva vocals—“3AM Eternal” sounded fresh as hell.
Ian Mathers: The KLF, or JAMMs (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) produced some truly whacked out stuff. After making one of the first really good ambient house albums (The KLF Chill Out) and having a hit single under the name the Timelords (“Doctorin' The Tardis”—Dr. Who meets football chant), the KLF released The White Room and retired a year later.
Nick Southall: You can’t argue with The White Room. You can’t argue with The KLF at all, actually; they might kill your cows with a Sonic Tank. I don’t own any cows, mind you.
Sam Bloch: "Come on boy do you want a ride?" Yes, yes I do Bill Drummond. I want to straddle your machineguns and blow up a million pounds with you.
Nick Southall: Bill Drummond is my hero. I actually got to meet him about a year ago when he did a tour to coincide with one of his books; he was cutting a photograph by Richard Long that he’d paid $20k for into twenty thousand pieces and selling them for $1 each. I still have about three of them mounted somewhere—I think I use them as bookmarks.
Tom May: Oh, they were special; they were fun and mysterious where so much else was dour and stodgily retro in the 1990s. "3AM Eternal" and "Justified and Ancient" totally blow me away each time I hear them.
Ian Mathers: “3 A.M. Eternal” can still cause hairs on the back of my neck to rise.
Adrien Begrand: Their videos were weird and pretentious, their lyrics were weird and pretentious (just what exactly is an Ancient of Mu Mu?), but the music was kind of fascinating. And getting Tammy Wynette to do a guest turn...what a coup, and what a stroke of genius.
Ian Mathers: I’m convinced that seeing the video for “Justified And Ancient” guest-starring Tammy Wynette on TV when I was a kid made me a weirder, and thus better, person.
Andrew Unterberger: Some bands can claim to be justified. Some might technically be ancient. But how many are both Justified and Ancient? Just one, my friends. Just one.
Clem Bastow: I still find it faintly incongruous that we were doing the running man to the KLF at my primary school discos. I remember writing "we're all bound for mumu land!" in my class diary and having my teacher reply "not yet". To this day I still have no idea what he meant.
Gavin Mueller: With a blend of cynicism and savvy that I can only envy, the KLF shrewdly calculated the steps necessary to achieve superstardom within the music industry, followed through, and went out the way every band should go out: hosing down an awards ceremony with blanks.
Nick Southall: The KLF are the nearest thing to pop situationists we’ve ever encountered, sod what The Stone Roses tried doing with paint and that—The KLF actually had number ones, for a start.
Andrew Unterberger: The KLF called the bluff of any band who ever considered themselves conceptual or daring by being twice as conceptual and daring, but more importantly, infinitely more popular. These guys were the highest selling singles act in the world in 1991. The thought is mind-boggling.
Nick Southall: Plus stunts like leaving pig carcasses on the steps of awards ceremonies and giving away cans of Tenants Super to street drinkers and driving round the M25 enough times to cover the mileage it would take to get to the Moon (or something). And burning a million quid.
Ben Woolhead: Even to this day I find myself hoping that I’ll be served a 99 with Flake by one of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.
Gavin Mueller: They succeeded in exposing everything they sought to prove about the cold, calculating, culturally bankrupt landscape of commercially controlled pop music. And yet, the music industry exists while the KLF does not. There's probably a lesson there.
Ben Woolhead: Jerry Springer—trailer trash TV par excellence for those viewers who thought Rikki Lake was too highbrow.
Scott McKeating: Like watching the car crash of what anti-American writers claimed the culture was all about; voyeurism, violence, exploitation and bigotry.
Ben Woolhead: There’s airing your dirty washing in public, and then there’s rubbing your soiled underpants in the faces of the audience. Most of those who appeared onstage with this in mind were not very good advertisements for the theory of evolution.
Steve Lichtenstein: YOU’D BE NOWHERE WITHOUT RICHARD BEY! NOWHERE! I’m sorry, I get a little defensive when I think about low-budget Jersey trash talk shows. Because I know those people. They were my lab partners, and come to think of it, those skeezers dress too slutty and they ain’t all that.
Scott McKeating: The first few times I saw incestuous couples being fought over by obese lesbian pensioners’ who seemed to be genuinely living out the movie cliché of redneck trailer trash being sold as entertainment I was stunned. Not stunned that such people existed but that the show was goading people into wrecking each other for fucking fun. But I, and I guess many others, have become totally desensitized to what people are willing to do to each other for their 15 minutes.
Andrew Unterberger: Before Jerry Springer, people used chairs for boring purposes like…sitting. It was only after the trailer trash cavalcade made their way through Springer’s half-hour show for so many years that the Chair realized its full potential as a weapon of mass destruction.
Ben Woolhead: Though I haven’t actually seen it, I’m led to believe that Jerry Springer: The Opera, written at least in part by Stewart Lee of Fist of Fun semi-fame, is a masterpiece of satire by the fact that its finale features a chorus of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen.
Ian Mathers: Ah, it seems so quaint now that we were all worried about Jerry back in the day. Back then his show didn’t openly embrace the decline-of-western-society ethos it was getting tagged with, didn’t openly encourage fights, and was basically just another talk show. Hell, Jerry’s always seemed like a more decent guy then, say Sally Jesse Raphael (who has been callously feeding off of the fears of parents for decades).
Gabe Gloden: He used to be the Mayor of Cincinnati... THE MAYOR OF CINCINNATI.
Gavin Mueller: While some would use Springer as an opportunity to poke fun at Ohio politics, I would much rather use Warren G. Harding.
Josh Timmermann: Making fun of the Jerry Springer Show is roughly as fish-in-a-barrel as telling an O.J. joke. I'll politely refrain from both.
Ian Mathers: Jerry’s end of show thought was always weird, because it was usually pretty good advice. As if he actually gave a shit about his guests. Pity none of them ever followed it.
Nick Southall: What a terrible, terrible asshole.
Tony Van Groningen: Following Dances With Wolves was probably pretty difficult for Kevin Costner, but he pulled it off with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Once again casting himself as an outlaw hero, helping those poor unfortunate souls oppressed by the man, Kevin Costner successfully strengthened every stereotype previously applied to him. He also once again manages a way to show his ass in this movie, to the delight of nobody.
Gabe Gloden: The other ’91 Kevin Costner movie where he fucks up his accent.
Adrien Begrand: All I can remember about this movie is Costner's embarrassing attempt at an English accent.
Nick Southall: I’ve been to Nottingham and I’ve been to Sherwood Forest. There are very few people there with American accents. You’ll notice that Costner plays the same role in this film, too. JUST FUCKING DO HAMLET ALREADY.
Gavin Mueller: Only through the innocent eyes of a child could I have enjoyed a Kevin Costner vehicle. Of course, if more Kevin Costner vehicles had Morgan Freeman playing a scimitar-wielding Moor, it might not be such an issue.
Tony Van Groningen: Featuring Morgan Freeman as a civilized-yet-lethal scimitar-wielding Moor was a nice addition to the Robin Hood myth, if a bit unlikely.
Chris Dahlen: Remember when Morgan Freeman, as the noble black man who corrects our prejudices, gave that woman a makeshift c-section? Without anesthesia? To prove that women are tougher than men? That's the only part I remember.
Josh Timmermann: Hands-down the best thing in this movie is Alan Rickman. The rest is exquisite horseshit, but Rickman's scenery-chewing turn is hilarious and magnetic. It almost makes this movie worth watching—which is indeed saying something.
Ben Woolhead: The Sheriff of Nottingham, played by Alan Rickman, is pure evil, delighting in his own unscrupulousness and malevolence. Very unlike the man I met four years ago on a bar crawl around the University campus—that particular real-life Sheriff had an earring, shoulder-length hair and a warm beery amiability, and was only too happy to talk about the job and sign autographs for those who approached him. My one regret is that when I saw him through my alcoholic haze in the Union bar at the end of the night, I didn’t request that the DJ played “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” so he could join us in playing air guitar to the solo in the middle of the dance floor.
Adrien Begrand: I'd like to apologize on behalf of all Canadians with good musical taste for the pain that Bryan Adams' song inflicted on the world.
William Swygart: UK Singles Chart #1's in 1991 were a bit of a mixed bag, really. On the one hand, you've got Enigma, The KLF, The Simpsons and The Clash. On the other, you get Hale & Pace, Queen (twice), Jason Donovan, Cher, and, for 16 whole weeks, Bryan fucking Adams.
Tom May: Bloody Brian Adams; need anyone say more than those three words to bring back the stasis of those 16 weeks at the summit of Britain's charts? As a poet almost said: the world will end not with a bang but with a whimpering "...for you...".
Andrew Unterberger: ’91 was a great year for cheesy power ballads with easily memorized guitar solos. Not that this song could hold a candle to “November Rain,” but still.
Josh Love: This was THE slow jam at my white-bread-as-fuck middle school.
Gabe Gloden: Beware any Bryan Adams look-alike at the karaoke bar, because he will inevitably treat you to a wretched rendition of this song. In fact, avoid any karaoke bars featuring this song in their catalog.
Josh Love: This movie really doesn’t even exist anymore thanks to Men in Tights, which completely repaced it in the cultural consciousness
Ben Welsh: What a terrible fucking movie. If nothing else, at least it lead to that Mel Brooks spoof, which made my father laugh. My father is a very unhappy man.
Tony Van Groningen: In any event, Prince of Thieves was certainly an entertaining movie, in an unprofound way.
Sam Hunt: Kevin Costner: the man could do no wrong. Tatonka!
Ben Woolhead: Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s moustachioed Italian plumbers Mario and Luigi was a blue hedgehog that could sprint and curl itself up into a ball to knock things out of its path. And to think that Bill Hicks argued for the vital role drugs play in the creation of MUSIC…
Gavin Mueller: Sega's answer to Mario lacked the charm of Nintendo's mascot, but the games were incredibly fun. If not an adequate replacement for the Mario games, definitely a worthwhile supplement.
Gabe Gloden: Sega's answer to Mario. Substitute coins with rings and Bowser with Dr. Eggman and you pretty much have Sonic in a nutshell.
Sam Hunt: Obviously the only thing that could compete with an overweight brick-punching, mushroom-popping plumber is…a ring-grubbing hedgehog who freed the spirit-lives of robotic animals.
Ian Mathers: As a kid reared on Nintendo, I was initially skeptical of Sonic. Then a friend showed me how this game was just like Mario, only instead of jumping you just ran really, really fast. Until you hit something and all of these rings popped out of you. We actually found that part funny, so we didn’t get far in the game, but man was running really, really fast fun.
Tony Van Groningen: This game was fucking awesome. The colors, the levels, the characters, the mini-games…plus it was on Sega Genesis. It made Super Mario Brothers look stupid in comparison.
Kareem Estefan: Mario might have been better overall, but Sonic the Hedgehog had one thing that even the most loyal Nintendo fan had to appreciate: gambling. Did Mario have two-player casino levels that offered limitless opportunities to blow precious coins away? I think not.
Joe Niemczyk: It was all about speed. It was all about attitude. It was all about the “blast processing,” whatever that was.
Scott McKeating: More addictive than internet porn, this was the game that broke most of my friends into serious gaming. But now they all claim it was sport simulation games or shoot ‘em ups, seems in retrospect that being really involved in pretending to be a hedgehog that collects coins is a bit embarrassing. Whereas punching seven shades of shitty tissue out of someone is ok.
Andrew Unterberger: Heroin has nothing on Sonic the Hedgehog. You play that casino level, with all the bumpers, pretty lights and dazzling music (and with that blissful symphony of sound effects in the background) and you tell me that there’s a greater high out there.
Evan Chakroff: Have you ever really thought about the premise of Sonic the Hedgehog? This evil doctor has made all these robots—which are powered, somehow, by small furry animals trapped inside—which are released (to freedom) when you (Sonic) destroy their outer robot shell. Is this some kind of parable?
Steve Lichtenstein: It was soon thereafter when I fully realized that life doesn’t have a point system, money and important objects don’t float above me just within my reach, and that air somersaulting is not a viable form of transportation.
Gavin Mueller: I had a physics teacher that bore an uncanny resemblance to Dr. Robotnik, both in body type and demeanor.
Clem Bastow: I never, never clocked this game, which remains one of the great regrets and infuriations of my life.
Gavin Mueller: Oh, and if anybody knows how to beat the last boss in Sonic 2, please email me.
Andrew Unterberger: r-r-r-r-r-R-R-R-RICO…..Suavé. This song was one long taunt to kids unable to r-r-r-roll their tongue.
Ian Mathers: Shirtless Ecuadorian singer/rapper gyrates for five minutes while intoning the words “rico… suave” (“smooth and tasty”, apparently). Was, to my ten-year-old mind, far dirtier than most of the things on TV.
Andrew Unterberger: Before some devil girl was pouring hot wax on Ricky Martin’s chest, we had this Latin lover taking care of business.
Gavin Mueller: Rich. Smooth. Gerardo. And Bavarian chocolate.
Josh Timmermann: As an early 90's curio, this works uncannily well as a companion piece to Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy.
Steve Lichtenstein: Nah, I never requested this video on MTV. And I certainly didn’t think unbiblical thoughts about that lean shirtless guy with the jeans. What are you implying? Stop judging me.
Ben Welsh: I remember my babysitter really wanted this guy’s groin. She would force me to call into Z102.9 in Cedar Rapids and request it. Then we’d play Wheel of Fortune on my Apple IIGS.
Gabe Gloden: It turns out that the video to this song was really just one 4 minute long Levi 501 Jeans commercial.
Ian Mathers: I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying, but he was unmistakably talking about fucking. Weird Al’s “Taco Grande” was clearly superior.
Steve Lichtenstein: I don’t know if was the pot, or the paranoia, or the paranoia caused by the pot, but watching Silence of the Lambs between my fingers on commercial television, huddled in the back of a dorm room bunk bed, was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced.
Ian Mathers: So the ending sequence begins, and it’s very tense and creepy, and I’m already thinking “this is the best thriller I’ve seen in quite a few years”… and then the lights go off. Masterful.
Sam Hunt: Funniest moment of 6th grade: learning that one of my classmates apparently shit his pants while watching this movie. It was THAT scary.
Gabe Gloden: This movie terrified me like almost nothing else before it; I was able to suspend belief when watching things like Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth Part 27, but Silence of the Lambs was believable, disgusting, exquisite and intelligent all at the same time. Sometimes people got away from Jason and Freddy, but if Hannibal Lecter wanted to eat your liver you were as good as dead. He was a thousand times smarter than you and wanted to eat you, if you were an interesting enough target for him, which is far more frightening than an immortal monster with a knife who stabs every moving thing that he comes across.
Scott McKeating: Lecter is a very interesting character, and pretty much the only thing of interest in this film. I can’t say that I believe it’s very healthy for a culture to be admiring/enjoying/worshipping murderers.
Gabe Gloden: It's a great thriller, certainly. But at its core, Silence of the Lambs is a love story between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter. Their relationship is the only reason anyone remembers this film as the first great “serial killer” film. The most memorable moments come not from the gore or jump cuts, but from their intimacy.
Nick Southall: It’s outrageous that Hopkins got an Oscar for best actor despite only being on-screen for about nine minutes.
Andrew Unterberger: Big scary psychological thriller, right? But the best part is still Lecter’s “Oh, and Senator, one more thing…Love ya
suit!
Tony Van Groningen: The scene where Lecter is escaping the police station is one of the most tense, spine-tingling scenes I’ve ever seen.
Scott McKeating: I remember thinking that the crucifixion of the prison guard was a pretty brutal image, obviously it didn’t take long for someone to top that.
Clem Bastow: I wasn't allowed to watch any of those movies. I went to see What About Bob? instead.
Tony Van Groningen: Not to mention Lecter’s fellow psycho killer Buffalo Bill, who is trying to make a coat of human skin and shoves moth cocoons down the throats of his victims.
Josh Timmermann: What everyone remembers from this film are those tense, vaguely erotic "quid pro quo" conversations between Hannibal and Clarice. What most of us have happily blocked out is one of the most disturbing stripteases ever put to celluloid.
Andrew Unterberger: “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.”
Gabe Gloden: Contains the best depiction of a “mangina” ever.
Lisa Oliver: My old boyfriend used to really freak me out by saying "it puts the lotion on its body" whenever I would put hand cream on in front of him.
Andrew Unterberger: The annoying thing about this movie is that everyone looks directly at the camera, seemingly accusing the audience of a whole lot of shit. No, Ms. Starling, I was not hitting on you. No, Mr. Chilton, I would not like to spend the night on the town with you. And damn it, Hannibal, stop making fun of my goddamn shoes!
Michael Heumann: This movie was for feminist film critics of the 90s what Madonna was for feminist pop culture critics of the 90s. I guess that's why a movie about a man who kills women and skins them alive is on the Lifetime channel for women every single week.
Gabe Gloden: GBH was a highly-acclaimed British miniseries... * cough *
Scott McKeating: Mild-mannered special needs teacher Jim Nelson (Michael Palin) ends up going head to head with the power mad / mental mad Councillor Michael Murray (Robert Lindsay) over the issue of whether to take his staff out on a strike. These principal players are deliberately chalk and cheese; Nelson is the principled family man, while Murray plays the self-centred political entrepreneur encircled by nodding dog wannabes.
Tom May: There was a hilarious part where Robert Lindsay's corrupt—yet very sympathetic—council leader books into a hotel with intent to bed the imperious Lindsay Duncan. And things really go quite mental when the hotel turns out to be hosting a Dr. Who convention.
Scott McKeating: Both however are lifelong members of the Labour Party. Extreme leftist militants and certified agitators convince Murray to call a city-wide strike bringing it to a standstill, with the purpose of stoking the fires of, and provoking, a race and class war. Except for one school where Nelson teaches which is overlooked by the picket lines. The two protagonists clash in a war of ideologies very similar to the situation that the UK finds itself in under Tony “I betrayed you all, ahahahahaha!” Blair; Labour vs Socialism.
Tom May: Where are our Alan Bleasdales today? Well... respect to Paul Abbott and Russell T. Davies, but you get my point; who will manage as audacious a merging of comedy, drama and politics as this?
Scott McKeating: The point of the show, as well as being highly entertaining, was that democratic moderation is the only way that our society is going to progress. The extremes of the right and left are outmoded, dangerous and superfluous to getting along in this life.
Tom May: Great laughs, bedding down with some quite dark drama as the series goes on.
Scott McKeating: Raw, black comedy, affecting, that would be all the more powerful/controversial today.
Andrew Unterberger: In ’90, baggy took over the UK. But in ’91, for one year only, indie dance was coming to conquer the states.
Nick Southall: These bands all need to die. “Let’s have a funky drumbeat.” No, let’s not, eh?
Steve Lichtenstein: In 1991, Jesus Jones and EMF infected the U.S. airwaves with catchy, modern rock for the hair-banded masses.
Joe Niemczyk: For a small fee, the kid next door to me dubbed me a copy of his EMF and Information Society singles. He also had that Jesus Jones album too, but I was already sick of that song from the radio.
Micheal Heumann: "Right Here, Right Now": I really liked this song at first, but then I graduated from college, and I realized that "right here, right now" wasn't so great after all; there were a lot of other places I'd rather be than unemployed.
Joe Niemczyk: Too bad it’s one of the only songs from that era that’s still being licensed for adverts and promotional use.
Josh Love: Why won’t “Right Here Right Now” and “Unbelievable” EVER die?! The former as a piece of positivist propoganda for corporate pitchmen, the latter as the numbskull soundtrack to local sports reels.
Steve Lichtenstein: Riding a wave of popularity and deftly avoiding the trap of radio ubiquity, EMF and Jesus Jones both signed a four-album contract with Dollar Bin Records and remained firmly in the public eye by churning out artistically challenging and platinum-selling records that are constantly enjoyed by everyone always.
William Swygart: The Soup Dragons! "DON’T BE AFRAID OF YOUR FREEDOM!”
Andrew Unterberger: The Soup Dragons’ “I’m Free” was sort of like a baggy “Joy to the World”, except twice as awesome and three times as incomprehensible.
William Swygart: I remember when the Uni decided to “do an indie night”. Ten people turned up. Me and this other bloke started airplaning all over the hall when “I'm Free” came on, making out like we knew the words (we blatantly didn't), and skidding and leaping clean across the whole hall on those puddles of spilt booze that magically accumulate at student nights as though they're obliged to... I had never danced so badly.
Adrien Begrand: Indie dance was a big reason why I listened to grunge in 1991.
Andrew Unterberger: OK, so they might not carry the critical weight of Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses these days. And yes, their albums are almost eternally damned to the $1 bin of your local used record store. But to you, EMF, Jesus Jones, Soup Dragons and all the rest of you wonderful funky bastards, I only have one thing to say: You’re unbelievable.
OH!
Tony Van Groningen: “November Rain” would be the posterchild for the Convention of Epic Melodrama in Music, if such a thing existed, sharing center stage with Celine Dion.
Gabe Gloden: Fuck Axl and Fuck Slash and Fuck this video. Such a piece of shit, so pretentious, and I assume that's the only reason it's noteworthy now. “November Rain” covered the entire gamut of putrid rock decadence and overblown narcissistic ideas.
Josh Timmermann: This has to be one of the most thoroughly wretched songs and videos of the decade.
Scott McKeating: Reminds me of Elton John, and I mean that in a good way.
Tony Van Groningen: All I know about this song is that it is super long, and that I got really sad every one of the 4 billion times I saw this video on MTV. It was kind of weird to see speedfreaky uber-rocker Axl looking all forlorn and lost on the television every single day of my life for six months, but as we all know, being miserable and broken-hearted is an integral aspect of “artistic growth.”
Josh Timmermann: Whenever I start to really miss the 90s, I remember “November Rain” and suddenly feel glad to be living in the 21st Century. We might have to put up with George W. Bush pillaging the Middle East and shitting on the Bill of Rights, but, hey, at least Axl Rose is virtually out of the picture.
Gavin Mueller: Look, this song is great and all, but it's too damn long. Cut out all that orchestrated pomp and circumstance, Axl! We want the rock!
Nick Southall: Awesome. I once wrote out the lyrics and gave them to a girl I ‘loved’. I was 12, come on. I think she let me touch her tits, such as they were. I think she joined the RAF.
Andrew Unterberger: To hell with all the haters, “November Rain” is practically the reason they invented the power ballad. I could karaoke this song until the day I die. And the video—oh, the video…
Clem Bastow: This video was such a load of arse.
Kareem Estefan: The great thing about this video is that Guns N’ Roses are never satisfied with their bombast, that each time they seem to cross a line, they have to outdo themselves. Long guitar solo! And it’s in the desert! And the camera’s panning around wildly! And oh no, it’s raining! NO, SHE’S DEAD! THE FLOWERS!!!! THEY’RE BLEEDING!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Gabe Gloden: I mean, why the fuck did that guy jump into that cake when it started to rain?
Andrew Unterberger: But seriously, can someone please explain to me how the chick dies in this video? OK, so she and Axl get married, everything’s beautiful, they’re eating cake, and it starts to rain. Then next thing, she’s dead. What the fuck happened? Did she slip and crack her head on the concrete? Struck by lightning? Drowned? ACID RAIN?
Ben Woolhead: The video is memorable mainly for the moment when Slash strides out of the white church to play his solo in the middle of the desert.
Scott McKeating: I might be alone in thinking Slash’s cliff face solo is a moment of sheer brilliance.
Ben Welsh: The helicopter flyover during Slash’s guitar solo is perhaps the most bombastic, badass thing ever committed to film. I once had a dream where I was doing that guitar solo on top of a Dodge Viper zooming across the Utah Salt Flats. There were ramps.
Nick Southall: There aren’t two guitar solos; there are three. I know because I saw the video on VH1 again the other day. Slash swaggers outside amidst the dust cloud for the third solo.
Adrien Begrand: The coda in "November Rain" was their last great moment. Slash played the most expressive solos of any 80s metal guitar god.
Gavin Mueller: Slash's guitar solo is so awesome that I could cause this girl in marching band to well up just by humming it.
Sam Hunt: If Nirvana changed my life, this song refined it. That 2nd guitar solo…goosebumps! It was like the guitar was crying, man. Seriously. I’d like to hear Buckethead (or whoever has taken his place) do that.
Andrew Unterberger: In ’91, a now infamous videotape of LA police brutally kicking the crap out of arrested black man Rodney King was made public. Really, the LAPD just couldn’t catch a break in the early 90s.
Gavin Mueller: Probably the singular reason police officers are quick to confiscate cameras these days.
Tony Van Groningen: The town where I was growing up was predominantly white, and the kids were for the most part blissfully unaware of racial tensions. Until the Rodney King incident happened. It, and the subsequent riots, were horrifying, I couldn’t fathom it. Some people said he deserved it. I didn’t know what to think about all of it, other than that the whole chain of events was so…wrong.
Nick Southall: What kind of person videos it rather than wading in and helping King? The kind of person who realises that they’d get the shit kicked out of them too.
Chris Dahlen: Around the time of the Rodney King beating I worked in a near-eastern history museum on the South Side of Chicago. My job as a "guard" was to walk back and forth in the galleries and tell people not to touch things. I wore a clip-on black tie, I had shoulder-length hair and I really looked like an idiot. I remember a couple of ten-year old black kids coming through one day while I was on duty. They ran up to me, shouted "Rodney King! Rodney King!" and then ran away laughing—like they'd really caught me out on something.
Steve Lichtenstein: This was a very unfortunate time for the country sometimes known as ‘America.’ Maybe I’m too simplistic, but if I had the choice between lifting sweet merch from open windows of generous vendors on the streets of LA or being savagely beaten by the city’s cops, I would choose taking the merchandise. You know, to help the economy. What it boils down to is that Rodney King and I come from different schools of thought, but it’s my hope that we’ll one day get past it.
Josh Love: After all the initial fallout from the trial and the riots, you would have thought America would have learned something from Rodney King, something about how white America perceives the black male as a physical threat, someone to be feared, someone to avoid, someone who must be subdued at all costs...you would think we would have realized the foolishness and fallacy of that mindset, but sure enough three months ago a successful, community-minded black husband and father with no criminal record (not that it mattered) was shot to death by police officers in my own home state of Georgia who suspected him of being a drug supplier.
Tony Van Groningen: Many years later, in college, I read something about it that I still remember, which to me is one of the most simple and profound statements about the complex subtleties of racism that I’ve ever heard: The article simply asked, “when you saw the Rodney King beating, did you think A) that poor man! Or did you think B) that could have been me!” When I realized that option B had never crossed my mind, it really opened my eyes to a lot of things.
Scott McKeating: I think Bill Hicks and Ice Cube said everything that needed to be said.
Gabe Gloden: Alright everybody, let's get this over with. Altogether now... “Can't we all just get along?”
Gabe Gloden: A stream-of-consciousness document of a day-in-the-life of the city of Austin, Texas in the early nineties, Slacker was two “firsts” in one. It introduced the mainstream to the whole hipster counter-culture, and as well as the term “indie film”.
Akiva Gottlieb: If there’s one cultural force that’s shaped the vaguely human creature I am today, it’s the American independent films of the 90s. Unfortunately, “Slacker”, for all its supposed influence, is an almost unwatchable bore. Keep in mind that I love nearly all of Richard Linklater’s other films, even at their talkiest and most abstract. Keep in mind that I’m a slacker myself, and a vaguely philosophical one at that.
Scott McKeating: Where Tarantino is hailed as a great dialogue writer, Linklater is the real deal. Slacker may feature several set pieces which discuss pop culture it doesn’t come across as a contrived statement crafted by the author. Great rambling film.
Akiva Gottlieb: I remember only about two of the nearly 200 characters in this film, and one of them carries around remnants of Madonna’s pap smear in a jar.
Adrien Begrand: The movie's kind of bumpy, but one line really hit home when I saw it in 1992: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy." The line was cool until Michael Stipe stole it.
Lisa Oliver: While I loved this film, it kinda pissed me off that Linklater was letting the general public in on me and my friends’ own private idaho of a lifestyle. I met him once and gave him a t-shirt of my band, which I later saw a photo of him wearing. Nice one.
Nick Southall: Considering how much I love Waking Life I really ought to watch this; one of my friends teaches this film in his “Teens On Screen” module; I’ll ask him what it’s about next time we’re playing football.
Akiva Gottlieb: “Slacker” taught me only that people in Austin are boring, vacuous stoners, which is the main reason why I refused an invitation to DJ the Stylus Magazine S&M (Sex & Margaritas) Party at this year’s South by Southwest music festival. Let me know how that went, guys!
Andrew Unterberger: Slacker made it cool for movies to be boring again. And for that, we should be thankful.
Ian Mathers: Terminator 2 was the best movie ever when I was 10.
Tony Van Groningen: Oh, how I loved this movie. This movie is everything a 13 year old boy could ask for.
Evan Chakroff: Listen: It's got robots, time travel, a playgound absolutely wrecked by a nuclear blast…
Tony Van Groningen: Killer robots from the future, shotguns, motorcycles, car chases…
Nick Southall: Liquid metal! Shoot him in the face with a grenade, Arnie! Wow, his face goes back together!
Andrew Unterberger: Extendable sword hands, Guns ‘n’ Roses, 10000 degree acid…
Tony Van Groningen: Explosions, an unstoppable bad guy, a kid just like us who was going to save the future…
Evan Chakroff: And: MORPHING. It's the greatest movie ever.
Gabe Gloden: I liked this movie as much as I like the entirety of 1991, which was quite a bit.
Steve Lichtenstein: Terminator 2 was the the first R-rated movie I ever saw. Lied to my parents to see it. I was 15. I remember thinking that Linda Hamilton could kick my ass and that there were girls having their first grandchildren at 15…and I was seeing my first R movie. I got eight tattoos (one on my tongue) and killed a man the next day.
Gavin Mueller: Everyone remembers the first R-rated movie they see at the theater: the fantastic explosions, the visceral gun battles, the profanity hurled in surround sound. I still vividly recall the opening sequence, displaying a wasteland of human skulls soundtracked by an industrial lull, and then -- SMASH -- a robotic foot crashes down, pulverizing a skull. On TV and DVD, the sound is a feeble crunching, but I swear it was like a sonic boom.
Sam Hunt: Read the book before I saw the movie. Eddie Furlong: the new Macauly Culkin.
Joe Niemczyk: The scene right after Sarah Connor falls asleep at the picnic table scared the crap out of me. Still gives me nightmares today.
Ian Mathers: It hasn’t aged well.
Chris Dahlen: I know we'll never watch it the same way again, between the dated CGI and everything that's happened to Ahnold, but this was a great action flick.
Tony Van Groningen: We’re used to it in 2004, with CGI being used in Geico commercials and every movie under the sun, but the special effects on the insidious shapeshifting T-1000 were nothing short of miraculous for 1991.
Nick Southall: Every time I see this on DVD I’m tempted to buy it, and then I remember that I was 12 when it came out and I’ve not seen it since, so it might be absolute crap. Plus, thirteen years ago, the CGI was more believable than it is now; the T1000 walking through the fire, all liquid metal and shiny and scary as hell, is way more real looking than fucking Princess Amidala. And she’s played by a real actress, too.
Adrien Begrand: 13 years later, this movie still looks incredible. It set the benchmark for big dumb blow-up movies, and few, if any, have come close to matching it since.
Gavin Mueller: For all the supposed advances CGI has made the past decade, almost nothing tops the seamless effects of T2.
Tony Van Groningen: I still enjoy this movie.
Andrew Unterberger: Greatest action movie of all-time. No contest.
Nick Southall: Fresh Prince. Now you’re talking.
Gavin Mueller: Will Smith before he became completely insufferable .
Michael Heumann: Remember when Will Smith was cool? Oh, wait, that was Urkel.
Josh Love: This is still the best thing Will Smith ever did. Keep your Cosby, your Roseanne, I can watch reruns of Fresh Prince all day long.
Scott McKeating: I overdosed on Will Smith for the first and last time with Men in Black. The guy is so not funny and is overstaying his welcome. Plus he’s stealing ‘comic’ roles that Martin Lawrence could do 1000 times better.
Ben Welsh: Will Smith had a bad habit of mouthing the other actor’s line during filming. If you look at the right times you can catch him at it. Apparently he had a hard time remembering his part and it was easier for him to memorize the entire script than just his own lines.
William Swygart: Why did Will Smith decide to stop being any good?
Evan Chakroff: The Fresh Prince taught me valuable lessons in chilling out max and relaxing all cool, both activities which I enjoy to this day.
Adrien Begrand: Had a few mild chuckles (that Silver Spoons kid's Tom Jones fascination was funny for a minute), but the only thing this show proved was that cool hip-hop artists were capable of making empty, pandering, "very special episode"-laden sitcoms just like everyone else.
Ben Woolhead: One of those sitcoms where the sit (Will is “street”, his adopted Bel-Air family is most definitely not) is not just a starting point for the com but in fact the basis for every single joke (see also: Keeping Up Appearances).
Ian Mathers: At the time I guess it was nice to see some people on TV who weren’t, you know, white, but that doesn’t change the fact that this was a bad, formulaic sitcom. The opening credits were neat, though.
William Swygart: In many ways, this wasn't actually much good. The storylines were visible from a mile off, the female characterization tended to be weak, and the moralizing was heavy-handed at best. The scripts really weren't very good at handling the serious stuff. But it was funny as fuck. They managed to pull together a cast with almost uniformly fantastic delivery, so even if you could see the joke coming (which happened quite a lot) it was still hilarious.
Josh Love: I don’t know what it is about this show that gives it such a high replayable factor, it was just so predictable and comforting, like Full House but not nearly as lame. Will would make fat jokes about Uncle Phil and short jokes about Carlton, Hilary was a dingbat shopaholic and Geoffrey just wanted to get fucked up and watch Masterpiece Theatre...and the Carlton dance will outlive us all.
Ian Mathers: The only person more smarmy and annoying than Will Smith was that jackass playing Carlton.
Ben Welsh: My sister was a big fan of this show. I’m pretty sure she cried during the last episode. Hugs everywhere. She can still recite every word to the theme song.
Joe Niemczyk: “In West Philadelphia, born and raised, on the playground was where I spent most of my days…” Yeah, this was probably one of the first hip-hop songs I ever memorized, but don’t judge. You know all the words too!
Ben Woolhead: If you couldn’t rattle off that title rap then you were a nobody.
Gavin Mueller: I think everyone in my generation has the entire theme song memorized. Best track Smith has ever done.
Ben Welsh: I might be able to get your through the first verse if I tried. I remember really liking the part where Big Willy gave the cabbie a high five.
William Swygart: Up till a few weeks ago the BBC was still showing this at about half six in the evenings. Then they decided to replace it with Wayans Brothers anti-fun propaganda video My Wife & Kids. Come back, Carlton, please...
Andrew Unterberger: Right Now, someone is wishing Van Halen broke up in 1984.
Steve Lichtenstein: In dark times, before High School assembly videos had a theme song they could call their own, there was much panic and poor ad placement for the 14-18 year-old demographic. Then came Samuel Hagar, dreamily sung pseudo aphorisms in black print on a white screen, and Pepsi sponsorships. And all was good in our schools forever.
Adrien Begrand: Right now I'm reminded of how much I liked For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge when it came out. Right now I'm wishing I didn't say that.
Lisa Oliver: This time period, Van Halen were known to me as "Van Hagar". Everyone knows the first Van Halen album is really the only one worth owning, and after that I pretty much stopped paying attention. But, when I saw this video, my jaw dropped. The meshing of words and images was perfectly executed and I thought the legacy that was Roth-led-Halen had been surpassed. Plus, I got to see my first breast implant.
Gavin Mueller: This video was a wake-up call for everyone who got most of their current events through MTV. Why this never became the intro to MTV News, I'll never know.
Kareem Estefan: Right now, people are dying. Well, WE’VE GOTTA CHANGE THAT!!
Joe Niemczyk: Is it just me, or does this song give anyone else a strange craving for Crystal Pepsi?
Josh Love: Mmm...Crystal Pepsi...
Gavin Mueller: Sammy Hagar sucks almost as much as Crystal Pepsi itself.
Kareem Estefan: Van Halen were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for this video, which inspired millions to dedicate their lives to protesting racism, corruption, and sin. It is thanks to “Right Now” that today we live in a world without crime, in which the word “unfair” exists only as a punch line to sick jokes or a means to describe the era before “Right Now”’s coming.
Josh Love: In the immortal words of Butthead: dude, if I wanted to read, I’d go to school.
Gabe Gloden: What a revolution! Finally, a funky fresh solution to the frustration associated with skateboarding! Anyone could be on the cutting-edge of rebellious youth culture!
Tony Van Groningen: I was kind of nonplussed when these came out. I’d never liked roller skating to begin with, and preferred skateboarding anyways. Plus my town was all hills- you could just grab your skateboard and walk up a hill, but it was kind of retarded to rollerblade up one. Not many kids that I knew had these.
Gabe Gloden: “Hey, look there, those skateboarders are coming over here to tell us how radical we look on our new skates! Oh boy, I've been waiting for this moment for so long. Hey Dudes! Nice boards! Whoa, what are you doing with that spray paint? Hey, that burns!”
Clem Bastow: I was always too pov-arse to afford blades, so one day Isabelle Border let me try on hers. Within about 34 seconds on them I was on the asphalt, and vowed never to try them on again. Besides, they looked stupid and I though the bladers who used to stride past our house along the foreshore were wankers.
Joe Niemczyk: My first pair were $40 at K-Mart, and had skinny, neon yellow wheels. The streets of my neighborhood were terribly cracked and covered with gravel, so my friends and I would usually skate in each other’s driveways and basements. We would have gone to the roller rink, but they wouldn’t let us bring in outside skates, not unless we wanted to pay for new wheels.
Tony Van Groningen: I didn’t mind a few years later when skaters and rollerbladers sort of evolved into polar opposite rivals. Technically, rollerbladers were allowed to come to the skatepark, but in reality, they knew better.
Clem Bastow: Even as more and more kids at the popular skating birthday parties at The Fun Factory wore blades, I was adamant that I'd never give up my Xanadu-esque rollerskating boots. I was shit on them, too, but that's beside the point
Andrew Unterberger: The main problem with rollerblades is that I could never figure out how to stop. Instead, I just calculated the least painful place on the sidewalk to fall down on, and slammed into the curb. See also: my experiences with ice skating, skateboarding, bike riding and automobile driving.
Ben Welsh: Rollerblading is dangerous. I tried it for the first time last summer. I ended up in the emergency room with several lacerations to my face and a chipped tooth after I face planted next to Lake Michigan.
Josh Timmermann: Rollerblades sound dangerous. And they are.
Ben Welsh: I remember when shit got hip, though. The old four square style skates sure went out of vogue pretty damn quick. Can you even buy those things anymore?
Gavin Mueller: I was raised on good old-fashioned skates, and that's what I prefer on the rare occasion I go skating any more. But even I will admit that blades are superior in almost every way. You can go faster with less effort, maneuver better, and fall down less. And play street hockey!
Josh Timmermann: Yay! Geography is FUN!
Andrew Unterberger: I was quite the geographically hip youngster in the early 90s. I had all the capitals of every country memorized, played constant variations of those damn Geo Safari games, and watched Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on a semi-regular basis.
Adrien Begrand: I was too old for this show when it appeared, but I still thought it was a pretty cool kids' show. Kids don't know enough about geography.
Sam Hunt: God I wanted to be on this show so badly.
Andrew Unterberger: The main concept of this show involved catching a slippery femme fatale named Carmen Sandiego by tracking her across various locations around the world through knowledge of geography.
Tony Van Groningen: Look, the name of the show is Where In The World. That the grand prize was a trip anywhere in the U.S. was total crap. Sure, those geographically savvy kids picked Alaska half the time, but who really wants to go to Alaska?
Sam Hunt: The final portion of each show featured a giant map-floor on which the winning contestant had to run around and identify countries. The kids always moved so painfully slow that it was difficult to watch.
Evan Chakroff: At the time, I thought having a giant map on the floor would be pretty cool.
Joe Niemczyk: The last part of the show, where the kids had to run across a giant map spread out over the floor carrying these flashing lights on poles, was probably the most difficult challenge I’ve ever seen in a children’s game show. I can’t remember a single team completing it on time and actually catching Carmen Sandiego, which I found personally frustrating, since geography was always my best subject in school.
Josh Love: Carmen went to Bulgaria! Carmen’s in Nepal!
Josh Timmermann: Quick--find Papua New Guinea!
Gabe Gloden: You would think most of those kids would have spent the entire week leading up to their appearance on the show just fucking doing nothing but studying the politcal maps of the world so they could fucking destroy that final round... but NO! I never understood that.
Josh Love: Well, I sucked at geography, but I still scoffed every time some lucky bastard kid got to track Carmen in the United States. I still don’t know where the fuck Cambodia is, but I sure as shit could find California.
Joe Niemczyk: I remember screaming at the television, “Norway! It’s right there bitch! Put the light down! Put the light down!”
Gabe Gloden: Shit, give me four hours before air-time and I'd nail Africa, Asia and Europe.
Sam Bloch: Actually, the best part about Carmen Sandiego were those computer games I got to play on floppy disks at my old school. I kept going back to like ... Yemen, or something, just so I could rack up ... time-travelling? ... points. So I could ... learn? ... about geography ... ? And at the end, you get to fight Carmen in a geography duel-off, right? And you have an energy bar, and you can do combo attacks on her?
Kareem Estefan: Back then, I was in it for the geography; today, it’s the jingle that I remember.
Adrien Begrand: That Rockapella group, though...talk about annoying
Sam Hunt: I think they’re still around and touring, unless (god forbid) there is another group called Rockapella.
Evan Chakroff: Rockapella remains my favorite a capella ground to have appeared on a popular television program.
Andrew Unterberger: DO IT ROCKAPELLA!
Scott McKeating: I saw Nirvana at Newcastle Mayfair 021291, where he came onstage to his infamous "Hi. My name is Kurt Cobain, I'm a homosexual, I'm a pagan, I'm a drug abuser and I like to fuck pot bellied pigs!" quote.
Michael Heumann: When I first heard the opening chords on "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I knew I'd heard something historic. Heck, I even remember where I was: driving to the local record store in my hometown. That song came on the radio, and I knew my generation (I was basically Kurt Cobain's age) had its own anthem.
Adrien Begrand: One of my first Nirvana memories from the early fall of 1991: hearing CBC FM playing the hidden track off Nevermind, feeling completely awestruck, hearing the host say, "This album is going to be huge."
Tony Van Groningen: It still amazes me that this album actually got to the ears of kids like me; in ’91 I was living in a small town with one radio station, and logging was the main industry. Nonetheless, I did hear it, and I did love it. Unintentional or not, it captured a zeitgeist, and became the rallying point for angsty young teenagers everywhere.
Sam Hunt: I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” when I was at a dance party (my first), and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I bought into ALL ensuing hype (except Candlebox).
Ian Mathers: Even if you didn’t own Nevermind at the time, Nirvana were everywhere. Everyone my age loved them, or at least pretended to in public. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was The Best Song Ever. Looking back, I couldn’t honestly tell you if I liked them at the time – they were just there. It would be like asking me if I liked the oxygen I breathed.
Gavin Mueller: The first CD I ever bought, the first thing that got me into music, etc. etc. etc. I didn't even like the other "grunge" bands, but I loved Nirvana, and for about a year they were all I listened to.
Ben Woolhead: It might be a horrible cliché, but Nevermind was the single most important album in terms of the evolution of my music tastes and record collection as it currently stands. The days of acquiescing to be subjected to WASP and Motley Crue albums round at friends’ houses were over. Once I knew where the line in the sand was drawn, that was it – my shelves were ruthlessly purged of shit and Nevermind established as the foundation upon which the collection would be rebuilt.
Akiva Gottlieb: Upon returning from summer camp at age nine, my parents alerted me about a rebellious new kid who’d moved onto the block. Naturally, I donned a flannel coat and went by his house to introduce myself, since camp had instilled in me a desire for some form of rebellion. He answered the door without a hello, gracing me with a blank stare and one intense, fateful question: “Do. You. Like. Nirvana?” Serendipitously, some older boys at camp, desperate for a protégé, had taped both Nevermind and Unplugged in New York for me, so I was able to nod in assent. Yes, I liked Nirvana. That rebel has now been my best friend for ten years.
Josh Love: Nirvana really started everything for me. Just a year before Nirvana, I was listening to Hammer, Vanilla Ice and Wilson Phillips.
Tony Van Groningen: Nevermind was like the gateway drug to rock music that wasn’t Metallica, Def Leppard, or Guns ‘N Roses. You’d better believe that I, and millions of other kids like me, went out looking for more music that sounded like this, that made me feel like this. That endeavor had varying degrees of success, but nonetheless served to truly expose me to a world of music that I had no idea even existed. I haven’t been the same since, and I have Nevermind to thank for it.
Ben Woolhead: The title of the seminal Sonic Youth / Nirvana / Dinosaur Jr tour video suggests that 1991 was the year punk broke. I would have given absolutely anything to see those three in action together.
Lisa Oliver: I saw Nirvana in Cleveland right before 'Nevermind' came out. I had already seen them open for Tad in London the year before and that was fucking exciting. That night, Nirvana kicked our asses, we rocked and it was beautiful.
Gabe Gloden: If Eddie Vedder had committed suicide in ’94, we’d all be talking about the “legendary” Pearl Jam now and complaining about Jeff Ament’s subsequent lackluster pop rock band, Scud Droppers. Nirvana, to you, would just be that band your cousin, who could give two shits about music, namedrops when describing his town’s local pub band. But don’t get me wrong, Nirvana was good man… real good.
Adrien Begrand: In 1991, I thought Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque was better than Nevermind, and I still feel the same way. I wish "Teen Spirit" hadn't been usurped by classic rock radio. It's so overplayed, I don't ever want to hear that song again.
Chris Dahlen: Never listened to 'em. My girlfriend played me their tape and I pictured a bunch of long-haired metalheads. I think you'd be hard-pressed to have imagined in '91 that they would matter so much when Cobain shot himself, and here we are, still living with Courtney Love. Fuck you, Nirvana. We'll see you in hell.
Kareem Estefan: I really don’t want to comment on Nirvana’s significance or the breakthrough of grunge. In fact, I wish that people could forget these aspects of the band; IT DOESN’T MATTER BY NOW! Seriously, can’t we just enjoy some of the greatest rock music ever produced?
Sam Hunt: At the risk of over-sapping a generally un-sappy exercise, I can’t help but note/gush that Nirvana was, more or less, single-handedly responsible for making me realize that I really loved music; that it was more than something my dad listened to or that you could sing along to or that you paid attention to in order to be cool.
Josh Love: It’s become fashionable to belittle Nirvana’s impact, to point out all of their influences and reconstrue them as thefts, to chalk up their legacy to a convenient confluence of time and place, a generational unrest that Kurt accidentally tapped into with his misanthropic mope-rock—of course most of these people are older than the generation that was raised on Nirvana, and in this case even a few years makes a world of difference. Maybe it's just impossible for me to be objective about Nirvana, but it's just as unfathomable for me to imagine my life as a music fan without them.
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By: Stylus Staff Published on: 2004-04-05 Comments (0) |