"I don’t have a lucid memory of what the world was like in 1999; it seems more distant to me than 1989, for whatever reason. I do know music was still selling like crazy, though: Total album sales in ’99 were 940 million. What was playing on the radio still mattered, and most of it was mainstream alternative rock or Santana’s ”Supernatural”. There was a certain kind of semi-heavy, quasi-spiritual, midtempo track that could be three years old but still get endless airplay— Creed’s “My Own Prison” was omnipresent at the bars and malls and Applebee’s I was frequenting at the time. The most popular single in the world was “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” a song about how Pro Tools made Puerto Ricans gay. There were a lot of bands who selected random numerical names on purpose (Matchbox 20, Third Eye Blind, Seven Mary Three), and there were a lot of people trying to convince themselves that a double album by Nine Inch Nails wasn’t ridiculous. Two disposable teens killed a bunch of beautiful people in suburban Colorado for reasons completely unrelated to Marilyn Manson, but traffic at Hot Topic improved nonetheless. Meanwhile, I was storing potable water and Oreo cookies in my hall closet; I was obsessed with Y2K, which negatively impacted my interest in things like TLC. At the time, TLC was advising me not to hang around with scrubs. This was kind of like their advice from 1994 about not chasing waterfalls. I never got that. Why not chase waterfalls? They’re so easy to chase. It would have been far more sensible if deceased arsonist Lisa Left Eye had told me not to chase something dangerous, like wildebeests. “Don’t go chasing wildebeests.” It was that kind of millennium. People cared about shit, but not really."
- Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
