In 1994, everything was fine. Music, movies, TV—cultural products are made to feel alive. People are cool too, or they achieve coolness by trying not to be cool. Anyway, 30 years ago I was Are not Cool and not much to do on a Friday night. That's why, on April 8, 1994, I was at home, watching Kurt Loder take over MTV to announce to me and everyone that Kurt Cobain was gone.
Reminiscing about the Nirvana frontman's passing might be a quick way to do it, but it's a wild reminder of just how many culture-changing events took place in 1994. Natural born killer And Pulp novels. Nine Inch Nails is released The downward spiral a month before Cobain committed suicide. Tori Amos crashed Below is pink a few weeks before. Above the rim hit theaters that spring and lived on car speakers all summer since Warren G and Nate Dogg's “Regulate” had a soundtrack. Aaliyah releases “Back & Forth”; Brandy wanted to lie down; TLC goes after “Waterfall.” My so-called life premiered a perfect but terrible season. Jim Carrey has father Movies in theaters have different qualities: Stupid and stupid, Ace Ventura: Pet DetectiveAnd Mask. Brad Pitt has three—two important things: The myth of the fall And Interview with the Vampire. Kevin Smith's debut, Secretarypremiered at Sundance, was picked up by Harvey Weinstein's Miramax and became a cult hit before the year was out.
These things are all anyone can talk about, culturally. That's all there used to be talk about.
Except they don't. The above are just some of the cultural moments that made national and worldwide headlines in 1994. That's what happened in the suburbs. Some of the year's best art is slow-burning. As C. Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco pointed out in their essay last week Nas' 30th anniversary absurdity, “there were no hip-hop message boards in the early 90s. No social media. Legend about absurdity built from street corner to street corner, person to person, party to party.” Still, Nas ABOVE This! MTV's rap version.
Every now and then some pundit scratches his chin and makes pronouncements about whether monocultures are dead or not. New York Times wondering if this is “TV after water cooler” time; Vox asked “Can monoculture survive in the algorithm?” My colleague Kate Knibbs has written about how unfortunate the demise of monocultures is. It's all a bit ridiculousand while that is arguable, it just is than Today's culture—more TikToks, more Coachella Instagram videos, more streaming shows—still has common denominators: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, hate Zack Snyder's movies. I think monoculture will never die; rather, it's a zombie that haunts everything. The ghost in the machine is an unspoken desire to share something in common, even if only to tear it to pieces. (See again: Taylor Swift.)
