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This is episode 9 of 1999 FOREVER
“Remember: Turn your computer off before midnight on 12/31/99” read a Best Buy sticker that was given to every computer customer for months leading up to the new year. An entire catalog of Y2K prep manuals appeared. Suddenly it did seem possible that ATMs would freeze, elevators might plummet, planes might crash, and nuclear missiles would erroneously fire. So many things were controlled by computers. On “The Simpsons,” Homer messed up and personally caused Y2K chaos and the end of the world.
President Clinton called Y2K “the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met.” What’s unclear–and in the words of Alanis Morissette, isn’t it ironic that we’ll never really know–whether the Y2K bug wasn’t actually a big deal at all, or whether it only seems that way now.
"Run Lola Run" director Tom Tykwer says the 1999 movie is about “the energy of my generation which is too often kept bottled up inside.” Lola, a Manic-Panic redhead with tattoos and Doc Martens, does cut a striking heroine for the twenty-first century.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES
Brian Raftery, “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.,” 2019. Perry Chen, “Computers in Crisis,” 2014. -
1999 was a year of viral memes, even though we didn’t know what those were yet. “I see dead people.” “One time at band camp.” The Budweiser Wassup commercial.
In the late ‘90s, the Texas-based radio show host Alex Jones looked around and saw “The X-Files,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” “The Matrix,” and the barrage of ‘90s pop culture about government cover-ups, and started a radio show about conspiracy theories. He called it InfoWars. By 1999, it was being carried on 50 small stations and Jones took his show online, to an even bigger audience.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES
Elizabeth Williamson, “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,” 2022.
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There’s a deep nihilism to “partying like it’s 1999.” Is the world ending? Maybe, so let’s party until it does.
Imagine 400,000 people crowded onto the grounds of an airforce base. It’s summer and the high peaks above 100 degrees. It’s a hot wasteland of bodies and debris as far as the eye can see. Everyone is drunk, overheated, and sunburned. Scores of people are sent to the hospital. And then the fires start.
This is Woodstock ‘99, otherwise known as the Day the Nineties died.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES
Jamie Crawford, “Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99,” 2022. Vera Papisova, “Sexual Harassment was Rampant at Coachella,” Teen Vogue, 2018. Garret Price, “Woodstock ‘99: Peace, Love, and Rage,” 2021. “Our Live Report from Woodstock ‘99,” SPIN, 1999. -
In 1999, the stories of three horrific acts of violence haunted the country: the murder of Amadou Diallo in New York City, the murder of Brandon Teena in Nebraska, and the Columbine school shooting in Colorado. These murders were all perpetrated by groups of white men and presaged the violence that would become a part of daily life for Americans: epidemics of police violence, violence against LGBTQ people, and mass shootings.
It’s easy to forget it wasn’t always like this.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES
Sam Feder, “Disclosure,” 2020. Gun Violence Archive Mapping Police Violence Donna Minkowitz, “How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story,” The Village Voice, 2018. Rachel Monroe, “Savage Appetites,” 2019. -
Thongs are a uniquely American obsession, born out of our paradoxical legacy of both prudishness and thirstiness. The thong is a paradox in itself–an item of clothing introduced to a country by women taking their clothes off.
This episode’s themes have been percolating for a long time, simmering, slowly trickling into our consciousness until we were ready for the most important song of 1999: "The Thong Song."
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos, and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
Sources:
Monica Lewinsky, “Emerging from ‘The House of Gaslight’ in the Age of #MeToo,” Vanity Fair, 2018. Rose McGowan, Brave, 2018. Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory, 2022. @sexworkerstyle Kara Swisher, “Monica Lewinsky Has Some Things to Say About Cancel Culture,” The New York Times, 2021. “The Story of ‘Thong Song’ by Sisqó,” Vice, 2021. -
We’re living in a period some have called The Great Resignation. Or are we quiet quitting now? While this hostility toward work feels radical, we’ve been here before. As Blink-182 said in their 1999 song "All the Small Things": Work sucks.
Several movies of 1999 follow almost the same character with the same problem: A mid-level, white-collar, white man is bored and dissatisfied with his corporate life; only a radical jolt to his system can force him to wake up and see everything with new eyes.
In "Fight Club," that shock comes in the form of a soap-selling maniac named Tyler Durden. For "American Beauty’s" middle-aged, married protagonist, it’s feeling sexual desire for his teenage daughter’s best friend. And in "The Matrix," a programmer-by-day, hacker-by-night named Thomas Anderson takes a little red pill.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
Sources:
Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999.
Eula Biss, Having and Being Had, 2020. Anne Helen Peterson, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, 2020. Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, 2019. Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, 2015. Vauhini Vara, “Amazon Has Transformed the Geography of Wealth and Power,” The Atlantic, 2021. -
Britney Spears has released nine albums, won a Grammy, set 15 Guinness World Records, won seven Billboard Music Awards, and held a Las Vegas residency. She’s the best-selling teenage musician of all time and the youngest to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was only 17 years old when "...Baby One More Time" came out.
And beginning when she was 26, she was under a conservatorship for more than a decade that gave her father complete control over her life, assets, and decisions. For all intents and purposes, legally, he became Britney Spears.
Appetite for stories about mad girls was high in 1999. But then, it always has been.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, videos and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES:
Erin Lee Carr, Britney Vs. Spears, 2021. Steven Daly, “Britney Spears, Teen Queen,” Rolling Stone, 1999. Jude Doyle, Trainwreck, 2016. Susana Keyson, Girl, Interrupted, 1993. Chuck Klosterman, “Bending Spoons with Britney Spears,” Esquire, 2003. Natasha Lasky, Britney Spears’s Blackout, 2022. Samantha Stark, Controlling Britney Spears, 2021. -
Today The Sopranos is widely regarded as one of the best television shows of all time. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s we lived in an ocean of exceptional television–dramas that dared to be unconventional, with troubled, complicated characters, and higher-than-ever writing and production quality. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” the channel bragged. This was the beginning of prestige tv.
But The Sopranos is only about organized crime on the surface. The pilot begins with Tony starting therapy because he’s having panic attacks. Even though Tony’s not completely sure therapy works, he keeps coming back because he’s afraid no one else will take him–or his pain–seriously. And he’s worried that, actually, none of it matters at all.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, playlists and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar.
SOURCES:
Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, 2014. James Andrew Miller, Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, 2021. Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, 2020. Willy Staley, “Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?”, The New York Times Magazine, 2021. -
There’s something I need to talk about. I can’t stop thinking about 1999. By thinking I mean obsessing, like making charts and timelines with Sharpie on cardboard in my free time. An incredible number of completely world-altering events happened in 1999, and I’m not exaggerating.
1999 FOREVER will be a journey in time. Join me every week as we try to understand 1999 and its echoes in the world we live in today. Because nothing has been the same since.
1999 FOREVER’S theme song is “In the Freezer” by Sophie Strauss
To support 1999 FOREVER, you can subscribe, leave a rating and a review, and tell all your friends how much you like it. To see episode moodboards, behind-the-scenes photos, playlists and more, follow me on Instagram @dahliabalcazar. To send compliments, email me at [email protected].
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Hey, have you ever thought about 1999? No, like, have you ever really thought about it? I have.
A year ago I started making a list of every major thing that happened in 1999. And when I got going, I couldn’t stop.
1999 was unreal.
Listen to this: In terms of movies, 1999 was peak culture.
Things were off the rails with preparations for the Y2K crisis. On the radio and on television, the tone was being set not just for the next year but for the next several decades.
1999 left an unbelievably lasting mark.
In 1999, I was 10 years old. Now, join me as I go back and dive deep into the most important year of all time. 1999 FOREVER starts November 11. See you soon.
