THE NINETIES-IST
Welcome to another edition of Brook Pridemore’s The Nineties-ist. This edition discusses 1999, Britney Spears’ responsibility for the downfall of the music industry, Limp Bizkit and cock rock, and the death of Mark Sandman. For earlier installments, go here.

Okay, so I posited a long time ago (I don’t expect you to remember), that Alanis’ Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill is the exact moment when the music industry started to fall apart, and that the real tragedy is how good the Morrissette album really is. Turns out, I got the year, album and artist of the downfall wrong, but I got the gender (half) right.

One bitter cold morning in January 1999, I’m over at my friend Rob’s house, imbibing in a wake-and-bake before class. Rob’s got MTV on in the background. All of a sudden, this gay disco (gay disco as a genre, not a slur)-sounding dance tune pops on the screen, amid this Catholic School setting, led by a Barbie Doll-looking girl in pleats and pigtails, moaning about something vaguely sadomasochistic (and yet completely homogenized). I spit out a heroic lung of pot smoke and doubled over, choking. I’d lived through the Spice Girls before, but they were at least sexual creatures: I felt like Humbert Humbert, ogling Britney Spears, and she was only 17 to my 19 at the time.

It’s a really dirty trick to play on a straight nineteen-year-old male, to make him feel like an old pervert for checking out a curvaceous, pretty and perky young woman on television, but Britney Spears’ handlers made it happen. Plus, the questionably sadomasochistic themes in her debut single, juxtaposed against her saving-herself-for-marriage public statement provided plenty of water cooler fodder for at least the next couple of years. Parents had something new (and Disney-sponsored) to deprive their children of, young dudes had a new fetish object, seemingly everyone had a new record to buy (…Baby, One More Time has sold an estimated 25 million copies worldwide), and young women had a new model of physical beauty they could never possibly live up to. This was a far cry from the promise of the Riot Grrl movement only ten years before, or even, for that matter, the batshit crazy Courtney Love, who at least occasionally acted in a good movie, and turned out three albums that she co-wrote and played on.

In the end, Britney Spears is like a Happy Meal from McDonald’s. Let me explain: in his book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser contends that the McDonald’s Happy Meal is set up as such to overload a child’s system and leave him neurologically confused. The caffeine and sugar in the soda mixes with the fat in the fries and the burger, coagulates with the sweetness of the cheese and ketchup, and a kid’s bouncing off the wall, already looking for that next awful cocktail. Plus, it comes with a free toy.
More on #16: 1999