Everything was cool in 1994. Music, films, television – the cultural offerings felt alive. People were also very cool, or they achieved coolness by trying not to be. At least that was me 30 years ago not cool and there wasn’t much to do on Friday evening. That’s why on April 8, 1994, I was at home watching Kurt Loder take over MTV to tell me and everyone else that Kurt Cobain was gone.
Remembering the Nirvana frontman’s death may be a maudlin thing to do, but it’s a wild reminder of how many culture-changing events took place in 1994. Natural born killers And pulp Fiction. Nine Inch Nails released The downward spiral a month before Cobain committed suicide. Tori Amos was out Under the pink a few weeks before. Over the edge hit theaters in the spring and lived on car speakers all summer long since Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” was on the soundtrack. Aaliyah released “Back & Forth”; Brandy wanted to be downstairs; TLC was looking for “Waterfalls.” My so-called life Premiere of its one perfect, ill-fated season. Jim Carrey had three Movies of different quality: Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura: Pet DetectiveAnd The mask. Brad Pitt had three – two of them are important: Legends of passion And Interview with the vampire. Kevin Smith’s debut, EmployeePremiering at Sundance, it was picked up by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax and was a cult hit before the year was out.
These things were all that culturally anyone could talk about. That’s all there Was To talk about it.
But they weren’t. Above are just a few of the cultural moments that made waves across the country and the world in 1994. It’s the stuff that reaches the suburbs. One of the best works of art of the year was Slow-Burn. As C. Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco wrote last week in their essay marking the 30th anniversary of Nas’ Illmatic“There were no hip-hop forums in the early 90s. There was no social media. The legend of Illmatic was built from street corner to street corner, person to person, party to party.” Still, Nas was on Yo! MTV raps.
Every now and then an expert shows up, scratches his chin and lectures about whether monoculture is dead or not. The New York Times wonders if these are “post-watercooler TV” times; Vox asks: “Can monoculture survive the algorithm?” My colleague Kate Knibbs has already written about how ridiculous it is to lament the demise of monoculture, and while that can be argued, that is also possible more Culture now – more TikToks, more Instagram videos from Coachella, more streaming shows – there are still common denominators: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, hatred of Zack Snyder films. Monoculture, I would argue, never died; Rather, it is a zombie that haunts everything. The ghost in the machine is an unspoken desire to share something together, if only to destroy it together. (See again: Taylor Swift.)