This Year in Pop Culture: 1999

If you were alive last year, you probably heard “1999” by Charli XCX and Troye Sivan. “I just wanna go back, back to 1999 / take a ride to my old neighborhood,” the pair sings in its chorus, before proceeding to list the many reasons we should want to return to the last year of the second millennium: CDs, MTV, Nike Airs, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and music from Eminem and Britney Spears.

But should we want to go back? 1999 was a year of good boy bands, big pants, and many Crimson editors’ births, but it was also a year of national anxiety, a year in which the Clinton presidency was coming to an inglorious end and Y2K was looming. Two decades later, it’s time to review the pop culture of 1999.

Music: “I Want It That Way” by The Backstreet Boys

In 1999, the boy band was in, and groups like the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC ruled the charts with their frosted tips and perfect smiles. Today, these groups don’t seem so cute to us, but their music is as fun as ever. 1999 brought us one of the boy band era’s best remembered hits: “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys.

Almost everyone knows the track’s nonsensical yet supernaturally catchy hook: “I never want to hear you say / I want it that way.” But fewer have seen the song’s music video, which is no less strange and infectious. In its most memorable shot, the Backstreet Boys dance in an airport terminal, wearing all white and periodically fading in and out of existence as a somewhat inexplicable golden glow surrounds them.

Movies: “The Matrix”

If you time-traveled to a movie theatre in 1999, you’d probably recognize at least one movie playing. “Fight Club,” “Being John Malkovich,” “American Beauty,” “The Blair Witch Project,” and “The Sixth Sense” all came out in 1999. But no 1999 film comes up as often in today’s pop-culture and Philosophy 101 sections as “The Matrix.”

The premise of “The Matrix” is an attention-grabber: A hacker named Neo learns that all humans are asleep, trapped in a simulated reality while hyper-intelligent machines use them as batteries. Beyond its thought-provoking premise, the cultural impact of the matrix has been immense. The film turned Keanu Reeves into a superstar, popularized the genre of cyberpunk, and brought an approach to fight scenes common in Japanese animation and martial arts films to the American mainstream.

TV: “The Sopranos”

On January 10, 1999, a show premiered that would soon claim an obligatory spot near the top of any TV critic’s best-series-of-all-time list. This show would draw condemnation from Italian-American groups, ignite interest in the genre of prestige television, and forever change the experience of driving on the New Jersey Turnpike with its iconic tile sequence. This show, of course, is “The Sopranos.”

“The Sopranos” tells the story of Tony Soprano and his many tumultuous relationships, both in his literal family and the DiMeo crime family of which he is the boss. This is a story that would have been easy to tell through stereotypes: Tony could have been a gangster first, a cigar-smoking don clipped out of a ’40s gangster movie. Instead, showrunner David Chase chose to make him a human first — Tony has human problems, and his therapy sessions structure much of the series’s plot. “The Sopranos” is not a perfect TV show, but its embrace of complexity paved the way for 21st-century classics like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”

The pop culture of 1999 had its duds, but overall, our memory of it is overwhelmingly positive. This list excludes so many iconic 1999 moments, like the release of “All Star” by Smash Mouth, the premiere of “Fight Club,” and the airing of the first episodes of “The West Wing” and “Spongebob Squarepants.” We like some of these cultural artifacts sincerely, and some ironically. But nevertheless, we like them all.

Our nostalgia for 1999 — and the ‘90s in general — may have something to do with demographics. People in their 20s decide what’s cool, what’s in, and what’s out, and in 2019, those people were born in the early ‘90s. The pop culture of 1999 was their childhood. It should come as no surprise that we see some of our current trends reflected in it.

— Staff writer Tadhg G. Larabee can be reached at tadhg.larabee@thecrimson.com.