#9 Inherent Vice
Hey everyone! It’s good to be back! So good in fact, that I’m afraid that I went a little overboard and kept adding new things. It’s a whole new world now that I’m not typing this stuff on my phone, and I think I got a little high off using a keyboard. I’ll try to get it under control. Plus the idea is to create a kind of mini-magazine for you to browse through during your bathroom break at the job factory, so if you skip some or all of it, you will find no quarrel with me, comrade. Anyway, welcome to the Halloween Edition! The theme is “cosplaying the 60s by way of the 90s”, because Quentin Tarantino recently released a movie set in 1969 and he really shouldn’t have. It’s called Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, it’s pure wish fulfillment, and in an extensive review, I’ll be spoiling the hell out of it. Our weird movie is Inherent Vice, a Paul Thomas Anderson period piece haunted by the dreams of hippies past. I included a long essay where I compare the two films and exorcise the evil spirit of the 90s (or at least I try - making a point is HARD, I can’t believe some of you ride this horror roller-coaster for a living). After that we take a psychedelic detour through the freaky world of Rick & Morty, and our trip ends when we reunite with a couple of old friends on new platforms. And if you enjoyed that morsel of meta, man are you in for a treat.
As always, beware of
👻👻👻SPOOOOOOOOOOOILERS👻 👻👻
Inherent Vice (2014)
Some movies are best paired with certain narcotics, but Inherent Vice is a movie that comes with its own in-built high. In fact, this isn’t so much a film as a lot of weed laced with a little cinema, which makes it hard to follow, but easy to enjoy. It's 1970, and the California dream is fading fast. The Establishment is going nowhere but up, the Manson murders have harshed everybody's buzz, and once-principled druggies are either strung out or they're FBI informants, or both. Melancholic, paranoid times for many devout LA counter-culturalists, including our protagonist Doc Sportello, private detective, pot enthusiast and Joaquin Phoenix cosplaying as his own public image. And then his ex-lover Shasta Fay walks back into the turquoise-accented drug den of a beach house for the first time in years, begging him to track down her current lover Mickey Wolfmann, a ruthless real estate magnet who is "technically a Jew but wants to be a Nazi", and went missing after he grew a conscience and expressed an interest in building affordable housing. This is approximately the first 5 of the 150 minutes of film, after which the plot will become so elusive, you'll forget it exists. From minute 6 on, we get lost in what seems like an endless parade of beautifully decorated sets where gorgeously dressed people mumble exposition at each other, the meaning of which none of them appear remotely interested in. Prepare to meet, and instantly forget, an ever-expanding string of delightful names like cop-slash-aspiring-actor Bigfoot Björnson, FBI agent Agent Borderline, marine lawyer Sancho Smilex, neo-Nazi Puck Beaverton and something called the Golden Fang, which may be a boat, an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel, or a dentist association or all three or none of these. When Inherent Vice was in production, people thought it was going to be the next The Big Lebowski, but actually it reminds me of The Big Sleep, a famous film noir with an impossibly convoluted plot where everyone has a lot of witty repartee about characters that remain off screen most of the time or only show up as a corpse. But while the Big Sleep is considered a classic, Inherent Vice had literal walk-outs. Seriously, I heard tales of self-proclaimed film buffs pressing pause after 30 minutes never to un-pause again. Yet, surprising nobody, this is the one entry in the entire oeuvre of hipster darling Paul Thomas Anderson that I sort of get. See, watching this guy's movies for me is like looking at a Baroque painting about some epic Bible thing - there's a lot of people going through a lot of emotions, and although I seem to lack the ideological, cultural and probably human equipment to connect with any of it, I do like the pretty colours. Inherent Vice is like a Baroque painting after it was acid-washed by the dopehead who found it in their aunt's smelly garage. It's a PTA flick, but through a haze so thick none of his usual intense and frankly exhausting drama gets through. I don't think it's on purpose, either, I suspect it has something to do with the source material. The movie is based on a Thomas Pynchon novel by the same title, and Pynchon doesn’t do grand and human, he does cartoonish and absurd. You can cut that with as much PTA as you like, it’s never going to take the edge off. The sole source of genuine emotion in all of this is Shasta Fay, played by personal favourite Katherine Waterston, who for reasons that are never entirely obvious always sounds like she's about to burst into tears. This sorrow-soaked performance, out of place as it is, gets me every time. I believe it's because she is the only one who actually understands the story she's in. Surrounded by clueless stoners refusing to grow up, and the moneyed establishment already busy building a future without them, Shasta is clear-headed enough to know she's witnessing the end of an era, an end that needs to be acknowledged and mourned, before it gets paved over and forgotten by anyone who matters. Inherent Vice: Because who knows when the planets will align for another Pynchon movie.
Review: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
I decided to re-watch Inherent Vice because of how much Quentin Tarantino's new movie reminded me of it. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood isn't weird enough to make it to the top of the bill around here, but it does have that distinct odor of odd about it, especially for a Tarantino. So here’s a long-ass spoiler review instead. First, let's talk about that Bruce Lee scene. I have to side with Lee's daughter here - that scene was both demeaning and unnecessary. Baffling, too. Tarantino is famous for treating his cinematic influences with a reverence that borders on pathological, so why stop now? Was it a jingoistic knee-jerk? Was he paying homage to the nasty 60s movie habit of being extra racist to the one Asian guy with a speaking part? It's probably not the latter, but that would fit with my overall interpretation of this film, namely that while Tarantino's work is usually about him wanting to make movies from the 60s, his latest piece is about him wanting to make movies *in* the 60s. He has graduated from homage to cosplay and the result is... off. Tarantino has a special talent for convincing his audience that the borrowed anachronistic elements he insists on stuffing his films with are in service of the larger story. So when he blasts Supersounds of the 70s or does a Hitchcock car scene or a Spaghetti Western zoom, it comes off as suave more than self-indulgent. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood feels like it was made by a Tarantino who is through taking his head out of his own derrière, as they call it in France, and refuses to arrange his random pop culture references into a coherent whole. Here, the many winks and odes and throwbacks are no longer serving the story, they are the story. The movie is about once-famous TV cowboy Leonardo DiCaprio and his long-time stuntman-turned-personal-assistant Brad Pitt. DiCaprio's post-television career hasn't taken off as he’d hoped and their friendship seems ripe for a series finale when DiCaprio gets married and is ready to leave Hollywood. Though DiCaprio's character is fictional, he lives next door to real-life 60s Hollywood couple Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. We all know what happened to these two - Tate was pregnant when one summer night in 1969 four drugged-up disciples of Charles Manson burst into her house and brutally murdered her and her friends, and Polanski, who was out that night, went on to become a celebrated filmmaker in Europe and convicted of raping a minor in the US. In Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Tarantino changes the ending of this story. He shows us a fantasy version of events where the Manson kids never get to kill anyone. The night they decide to strike is also the night bosom buddies DiCaprio and Pitt are hanging out for the last time. When the murderers’ car pulls up in his cul-de-sac, a drunk DiCaprio yells at them to get off his lawn, prompting them to invade his home instead, where rather than helpless victims, they find a gruesome death at the hands of Pitt on LSD, his hungry dog, and DiCaprio's movie prop flame thrower that throws real flames. The Hollywood fairy tale ends with Sharon Tate, alive and well, inviting DiCaprio into her home and everybody living happily ever after, which I'm pretty sure means that Tate has her baby, and Polanski doesn't drug and force himself on a 13-year-old, but stays in America and casts his neighbour DiCaprio in many award-winning films. It's important to note that everything I just described happens in the last 15 minutes of the movie, the rest of which is basically a meandering ride-along with the main characters as they go about their show business in the year leading up to the Manson massacre. DiCaprio takes on different acting jobs, Pitt picks a fight with Bruce Lee, and Tate goes to the cinema. It's dreamy and freewheeling, lacking the flawless pacing and loquacious back-and-forth we’ve come to expect from a Tarantino flick. With True Romance and Natural Born Killers, we got movies that were written by him, but directed by someone else. Once Upon a Time In Hollywood feels like the closest thing we have so far to a movie directed, but not written by Tarantino. Without the centrifugal force of his signature dialogue, there is nothing to hold the scenes together. They just fall apart, in sketches and mood pieces and movies-within-movies. Watching this film is a little like reading Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. It's a kind of collage, a kaleidoscopic look at a bunch of stories that will never be told in full because we already know them too well, though we can't get enough of them, either. It doesn't have Calvino's intense energy, though, rather that of a casual drive along the Sunset Strip while billboards for upcoming features keep flashing by. Tarantino scenes are never in a hurry to get to the point, but in this film they seem determined not to go anywhere at all, trying instead to linger as long as possible, to just be. Like a final drunken night before parting with an old fiend, this movie is messy, sentimental, and always means less than you want it to. But it's sweet. Tarantino has been saying that his next film will be his last, yet Once Upon A Time In Hollywood already feels like a goodbye. Not exactly Tarantino's goodbye to his movie career, or even movies in general. It feels like a goodbye to us, his audience. As if we're Marty McFly, and he is Doc Brown at the end of Back to the Future 3, choosing to stay behind in his favourite historical period. Rather than riding off into the sunset, Tarantino is settling on his porch, in his own version of a 60s that never ended, watching us disappear into a future he doesn't plan to be a part of.
Essay: Goodbye To ‘69, Or Is It ‘96?
At first glance, Inherent Vice and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood have a lot in common. Both look like wistful 60s period pieces set in LA, both are heavy on mood and uninterested in plot, both start a year away from that mythical summer of '69. However, I believe that once you undo the nostalgia filter, neither movies is that much about the 60s at all. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is actually a throwback to the 1990s, and Inherent Vice... that's all about the future, baby.
I The trash pile at the End of History
I can’t imagine how I would explain to youngsters living through these politically volatile times what it was like to grow up in the 90s. Other than shitty. It was shitty. I don't know what it was like for you guys, but for a precocious idealist like myself, the 90s was shithole decade. Communism had fallen and anyone who still believed in a better society than the one we had was seen as some sort of delusion loser. It was the End of History, as we call it in the bizz, and what that really meant was the end of any language for even starting to think about maybe contemplating a little bit of a vision for a slightly different future. The 90s were the eternal present in which we were told we could do anything we wanted, but we weren't sure there was anything left to do. "Everything has already been done" was our secret motto, the hidden price of victory. Without new worlds to dream about or history left to make, our only recourse was to endlessly rearrange the history we already had. Postmodernism became our native tongue, which is why Tarantino so naturally emerged as our most prominent spokesperson.
In 1995, at the height of the Tarantino craze, those contrarian rascals at The Baffler published a critique of his work in which they called him, giggle,
a genuine connoisseur of trash [...] an agent for commerce, a booster for the commercial values of industry product, a symbol of Hollywood Triumphant
The guy who wrote this isn’t wrong, but he also wasn't forced to spend a childhood in the pointless 90s, so he was never going to understand how good its "industry product" actually was. See, without any collective projects or shared spaces to turn to, TV and movies became the few things we the people had in common, even if we very well knew that their main goal was to sell us cereal. The creators of pop culture knew it too. More than Hollywood products in any other decade, 1990s TV shows are aware that they are commodities. They know what they are made for and who they’re meant to soothe, and they just can’t seem to shake this realization. Shows like Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, Larry Sanders, X-Files, Animaniacs and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are all incredibly good and incredibly self-aware at the same time. They can't stop referring to their own status as TV shows, constantly undermining the foundation of their own worlds. 90s pop culture is trash that knows it's trash, and is therefore awesome.
As much as I hated 90s politics, I'm always going to have a soft spot for 90s Hollywood. It felt my pain. I think the “Hollywood Triumphant” thing the Baffler article talks about is actually a form of defeat. Tarantino may the 1990s’ happiest warrior, but he is still fighting a war. Or actually, preemptively surrendering. He wants to make the westerns and gangster movies and kung-fu films he was raised on, but he knows he can't, no one would accept that. He has to make collages and homages, because all stories, good, bad and ugly, have already been told. 90s Hollywood is fueled by the shame of being unoriginal and knowing it's unavoidable. That's the burden of post-history, the feeling that you're carrying all of history on your back without belonging to it. Which is why 90s nostalgia is different from any other kind of nostalgia. It's not a longing for a particular historical period, but for a place in history itself. It’s what makes 90s culture so postmodern and nihilistic. When history is over, it's no longer real, but just another cultural product, a heap of now-meaningless things no one knows what to do with, other than steal whatever looks shiny.
II Bye, nostalgia
It's 2019, though Tarantino hasn't noticed. He may have left his heart in the 60s, but his spirit is still firmly stuck in 1990s Hollywood. Just look at the different ways in which Inherent Vice and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood deal with the subject of hippies. Inherent Vice’s main character comes off as goofy, sure, but the film still takes place in Sportello’s moral universe. A universe in which dopeheads are the good guys, cops are violent and stupid, real estate development is nefarious, and Hollywood is square. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood feels like the exact inverse of all this. In Tarantino’s idealized version of California in 1968, there is no trace of counter-culture. This was The Time and The Place and yet, not one hippie or civil rights activist or war protestor in sight. Tarantino, true to his 90s roots, doesn't DO politics. In his post-historical paradise, ideals are a buzzkill, and so are the hippies they come with.
The members of the Manson family are the only hippies Tarantino has time for. He portrays them as parasites and vultures who, when they're not busy murdering, are rummaging through dumpsters behind movie studios or living for free on land that was once used for shooting shows. It's trademark Tarantino to take historic bad guys like Nazis and slave owners and subject them to the grisly death and torture we can all agree they deserve. So when he singles out the Manson murderers for a similar fate, he probably reckons he's tapping into our collective hatred for these guys. But I think it's much, much more personal than that. For Tarantino, the assault of Sharon Tate wasn’t an assault on the reputation of hippies everywhere or humanity at large, it was an attack on Hollywood, HIS Hollywood, his beautiful, innocent perfect pop factory that is the 60s movie scene. When DiCaprio's character, with the righteous rage of a homeowner, calls the Manson killers dirty hippies, threatens to call the cops on them and subsequently lights one on fire, it feels like a catharsis for the filmmaker more than for the modern movie-goer. If Manson is the villain behind the curtain, then that makes Tarantino the good guy of the story. He is the hero who swoops in last minute to create a parallel universe in which Manson’s followers die horribly before they can execute his evil plan. Single-handedly, he saves Hollywood from a rude intrusion by the outside world, keeping its magic intact. I'm not sure Tarantino can even tell the difference between the Manson kids and non-homicidal hippies. He's simply too plugged into mass culture to be able to empathize with anyone who elects to stay outside of it. Hippies are trespassers on his vintage wonderland, they have no right to exist in the glamorous galaxies he fashions out of pure pulp.
In his latest release, Tarantino is "Hollywood Triumphant" even more than usual. This is not surprising, but it is getting a little tired. Between the Bruce Lee stuff, his gratuitous use of the N-word and that time he almost killed Uma Thurman, Tarantino seems one "what?" away from being cancelled into oblivion. Even outside Twitter, though, he is approaching his expiration date. His a-moral, a-political postmodern shenanigans just don't resonate anymore. While in the 90s Tarantino's uncritical Spectacle worship was a kind of shared ideology, in 2019 it feels idiosyncratic at best. Rather than the hippies he despises, he is the one who can’t let go of a dying decade. Like I said, we’re too psychically linked for me to be able to ever completely dismiss Tarantino, but I'm not going to miss him or his nihilism, either. The 90s are finally over. I wish they hadn’t met their demise in quite the historic dumpster fire 2016 turned out to be, but I’ll take it. Good riddance to great rubbish.
III Hippies spring eternal
So now what? 90s politics may be retreating, but Hollywood’s appetite for cannibalizing the cultural products of the past seems as insatiable as ever. Did I drag Inherent Vice into this because I want to replace 90s nihilism with that overdone boomer doting over the idyllic 60s? No. It’s because I think Inherent Vice was a failure for a reason, and that reason points to a way out of our current nostalgia loop. Like I said, Paul Thomas Anderson wants to turn Thomas Pynchon's story into a rumination on the good old days, but it just comes out weird and alienating, because it's not supposed to be a nostalgic story at all, because Pynchon will do sappy the day he does a spread in Vogue. That explains why the novel is set in 1970, at a point when the counter-culture optimism hasn't quite turned into bitter disillusionment, but all is not lovely and peaceful anymore, either. It’s a story about people who are vaguely aware that they might be losing something, but they're not sure when and they're not sure how.
Pynchon published Inherent Vice a year after the financial crash, and I think the book is his way of answering the question a lot of people were asking at the time, namely “How did we get here?” It’s a reminder more than a memoir. It shows a turning point in history at which the victory of capitalism didn’t seem quite so absolute, and hippie values, though under threat, didn't seem quite so unrealistic. Right before it became a private acid flashback, the California dream was a shared vision of a better world. History took the turn it did, but in that particular moment, an alternate course seemed equally possible.
My hunch is that Inherent Vice is a precursor to this thing that has been going around in lefty circles lately, a thing called Acid Communism. It was thought up by a theorist even more obsessed than I with the End of History and the perpetual present, who figured Acid Communism might be a way to escape this boring mess. It’s based on the assumption that the hippies may have lost, but that their loss wasn't inevitable. And if loserdom is an incidental, rather than inherent hippie vice, then maybe some of their ideas are still useful. The "acid" in Acid Communism refers to the fact that psychedelics as an experience, like lefty idealism, can expose people to different ways of connecting to the world and each other. It’s about experimenting with other ways of life rather than sticking to the default option we have now, that of isolated individuals working jobs of varying degrees of shittiness until either the weekend or death. Acid Communism is the belief that before you can usher in a new age, you have to be able to imagine it first. Like Inherent Vice, it sounds like pure 60s idolatry, but it's not. It's not about lamenting or denying the end of history. It's about fighting it. And though my inner Marxist has a million questions, my inner 12-year-old thinks that's just… groovy.
Interlude: Psychederick!
For the record, I've never actually done psychedelic drugs because nowadays my body is so shoddy I'll probably slip into a coma if I expose it to anything stronger than green tea, and back when I was young and healthy they didn't allow drugs in the library. But it wasn’t all the Acid Communism talk that made me realize I might be missing out on something important. It was this promo video for the Adult Swim show Rick & Morty.
That video, man, it blew my mind. You guys know how I can't shut up about Thomas Pynchon, right? Well, my all-time favourite part of my all-time favourite book that made him my all-time favourite writer is this one chapter in which the protagonist spends a night wandering through LA and has all kinds of strange encounters. The writing has an emotionally intense, but fragmented quality to it, and an edge of feverish paranoia I've never read anywhere else, even in Pynchon. It’s dark and abstract, but at the same time indescribably moving. This section affected me to the point that I had to sneak into some famous pomo lit prof's Pynchon lecture just to ask him what it meant. The prof couldn't tell me, but 10 years later I saw this video and figured it out.
“Acid, Morty, pure LSD.”
Shit. It's the exact same vibe, I swear. Only prettier because Pynchon is even better at words than these guys are at animation. And while this answers one question, it raises many, many others, like: Is all art I love some watered-down version of a psychedelic experience? Instead of reading books should I have been doing LSD this whole time? Do drug highs count as Buildung? What does the Harvard style guide say about referencing acid trips?
But there's more. The video is called "exquisite corpse", which is the name of a Surrealist technique where multiple artists take turns to each draw one part of a creature, inevitably concocting some warped monster lifted straight out of their collective subconscious. Surrealists were always doing stuff like this, trying to get rid of the rational and individual in favour of deeper and weirder ways of seeing the world. They were proto-psychedelics, if you will, but with endlessly better colours. Maybe cause instead of doing drugs that fucked with their senses they got drunk like normal people.
Which brings me back to Rick & Morty. The title of that promo is obviously about the trippy mix of styles in the video, but this isn't the only time the makers of this show have given us something akin to the spontaneous, patchy, collective artsiness of exquisite corpse. Season 1 and 2 both have an episode featuring "interdimensional cable", in which the characters watch and switch between TV channels from every parallel universe in existence. There’s too much weirdness there for even me to describe, but here’s a few examples close enough to normality to not completely defy language: a commercial with an electronics salesman who has ants in his eyes, a thriller about a half-man-half-octopus on a stabbing spree, an alternate reality SNL starring a piece of toast. The way they made these episodes was that co-creator and voice actor Justin Roiland got increasingly shit-faced in the recording booth while improvising bit after bit, and then the writers and animators took his drunken ramblings and forged something vaguely watchable out of them. What we get is a gross, violent, extremely odd whirlwind of random story snippets and non-existent products. A kind of Tarantino through the looking glass. Exquisite indeed.
All of this is me taking the scenic route to tell you that Rick & Morty will be back on November 10th. They're airing only half a season for now, but I’m already pretty satisfied, because according to the trailer, this batch includes the return of my favourite viral Rick & Morty invention, Mr. Meeseeks! For you heathens: Mr. Meeseeks is the ineffably creepy, happy slave who you can summon into existence to help you complete a single task, after which he’ll disappear into thin air. Unless you can’t complete the task you drafted him for, in which case he will go through a bout of existential angst so severe, he will try to end you instead. He would've made for a great Halloween costume, too, if I wasn't already using him as my next birthday theme-
TV Rec: X-Men Past Present
Finally, from a contemporary cartoon so meta it could've been from the 90s, to a 90s cartoon so woke it might as well have been released yesterday. A couple of months ago Disney launched its new streaming platform in the Netherlands for testing, and I'm not going to lie, playing lab rat for The Mouse has been a pleasure. I signed up so I could watch all of the Star Wars, but ended up unexpectedly bumping into a lot of old friends I hadn't thought about in years, including my mutant superbuddies from X-Men The Animated Series. Look, you guys know I couldn't care less about superheroes, but if I have an origin story, it's 90s Saturday cartoons. To say I watched this show religiously would be, well, extremely accurate - they aired them on Sunday mornings here in Holland and I never missed a mass. Turns out, it wasn’t just a phase. X-Men TAS is still as entertaining as ever. I’d like to claim that the art is excellent, but the truth that this style is seared into my brain as such a standard that I have no idea whether it's good or not, it's just what cartoons look like. Then there's the mid-battle puns, the more-human-than-human characters and the almost manga-level melodrama. What strikes me about the show now is how serious it takes itself, especially compared to the bouncy self-awareness of other 1990s cartoons. There's a real sense of tragedy here, not one nihilist bone in those ripped bodies. The comic book The Uncanny X-Men has been running since the 60s and was heavily influenced by the civil rights movement. Superheroes in X-Men are not singular accidents, they're born with a genetic mutation that gives them powers, but also marks them as a suspect minority. They live under constant fear of persecution, always one bad PR incident away from being rounded up by the normals and shipped off to some labour camp. Wherever they go, their existence sparks protests and there is a gamut of groups fighting over the real solution to the "mutant problem". Mutants can be a stand-in for all kinds of minorities, and that makes the show more current now than when it first aired in 1992. We had that consensus back then, son, social contention is more of a late 2010s thing. I've seen the pilot around 5 times, but this time, when the giant robots show up to take a mutant teenager into custody because her foster dad reported her to some government agency with ties to private vigilantes, I involuntarily went: "Yeah we get it, the Sentinels are ICE, kind of on the nose, guys" 🤦♀️. In the 60s of Inherent Vice and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Nazis are mostly a joke, but in X-Men they're #neverforgotten, manifesting in the form of the ever-present danger of hatred, exclusion, and ultimately genocide. Even bad guy Magneto isn't really bad, he is just trying to deal with this terrifying potential at the heart of human society. I think the show doesn't feel dated because in the X-Men universe, history never ended. There was no victory of one ideology over another, the forces of intolerance and annihilation were always gathering somewhere, about to make a move. Which is why I find X-Men TAS' philosophy of the future the most hopeful of all the ones we’ve seen so far, despite its many post-apocalypse-themed episodes. The future in X-Men is neither fixed nor cancelled. Rather, it's constantly changing based on what happens in the present. Alternate timelines are not daydreams, they're possibilities, visions of doom to be prevented or ideals worth fighting for, by outcasts of any stripe. If the show makes me nostalgic for anything, it's that time it got cancelled because Marvel Studios had to file for bankruptcy lol. That, and evil Jean Grey's goddamn hair. It’s a real failure of the capitalist imagination that 30 years later, I still can’t purchase an entire hair product line called Dark Phoenix.
Con Calma Coda
Speaking of uncanny, I thought we'd reached peak 2019 90s recycling with that giant eye-roll of a Captain Marvel movie, but this Normani video is somehow even more disturbing.
I mean, this girl is walking around with 1996 emblazoned across her chest, not because that's the year she received the gift of tits like the rest of us, but because that's the year she was born. Plus this was exactly me, glued to all this exact music channel, watching a video that looked exactly like this. It’s so eerie it makes me cranky. Is this why boomers are such cranks now, because we can’t stop making movies about their youth? But the degree of detail isn't what upsets me most about this video. It’s that she's actually fantasizing about the 90s. Who does that and why? Someone needs to tell her that if you're dreaming about the 90s, your weren't there.
In contrast, I'd like to present a Daddy Yankee video from earlier this year, my new go-to cure for crankiness. It's a cover of Snow's 1992 hit Informer, and two-thirds of the way through, the man himself pops up to do a verse.
This is how I like my 90s throwback - 2010s style. I mean, only in this day and age does it seem like a good idea to take a song about plotting your snitches' murder from prison and turn it into salute to some party girl's "poom poom". It's another supershiny, completely unnecessary remake where they got the original cast to make a special, if somewhat reluctant appearance. Uncomfortable as Snow looks standing next to that Daddy Yankee CGI puppet, it's kind of nice to see him after all this time. New shades, new chins, disheveled as fuck, same as ever. Like looking in the mirror. I guess I prefer this video because I need to know that things have changed since 1996, even if that makes the types of Snow, Tarantino and me look comically out of place. We're just going to have to find a way to abide.