Day 5: Space Ghost, Country Music, and Bulletin Boards
Today’s entry will be lighter than the previous four because last night I had to do a little podcasting and then wasted an hour stuck on a bastard named Butcher in Diablo. Sometimes 2021 gets in the way of your 1996 and sometimes 1996 gets in the way of itself.
I have filled the last two days with a stacked playlist courtesy of a friend (Hello Leah!) and it rules. It validates that idea that if someone else makes you a sandwich, it tastes better than if you made it yourself. If someone else assembles your playlist, you like it better. It’s why gifting a burned CD or a mixtape here in 1996 is such a great gift. There’s probably plenty of psychology to explain the biases involved there. Anyway, I have been bonkin’ on this playlist and I have enjoyed hearing the songs that I would never choose to listen to on my own simply because someone else constructed the list for me. Does that make sense? It’s like listening to the radio - I don’t have any control over it and I just let it run through me, as you would in 1996.
Not pictured: A devil’s haircut
Music is not something I am equipped to write about. I have two settings for music: “I like it” and “I don’t like it”. I can hardly describe what I like about what I like. “It made me feel good”, “I really thought it sounded swell”, “I also love California”, or “I am entertained by his number of microphones, haircuts, and turntables” are the extent of my melodic vernacular. I happen to like most music and love very little, but 1996 had a ton of great music in the areas I thrive most. Rock and alternative rock were near peak from what I can tell and even country music was enjoyable but that probably has a lot to do with my personal nostalgia. Country music was reserved for when I was with my Dad and as a young boy getting lugged around to all of my sport practices and games, to fishing, to Lowe’s, or to get more beer - the country music was bangin’ in Dad’s red 1983 Ford F150. The beer was for him.
April 1996
Out here in ‘96 we have LeAnn Rimes’s One Way Ticket, a song I probably despised at some point from how overplayed it was but proudly sang along with while I did my nightly round of pushups. Who could forget Deana Carter’s Strawberry Wine? Even just typing that, I’ve sang most of the next two verses in my head and you probably did too. Brooks & Dunn released My Maria, another intrusive ear worm that lays eggs in the cochlear membrane and doesn’t let go for days and then hatches an aneurysm. Country music felt genuine to me then and it could have a lot to do with me actually growing up in an area where country people enjoyed country music as opposed to what it has become now. Now country music appears as a pandering fad and the only remaining reason to continue to wear hole-y jeans unironically. People will always say the decade they grew up in was “just better” for something, but I think it holds true for country music. It was better in the 90’s.
Last night I watched some Space Ghost. Take a deep breath and hold it - this is the first time I have ever watched it. At first, I didn’t get it. What is going on? When is it funny? A cartoon fumbles his way through an awkward interview with a B-lister? We call this a podcast now. The first guest was Monty Python’s Terry Jones. I love him but it was too silly and didn’t click with me. The second episode was Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Joel Hodgson. I haven’t watched a ton of MST3K and so this episode also didn’t click very well either. The third episode was Carrot Top and then, for some reason, I kind of got it. The show is supposed to be awful! Understanding that it wasn’t trying hard and failing but was instead not trying at all and failing made it slightly better. There was too much awkward to sift through before the occasional gold nugget one liner would reveal itself, so I don’t know how worth it is for me to keep trudging through those but I came away with another 1996 vibe at the end of one of the episodes when this caught my eye after the credits...
A different example
In 1996, if you wanted to get in touch with Space Ghost, you could leave a voice message, send a fax, or check out their BBS. Remember BBS? I hardly do. I did not get to enjoy having the internet in my home until 1999 and by that time bulletin board systems were fading out. These systems were terminal based servers that users could login to and interact with each other. I was unable to find a screenshot of what that would have looked like for Space Ghost, but here is a different example. I am sad to report ghostplanet.com is no longer a thing and someone should buy it and make it look like an old school BBS.
“Everybody knows
That the world is full of stupid people
So meet me at the mission at midnight
We’ll divvy up there”
The world is full of stupid people and 1996 saw that and tried to fix it by putting encyclopedias on CD-ROMs. Their words, not mine. Where today we get to reap the sweet knowledge fruits of Wikipedia as well as blindly abuse and trust it, in 1996 people were tired of lugging volumes of books around the house or walking into quiet libraries for their information - they needed a better solution. Technology was there to help and if you were so inclined, you could get all you needed to know about the American Civil War on one volume of interactive discs for the low-low price of $79.95 ($133 today). This is quality Simon & Schuster audio (I saw you wince) and here is the first bit of a NY Times review of it. Yes, in 1996 they reviewed educational software in the NY Times.
In other news, excitement for the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta is ramping, Timothy McVey’s trial after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people has been moved to Colorado, Bob Dole Bob Dole, and a Russian presidential candidate backs Pat Buchanan’s running for the US presidency.
