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Maybe I’m a cranky old queen, but it’s weird to watch anyone talk about pop music in the late 90s and early 00s without mentioning how bad it was, how it coincided with the consolidation of corporate radio and the end of a cultural chapter of variety, taste and independence.
Like, for instance, Britney and all those boy bands arrived after the 1996 Telecommunications Act that deregulated radio. It’s hard to describe what a huge shift this was. Just driving in a car, you used to hear so many bands and singers. Then it was like a handful at a time.
I remember at the time feeling RAGE towards Britney, NSYNC, etc, because it no longer felt like I could avoid songs or acts that I hated. They were EVERYWHERE and suddenly the artists I loved were NOWHERE.
Like, look at female singers who got big in the early 90s. So many of them were knocked off of their labels so quickly after 1996. And Lilith Fair only kept a few of those women in the public eye for a year or two, if that. And that was almost entirely white women.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s an interesting conclusion to this thought, but suffice it to say: I remember that moment of history very differently than the way I often see it portrayed.
GENERATION Y IS RISING UP IN MY MENTIONS!
PS: If yr interested in the cultural impact of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, I recall a great chapter about it in Juliana Hatfield's excellent memoir "When I Grow Up": https://bookshop.org/books/when-i-grow-up-9780470189597/9780470189597
