Numlock Sunday: Ross Benes on the year low culture conquered America
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Ross Benes, the author of the new book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times.
I’m fascinated by the impact that pop culture has on our society, and one thing I’ve always taken seriously is that it’s not just the works that serve as the heights of our societal creative output — the Oscar winners, the prestige television, the prize-winning novels — that reflect and change our society.
More often than not, it’s the popular culture in the most specific sense of the word — popular — that moves the needle, and this new book is an exploration into the late 1990s and early 2000s and the ways that those eras not only facilitated the rise of a powerful, bottom-up cultural moment but also fueled it for decades to come.
The book is available wherever books are sold.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Ross Benes, thank you so much for coming on.
Good to be here.
You are the author of the new book 1999, The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. That's a really fascinating angle to take on a book, honing in on one specific year.
I appreciate that.
How did you arrive at this idea?
Well, I saw a lot of little moments over the course of the last few years that would remind me of the trashy stuff I grew up with in the 90s, whether it was like senators threatening to fight each other in Congress, like Jerry Springer, or all the kayfabe stuff that Trump does, or even NFTs resembling some of the mania of Beanie Babies that it made me go back and re-examine all my childhood entertainment, try to connect it to today's world.
It was a really good year for movies, for instance. It was a really crucial moment in the development of the internet. Your thesis, again, really highlights, what you describe as, low culture conquered America. What do you mean by it?
Yeah. Low culture is something that's in the eye of the beholder a little bit. What I mean by it is culture that's denigrated generally. The Insane Clown Posse's in my book, they were rated as the worst band of all time by Blender Magazine, and their albums were rated as the worst ever by USA Today. Jerry Springer was called the worst TV show by TV Guide. People would always refer to this entertainment as trashy. So it's like cheaply made entertainment, often aimed at middle or lower class people that is looked down upon by cultural critics. That's kind of a broad term, but that's what I'm going for. Fascinating.
You talk a little bit about how Jerry Springer became daytime TV's most watched program. You saw the movie scene involving Austin Powers, right? You had video games enter into a cultural prominence that they otherwise lacked, like Grand Theft Auto came out that year. What were some of the cultural forces that were motivating this trend?
Well, there was a huge push to target teens and just young adults in general. That's always the case, but in the late 90s, there were more teenagers than there were during the baby boom. It was a huge youth glut. Marketers, especially broadcast marketers, were trying to channel that energy into profits. So if you look at the cinema of 1999, in addition to all those great movies, just in one year, you had She's All That, American Pie, Never Been Kissed, Jawbreaker, Teaching Miss Tingle, 10 Things I Hate About You.
It was just an explosion of teen movies. On TV, you had Buffy and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and 90210 was still going. All these other teen shows that's often scoffed at during a particular time is what the youth are consuming. So there was just a ton of youth entertainment because it was cheap to produce, and they want to reach young people before they become adults in their own right and have their own purchasing power.
The other thing is technological innovation happening alongside media deregulation. So all the big media companies are getting even bigger because the laws that used to restrict the types of stuff they could own are being eliminated. There is no longer “you have a division between having a film studio and a TV network.” There's no restrictions on how many TV networks a particular company can own. A telecom can be a phone company. A phone company can be a cable provider and so on. Everyone's getting in everyone's business. That leads to Viacom becoming the largest media company ever in 1999.
Where I'm going with this is that when you have a company of that size looking to produce profitable hits as cheaply as they can, you can take one person like Howard Stern and syndicate their radio show, broadcast to multiple TV shows, produce their movie, publish their book and do it all in one house and make that person a star easier than it would have been without this all being centralized in one place. So that's contributed to a lot of the low culture taking off — huge companies pushing stuff across all their channels.
You can see the shift from institutions like the Tonight Show or institutions like the Nightly News towards individuals like Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey, that stuff, and what that means for a shift in media. That's a really interesting point.
It's becoming more personality driven for sure. When you have a star like that, they become so bankable. Gosh, Jerry Springer in the 90s, he had his book, his movie, eventually there'd be the Jerry Springer opera (although he wasn't associated with that), his TV show, his merchandise exploded. They were just seeing a bonanza from something that didn't cost them all that much to produce. They were taking the outtakes of Jerry Springer and putting them on a VHS called Too Hot for TV and selling them for 20 bucks a pop like in the late 90s. And yeah, Springer's the star there. The institution isn't the daytime talk show format. When he's done, the program's done.
Do you want to talk a little bit about wrestling and what happened to it in the 90s? Because it seems like a lot of pop culture these days, whether intentionally or not, has been flowing down from what went down in wrestling in the 1990s.
Yeah, we're living in an attitude era, all in the world surrounding us. I love the attitude era. I love the Monday Night Wars. So I'm not trying to hide my fandom here, but the theatrics that they used and the storytelling style that WCW and especially WWF used in the late 90s. They're in the Oval Office now. They're on cable news. Gosh, if you see Jake Tapper bring on a conservative and talk them down, it's a lot like a squash match with Goldberg. Even Eric Bischoff, who ran WCW, says that cable news is better at being pro wrestling than pro wrestling is.
Yeah, it's not just a style of combat. So much of it is rhetoric, right?
It's the presentation of storytelling and how they communicate with each other. The combat is a very small part of it. I did an article for the Wall Street Journal several years ago. They have this series called The Count. The most famous one is when they count how much football is in football. There's like 17 minutes of actual football in a four-hour broadcast, I think is the takeaway. I counted how much wrestling is in wrestling, and it is not much. If you watch WrestleMania for 3.5 hours, less than 40% of that time are the guys even in the ring, let alone them grappling with each other. So much of it is the promos and the sequences in between the matches and the long-ass entrances and getting the crowd into it. The combat, that's like the sizzle, but it's not even most of the program.
It’s even tough, whether it's a historian or a researcher, to actually go back and watch some of what happened on wrestling in the 90s, cause it is actively also censored, too. This is an era that simultaneously was central to it attaining hegemonic status in the United States culture, while at the same time, has also been swept under a rug. Our current media landscape is defined by individual decisions that people made-
30 million Americans watching it a week in the 90s.
I think that with the WWE, they want their current situation to look like a bare-knuckle blood fest, but they want their previous iteration to be remembered as Major League Baseball, like a national pastime. There is this nostalgic element that I think clouds just what happened, as you describe in your book, when we stopped regulating television and we started giving people exactly what they wanted.