Day 6: Beavis, Butthead, and Music Videos
An unexpected positive of this exercise is that all of the kid’s music earworms that have nested in my brain over the last year have been replaced by music from 1996. While I enjoy singing the theme to Dinosaur Train or even the occasional Hot Diggity Dog song with my daughter, I much prefer the time I’ve spent humming Metallica’s Ain’t My Bitch or repeatedly doing the synthesized intro of California Love ad nauseum. My wife is a little less enthusiastic about this but I was able to drag her and the family down with me as I cranked my 1996 playlist while we cleaned up after dinner. It wasn’t long before my wife and I were singing along with Sheryl Crow, The Refreshments, and The Cranberries and my two year old was the only one who seemed to understand what Rob Thomas was blathering about.
Last night I forced my Discord friends into a 1996 party by commencing a watch-along session of Beavis & Butthead Do America and it holds up decently well. I love anything Mike Judge touches and this is a movie that I highly regard from childhood. As a 12 year old when I first watched it I certainly got more enjoyment out of the fart, boob, and whackin’ it (huhuhuh) jokes back then but I still had a good time reliving the joys of juvenile humor through television's historically stupidest protagonists. I have a soft spot for any comedy that involves trekking on a cross country adventure. I adore when the Griswald’s load up the station wagon, or when Harry and Lloyd make their way out to Aspen, or that movie Sex Drive that only I remember. Beavis and Butthead do America just right.
this will make your fist stink
After the movie, those who were still willing to hang out because they weren’t finished with their drinks got suckered by me into watching nothing but 1996 music videos for three hours and it could be the most fun I’ve had in 1996 so far. As a disclaimer, some music videos came out in 1996 for songs that released before 1996 and that was deemed allowable as a person living in 1996 would be seeing those videos for the first time that year. They were all amazing to watch regardless of how good or less-good any particular song was. Videos like Metallica’s Until it Sleeps are so weird and overproduced there’s no way you can look back on it today and not wonder what point they were trying to make. Was there a point or were they on LSD in a North African art museum? Then there are others like Deftone’s Bored or Trace Adkins’s Every Light in the House that are so mind bogglingly void of any effort or budget, it makes you wonder how much they even cared about music videos as a vehicle to promote their own music. I’m not even sure the Deftones were aware they were being recorded in that video. Then there are the videos that hold up just because of how memorable they are like Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity or Tool’s Stinkfist where I can almost remember where I was when I first watched them 25 years ago (which happened to be the same musty living room for both but, yeah).
“Nothing seems to satisfy
I don’t want it
I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive”
You know what isn’t fun? The news. Early March was rough in 1996. A Peruvian plane crash killed all 123 on-board and a 9-year old kid choked to death on a hot dog in a school cafeteria. Early 1996 is also when the Angel of Death, Doctor Jack Kevorkian, was being tried for his assisted suicides. He was found not guilty of being responsible for 27 assisted deaths.
He died all on his own in 2011 at age 83
Tonight is the Super Bowl! Most people I know will be watching the “real” Super Bowl tomorrow on Super Bowl Sunday but I will be enjoying January 1996’s Super Bowl XXX between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers. I cannot wait to be very 2021 drunk toward the end.
