Are We Still Living in 1999?
A new book argues that late-20th-century lowbrow culture created the modern world.
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, by Ross Benes, University Press of Kansas, 296 pages, $32.99
In 1982, Prince first sang that he planned to party "like it's 1999." But on New Year's Eve of 1998, as MTV counted down to the actual year 1999, it wasn't the Purple One who performed that song in Times Square. As Ross Benes notes in his new book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, it was the nu metal band Limp Bizkit that performed one of the 20th century's most recognizable dance hits, swapping the original's synths and funky basslines for chugging guitars and hip-hop breakbeats.
In retrospect, Benes writes, this signaled more than just a programming decision: For Limp Bizkit—"proud sellouts who halfway rap and halfway rock about boning"—to appear on "the youth station as the clocks turned over demonstrated low culture's domination."
While not perfect—and weakest when defending its titular premise—Benes' book makes a compelling case that the most reviled, lowbrow forms of popular entertainment were instrumental in creating many things we enjoy today, and that they also offered an effective remedy for the things we hate.
"Low culture" is defined as popular culture that is less sophisticated and more mainstream, intended to appeal to a broad audience. Benes cites multiple examples, among them video games, Beanie Babies, internet porn, and Jerry Springer; none originated in 1999, but Benes argues that was when they reached their cultural zenith.
In part, this was the result of an increasingly diverse media landscape that allowed ideas to spread more easily, thanks both to advances in technology and a lighter hand from government regulators.
"Consider the interconnectedness of 1990s mass media," Benes writes. "During the late nineties, print circulation held steady, cable TV added channels and gained subscribers, and the internet emerged. This happened while media conglomerates gobbled up more companies and became increasingly deregulated. The result was a media environment that extended the reach of trashy stories and entertainment through heavy cross-promotion."
The book isn't a jeremiad. "While my thesis is that 1999 was the year low culture took over the world, I'm not arguing that its pop culture was uniformly trash," he writes. In fact, 1999 saw the premieres of numerous respected cultural achievements, including such films as Magnolia and Office Space and such TV shows as The Sopranos. But "despite this revered entertainment, low culture was plenty in-demand. And these lowbrow products teach us most about the world." In fact, the year's most honored film at the Oscars, American Beauty—winning five prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor—was itself partly based on the story of Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island mechanic whose teenaged paramour shot his wife in 1992, yielding tabloid fodder for years to come.
Jerry Springer's eponymous talk show was the apotheosis of trash TV. The show reveled in the lurid and distasteful. An episode's guests might be siblings who were dating the same person—or each other. Salacious details once only whispered about were now syndicated on weekday afternoons. Segments routinely turned into fistfights, with the live audience whooping and hollering like they were watching professional wrestling (which also got more popular in the late 1990s and gets its own chapter in the book).
Benes uses Springer's show to demonstrate the '90s trend toward lowbrow, cheaply produced content that eventually led to the explosion of reality shows in the 2000s—which themselves helped shape the world we know today. Broadcast networks' ratings fell as cable TV and VCRs encroached on their home entertainment oligopoly. (Benes notes in the epilogue that movie studios and broadcasters petitioned the government to limit VCRs and cable. While VCRs survived a court challenge, cable was effectively locked out of most major markets for decades until federal deregulation in the 1970s.) Deregulation then allowed networks to license their own shows for syndication. Where Jerry Springer and shows of its ilk were produced for cheap by syndicators and sold for broadcast at huge markups, the networks could now get in on the action—creating their own cheap content that was immediately profitable and could then be syndicated for more profits.
ABC developed the primetime quiz show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire specifically because it would cost less than a scripted program. It was an immediate hit when it premiered in August 1999, becoming the year's most watched series. That same year, CBS merged with Viacom as soon as the government allowed such mergers (another bit of deregulation). CBS was now a sister station to MTV, which had expanded into reality programming with The Real World, the original "seven strangers in a house" show.
"Viacom and CBS went all-in on reality because doing so was cheap, effective, and fit in with the company's efforts to reduce production costs," Benes writes. Huge successes such as Survivor, Big Brother, and The Amazing Race followed, each of which still airs new episodes today. Soon reality shows were everywhere.
We very much still live in that world. Perhaps the most famous reality TV personality of all time is Donald Trump, whose competition series The Apprentice premiered in 2004 and turned him from a boorish Manhattan has-been into an international symbol of wealth and success—an image central to his 2016 run for the presidency. As improbable as that trajectory is, Benes makes it clear that it wasn't unforeseeable. In 1998, newspaper columnist Art Buchwald reflected on the decade's political scandals—chiefly, then-President Bill Clinton's dalliances with a young White House intern—writing, "Washington is getting more like Jerry Springer, or, worse still, Jerry Springer is getting more like Washington."
"The thing that annoys me about Trump is that he took my show and brought it to the White House," Springer is quoted as saying, while his show's executive producer takes credit for "creating reality TV, which ruined television, and then the country."
This topic simultaneously demonstrates some of the limitations of Benes' central thesis, which ironically is weakest when he tries to fit his given examples into his target year. Most broadly, he writes that 1999 was when Springer truly became a pop cultural force, referenced (or appearing in) multiple Hollywood films and hosting an MTV Spring Break version of his show called Springer Break. But Springer Break actually premiered in 1998, with a second airing the following year.
Regarding reality TV, Benes says the 1999 premieres of films like The Truman Show and EDtv and shows like Big Brother "toyed with the concept that watching people do ordinary everyday tasks in artificial environments was exciting." But The Truman Show premiered in 1998 (Benes notes that it "came out on home video" in 1999). Big Brother, meanwhile, premiered in the U.S. in July 2000—and was preceded by nearly a decade by The Real World, which was itself inspired by An American Family, the 1972 PBS documentary miniseries that depicted a middle-class family in Santa Barbara.
In her 2022 book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist Danielle Lindemann argued that while reality TV "as we know it today" largely springs from The Real World, its origins go back decades—perhaps as far as the first televised iteration of Candid Camera in 1948. "While it's fruitless to try to establish a singular starting point for the genre," Lindemann wrote, "reality TV was not a flash storm that arose suddenly on a sunny day. It had been brewing for quite some time."
Benes also notes the rise of video games not only as a popular pastime but also as a target of elite censorship—most prominently, when blamed for the April 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. Benes singles out Grand Theft Auto 2, released in October 1999, as an example of the popular backlash against violent video games. But for anyone familiar with the history of video game moral panics, that game's release is overshadowed by its sequel, Grand Theft Auto III, two years later. The latter title's violent 3D graphics and profane voice acting, each a first for the series, launched the previously modest-selling franchise onto both the bestseller charts and the nightly news, and made its subsequent titles the subject of congressional inquiry. Grand Theft Auto 2, by contrast, was largely considered a retread of its predecessor and has sold fewer copies than any other main title in the series.
Benes is strongest when he eschews the premise of fitting his examples into a single year and merely presents low culture as the product of democratization, removing barriers to participation between social strata. "Since the invention of the written word, there have always been crusaders blaming social ills on new entertainment forms," he writes. "Today, politicians ban TikTok. Technologists warn that AI will cause human extinction. Social media receives blame for violent crimes that used to be aimed at video games. As soon as one panic folds, new ones begin."
Benes notes that studies consistently fail to show a causal link between video games and real-world violence, yet censorial scolds never let that stand in their way. Before video games, they blamed TV—and rock music, comic books, radio, movies, all the way back to the printed word itself. In each case, the masses outlasted the alarmists.
"Over the past several hundred years, new entertainment, usually targeted at young people, has become despised, blamed for societal problems, and threatened with legal sanctions," Benes adds. "After the entertainment has been around a few decades and its audience has aged, pressure reduces, old fears become laughable, legal protections arise, and free-speech rights expand." Low culture is a story of technological advances that enabled broadcast to a mass audience.
This had positive spillover effects. In a chapter on internet pornography, Benes notes that "porn's biggest online impact really came from how it shaped technologies that became common in people's everyday lives. Pornographers didn't invent the internet, but they commercialized it." Indeed, many innovations underpinning the modern internet—like high-capacity bandwidth, streaming video, and secure payment processors—were originally developed for distributing smut over the web. (Titillating but nonpornographic content played a similar role. Google Image Search was created as a way to find pictures of Jennifer Lopez in the plunging-neckline Versace dress she wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards, and three engineers created YouTube partially as a space to host a clip of Justin Timberlake accidentally revealing Janet Jackson's bare breast at the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show.)
Even legislation against low culture had catalyzing effects, albeit accidentally. Congress drafted the Communications Decency Act of 1996 specifically to restrict access to internet pornography. The bulk of the law would be struck down for unconstitutional infringements on speech, but one provision that survived was Section 230, which conferred legal protections on platforms that host others' content and enabled the rise of social media, and the web more broadly, over the next three decades. "The speech protections in Section 230 will likely come under duress as lawmakers consider regulating tech companies to curb the social ills they foster," Benes warns.
The expansion of lowbrow culture also opened the U.S. to the rest of the world. "By the late 1990s, pop culture had become America's biggest export," Benes writes. "This happened after the fall of the Soviet Union opened markets for Western entertainment. Because deregulation allowed US media companies to become much larger than foreign competitors, American entertainment held advantages breaking through international markets. What did America create that the rest of the world wanted? Trash." Talk shows, pro wrestling, porn, and all manner of lowbrow content numbered among America's cultural output.
For all the harm trashy entertainment is accused of doing, Benes notes, the democratizing aspects that enabled its rise in the first place also signal a positive path forward: "If we truly want our civics to improve, consider the programming changes that shook up the entertainment industry, which went on to shake up politics. Across elections and talk shows, the audience members who make their presence most known have something in common—they actively participate."
