All of a sudden, music changed. The Macarena infected weddings and school dances. Tupac was alive—until September. Wonderwall played on every radio, and the Spice Girls told us what we really, really wanted. Oasis vs. Blur wasn’t just a chart battle; it was a cultural civil war. And in a small studio in Norway, a keyboard riff for “Barbie Girl” was being written, unknowingly preparing to haunt the next two decades.
All of a sudden, movies got sharper. Fargo , Trainspotting , Scream , Jerry Maguire —each one a fracture in the mold of 80s cinema. Indie filmmaking stopped being niche and started being necessary. The Coen brothers’ snow, Danny Boyle’s toilet, Wes Craven’s phone call: iconic in real time.
All of a sudden, it was over. And all of a sudden, it’s thirty years ago.
On a personal level—imagining for a moment—1996 was the year of the Tamagotchi, the Tickle Me Elmo, the first DVD player. It was the year you might have watched Friends on a Thursday night, or listened to Jagged Little Pill on a portable CD player that skipped if you walked too fast. It was the year pagers buzzed with numeric codes that meant “I love you” or “call home.” It was the last full year before Harry Potter was published, before Princess Diana died, before everything changed again.
