How I Spent New Year’s 2000

“A long December, and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.”

New Years is a pointless holiday. It makes much more sense to celebrate the New Year during a Solstice or Equinox. For most pre-Christian cultures it was the Spring Equinox. January 1^st is a random date. There’s no real cosmic significance. You can make resolutions any time, why wait? So it follows, 2000 was nothing more than a number. I got swept up in the excitement at the time of New Year’s Eve 1999, but Nihilism and disillusionment have killed any chance of me getting as excited for 2020. I’m not even making a mixtape about it this time. I only pay attention to the Gregorian calendar out of necessity. I have to because everyone else in the society I find myself in is doing it. You can’t ever completely divorce yourself from it psychologically. One thing I will say for the holiday is it works as a time to reflect. I get caught up in that sometimes, like when it comes to cultural shorthand such as decade nostalgia. I guess that’s what I’m doing now by writing this blog entry. 

It’s now been twenty years since “the Year 2000”, or “Y2K”. I ranted enough about the passage of time in my blog about the music I listened to in the 2010’s, so I’ll save it. I’ll just say though, that it feels strange to have such clear memories of a night from twenty years ago. Twenty years used to seem a lot longer of a time to me ten years ago than it does now. The main reason my memories about that night are as good as they are is that they’re all tied in with the recordings I made that night, both on VHS and audio cassette. Perhaps it just gives me a story to tell myself and isn’t really a true memory, but either way, I know what I was up to. So, this post is going to be a bit of a double-whammy, I’m going to talk about a mix tape and a VHS tape. But, since I don’t feel like writing a 25-page term paper, I’ll just talk about what stood out most, give you a list of what was on it, maybe see what I can find on YouTube of it.

            Anyway, to get a big topic out of the way, I didn’t fully buy into the Y2K Bug paranoia of the time. I still to this day wonder who profited off spreading a lie like that. Maybe the media did it for the ratings, and a few con artists helped spread the paranoia so they could sell their survival books and videos. It wasn’t that I was a total skeptic. But I was 13. I didn’t own a computer, I didn’t have a bank account, so I didn’t think it would affect me even if it did happen. Best case scenario the schools would be closed, and that’s what I was hoping for. No such luck.

            And the people who didn’t think we were on the brink of technological Armageddon had such high hopes for the coming century. Flying cars, robots, world peace. Instead the world has only gone downhill in the last twenty years. The people on this tape had no idea what disasters the future would bring, starting in 2001. Endless war, ecological disaster, economic turmoil, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and to top it all off, all the movies coming out suck. It’s kind of sad watching this old VHS tape again, knowing what happens next.

So, back to twenty years ago. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999. I was determined to stay up all night. It was the start of the new millennium. I wasn’t old enough to drink, and I wasn’t going to any party, so I had to do something special. Everyone else was making a big deal about the year 2000, so I believed it was a big deal. My father had gone off to celebrate with his friends, my sister was at a sleepover at a friend’s house, and my mother went to bed early, so it was just me. And I recorded myself channel surfing for a big chunk of the night. I still have my New Year’s 2000 VHS tape that I was recording all of this on.

Now Y2K compliant and guaranteed to survive technological Armageddon.

 
The first thing on the tape is The Three Stooges short “Malice in the Palace”, one of the four public domain episodes, so it's pretty safe to post it here without worrying about it getting taken off YouTube. Because we ALL own this episode. I love public domain. Anyway, the sad thing about this one is Curly was going to come back to play the cook (this was after his stroke caused him to have to quit show business and he was replaced with Shemp), but he was too sick so Larry took the part instead. I want to travel to the alternate universe where we got a short with both Curly and Shemp.

And I must have been channel surfing, after this is an episode of Kenan and Kel recorded off Nickelodeon. That channel was still watchable at the time. It was the episode where Kenan’s family is eating at a restaurant and they one by one get locked in the freezer after Kel switches the sign pointing to the restroom. It’s a mystery to me why Kenan made it to Saturday Night Live but Kel didn’t. Kel was funnier. It's not on YouTube, I checked.

  
Next, I changed the channel to TLC, back when it was a documentary channel (TLC once stood for “The Learning Channel”, if anyone even remembers that). The documentary I recorded was 100 Greatest Achievements of the 20^th Century. These “Greatest ____ of the 20^th Century” list shows were freaking everywhere in 1999. On every channel. But especially on the likes of TLC, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel, etc. This is just an example of a typical one. When it came to the documentary channels it was either this or “How Will the World End?” documentaries. Silly fools, didn’t they know the world wasn’t going to end until 2012 according to the Mayan calendar?

 
Throughout the day the main channels (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) showed New Year celebrations around the world, of course acting like this was some monumental celestial event. There are bits and pieces of this on my tape too. You get to learn all about time zones on New Year’s Eve. They would show different cities where it hit midnight. You’ve got Maori tribes in New Zealand celebrating, this interesting ceremony going on in New Guinea, cultures that don’t even use the Gregorian calendar still wanted in on the fun. Then they’d periodically check up on those poor fools in Times Square in New York City suffering frostbite and wearing diapers so they could stand there all day and wait for a stupid ball to drop. I don’t know why people do it every year. Being in Times Square must feel like being inside an advertisement.

Right before midnight on CBS, Bill Clinton gave a sweeping, optimistic speech about the future, which time has shown to be very much overly-optimistic. It’s long and boring, but it makes me remember that we used to have presidents that were articulate. After enduring some of this, I changed the channel to the ball dropping in New York on Fox (I couldn’t find it on YouTube). Apparently, they dropped three tons of confetti on the crowd. Such wastefulness. How many trees were mowed down to make that much stupid, useless confetti? How many animals did that confetti probably kill? And for what?  “Woo hoo, year number on made-up calendar different now! Perfect excuse to get drunk!”

And one of the sponsors for the event in Times Square was Blockbuster Video. Oof, that’s like a punch in the gut. If no other moment is symbolic of this tape, of people being blissfully unaware of the complete disaster that awaited them in the next two decades, it was that little tidbit.

After watching the ball drop at Times Square and usher in the new millennium from the TV that used to be in my room, I remember filling up on sparkling apple cider and switching the channel to AMC (this was back when every TV channel stuck to what it’s supposed to be, in this case “American Movie Classics”; I blame MTV for degenerating first, most of the other channels have followed suit now and I rarely if ever watch cable as a result) to catch and record the rest of the Three Stooges marathon, filling up the rest of the tape. It was mostly Shemp episodes for some reason. I must have been partly disappointed at the time, but my respect for Shemp has grown over the years, even if Curly is more iconic. It’s an acquired taste. I never disliked Shemp though. He was his own thing and can’t really be compared to Curly. Once the tape was finished, I retired to my bedroom and turned on the radio, determined to pull an all-nighter.

Pay no attention to that mention of "Fatboy Slim", it's not on the tape anymore.

At any rate, my audio cassette this time was a 110-minute TDK "CD Power" tape. These were essentially Type II cassettes, which have better sound quality than your standard Type I cassettes. Has to do with the type of magnetic tape that was used. It was called Michael’s Music 2000, and was my 15^th mixtape. My second in the “Michael’s Music” yearly series (later renamed “Suren’s Songs”), like the first, didn’t so much record what I listened to throughout the year as later ones did, but essentially acted like a “New Year’s” tape. I‘m not sure how I got lucky enough to record “Anthem for the Year 2000“ by Silverchair as the first song. This was before I had dual cassette players. Maybe it was fate. But I think I may have cheated and recorded it early. If true, I would probably have heard the DJ say he was going to play the song and madly scrambled for the tape. It was so long ago I don’t remember. It was a song that I listened to a lot in 1999; its lyrics encapsulated my disillusionment with the world. "Never knew we were living in a world where our innocence is so short", and all that. Middle School was awful. This song was my turn to the dark side. My childhood ended with that guitar riff in the beginning.

  
But by the time 3am rolled around, to stave off my sleepiness I relocated to my bedroom and turned on the radio to record any good songs playing. I was at it for the rest of New Year’s day. Live 105, a San Francisco alternative rock station that I think might still be around, did a “Best Alternative Bands of the Millennium” countdown that day, giving me a lot of material to work with. Unlike the near-identical countdown they had the previous summer, this one also included bands from the 80‘s. As with Michael’s Music 1999, it’s hit-or-miss with me these days, with quite a few old shames that I don’t really like anymore, per se. To be fair, I’ll still listen to Silverchair and Oasis for old time’s sake. They’re inseparably attached to my childhood and preteens. Rage Against the Machine’s music is something I understand a lot more now than I did then. And Powerman 5000, whatever happened to that band? They were pretty good. Korn, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, these are all classics. But then Weezer, Sublime, and Smash Mouth? What was I thinking? I had a thing for the Beastie Boys around that time too, I remember. Ehh, I still think they’re okay, I’m kinda neutral on them now. And then there’s that “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” song that everyone was listening to at the time. I don’t even really remember why I liked it. Oh well, I was 13 and it was basically still the 90’s. What were you listening to at 13? Probably a lot of stuff you hate now. But because I’m feeling shameless, I’ll share the playlist and recreate it on Spotify. Maybe someone out there is morbidly curious. It definitely captures what a lot of people my age at that time were listening to if they weren’t either into pop or whatever their parents listened to, at least if they lived in the United States, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area. So, if that was you, maybe you’ll be interested. But it’s not as fun without the DJ’s, old radio commercials and station bumpers.

At some point during New Year’s Day I finished the 110-minute tape, but I remember having lasted until shortly after dinner that day before finally dozing off. I was quite proud of myself for conquering the night. The sad thing was I had to be back at school in two days, with a screwed-up sleep schedule. I couldn’t have been the only one though. Probably even some of the teachers were in the same boat. They were old enough to drink, so most likely.

Michael’s Music 2000 – Spotify Playlist 

Side A

Silverchair – Anthem for the Year 2000

Bad Religion – 21^st Century Digital Boy

Beastie Boys – So Whatcha Want?

Silverchair – Abuse Me

Oasis – Morning Glory

Slipknot – Wait and Bleed

Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall

Nine Inch Nails – Head Like a Hole

Nirvana – Negative Creep

Rage Against the Machine – Guerrilla Radio

Korn- No Place to Hide

The Offspring – Pretty Fly for a White Guy

Side B

Devo – Whip It

 Beastie Boys – Brass Monkey

Powerman 5000 – Nobody’s Real

 Bad Religion – A Walk

Dire Straits – Money for Nothing

Counting Crows – A Long December

Smash Mouth – Walking on the Sun

Oasis – Wonderwall

Orgy – Blue Monday

Crystal Method – Busy Child

Weezer – Buddy holly

 Beastie Boys – Paul Revere

Blur – Song 2

Cake – The Distance

Sublime – Santeria

The Verve Pipe – The Freshmen

"I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold onto these moments as they pass..."