Throwback Thursday: 2004 |

Do you know how long ten years ago was? If I’m remembering my lyrics to Rent correctly, it’s around 5,256,000 minutes. Bush was President. You were in elementary school. LeBron still played for Cleveland. Let that sink in. Look at how far we’ve come.

*****

The Year I Became a Man: The Pop Music Landscape in 2004

by Lawrence Neil

2004.

Ah.

Usher dropped Confessions. Saying you enjoyed listening to Evanescence didn’t elicit strange looks. Diddy was on a song with Enya. Both Ying Yang Twins were very present. Auto-tune had not happened yet. Destiny’s Child was a thing. Jessica Simpson was relevant.

The clothes were baggier. The hip-hop, blingier. The rock, angstier. The political correctness, absent-er. I was twelve. These were the days.

Here are (just a few) songs that came out in 2004 that inevitably get the same response of ‘OOHHHHHHHHHH!!!’ and intense head nodding and/or hand waving any time they come on at a party:

Hey Ya – Outkast – Suburban American learns who Outkast is. Lucy Liu is on par with Beyonce.
Tipsy – J-Kwon – Aside from ‘Baby Got Back’, potentially the best-known spoken intro to a hip-hop song: ‘YO I GOT A FAKE ID DOE’
Yeah! – Usher ft. Ludacris, Lil’ Jon – I may teach the Ludacris verse to my children. On second thought, I will definitely teach the Ludacris verse to my children.
Freek-A-Leek – Petey Pablo – Suburban American learns many new names.
Get Low – Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boyz – Every 6th grader: “Wait, ‘skeet’ means what?!? Gross.”
Milkshake – Kelis – No one could ever begin a sentence with ‘My milkshake…’ again.

Similarly, here are songs released in 2004 that are just as recognized but instead get an ‘Oh my god…’, followed by wide-eyed glances around the room and (potential) knowing nods to fellow party goers until someone runs to the phone playing music and quickly switches. Or everyone just keeps guilty-pleasure jamming:

Leave (Get Out) – JoJo – High school. Cheerleaders. So heartbroken.
Pieces of Me – Ashlee Simpson – Oh my god, she did exist!
Turn Me On – Kevin Lyttle – How high can homeboy’s voice really get?
The Reason – Hoobastank – Oh, you didn’t like this Hoobastank song when it came out? Yeah? Yeah? Liar.
Meant to Live – Switchfoot – So many bangs.

But one song transcends these boundaries. Only one song from 2004 is still met with similar enthusiasm and horror at the first keyboard chord and 808 hit. Only one song evokes such intense pride and shame at knowing every word, such self-loathing and self-confidence at belting them out in an awkward, squawky falsetto.

The song?

Yes. “Fuck It”, by the mononymous Eamon.

Some thoughts on this anthem:

The video details the ignominious Staten Island, Bari’s Pizza patio break up spurred by revelations of the infidelity of Eamon’s lover, intermingled with grainy old footage of the couple’s good ol’ days.

Who thought that gleaming pepperoni pizza was going to make it to the end of the video? No one. No one did. Not a chance. Fuck that pizza.

I thought they really had something, those two. But all good things must come to an end.

This song holds the Guinness World Record for most expletives in a #1 song.

An Aside:

After some thorough investigative journalism, this is what I found:

Eamon is on the left. Drake is on the right. Look — they are both yelling into microphone spit-shields because they are singing passionately about their feelings.

Drake is an angsty pseudo-singer, and permanently upset at his ex-girlfriends.

Eamon is an angsty pseudo-singer, and really, really upset at his ex-girlfriend.

Eamon last album was released in 2006 and he hasn’t been active since. Drake’s first mixtape dropped in 2006 and before that was allegedly an “actor”.

Connect the dots, people. (Conspiracy aside over)

Eamon was my age when he recorded this song. My mixtape is also dropping soon. Oh-oh. Oh-oh. Uh-huh. Yeah. (repeat x 200)

*****

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Mean Girls Ten Years Later

by Lindsay Mewes

I was 10 years old when Mean Girls first hit the box office in 2004. Seeing this movie was not only my introduction into “Girl World,” but because it was the first Lindsay Lohan movie I had seen since Parent Trap, this was also the moment I finally realized that she did not have a twin. Blew my mind. So in honor of the film’s ten-year anniversary, I’m going to take a moment today to reflect on its legacy.

In case you haven’t seen it: Lohan plays Cady Heron, a 16-year-old girl who, upon moving to Illinois, is forced into the girl-eat-girl world of North Shore High School after spending her entire life being homeschooled by her zoologist parents in Africa. Cady meets Janis Ian and Damien Holmes, who act as her spiritual guides to North Shore, warning Cady of the unwritten social code and various lunchroom cliques—including the most popular girls in school, the Plastics. The three come up with a plan to sabotage the Plastics’ ring leader, Regina George, by having Cady hang out and pretend to be friends with the clique. But eventually, Cady stops pretending, and transforms from a sweet, innocent math whiz to “cold, shiny, hard plastic,” becoming one of the mean girls she, Janis, and Damien set out to destroy.

By the time of its release, the high school comedy had been done so many times that the genre was quickly filling up the “straight to DVD” shelves in the movie rental stores. (R.I.P Blockbuster.) So why is Mean Girls so memorable? Put simply: it’s smart. Which is no surprise, since the screenplay was written by the very clever and always hilarious Tina Fey. Fey based the script on Rosalind Wiseman’s popular parental self-help book titled, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence. Though unlike the book, the film was not intended to be guide for teenage girls attempting to navigate the scary high school social scene. However, it is nonetheless full of brilliant social commentary. Fey knows how to make an audience laugh—hysterically—while still drawing their attention to very real cultural issues, like body image, bullying, and peer pressure. From Amy Poehler’s “cool mom” performance to the inclusion of the girl-bashing “Burn Book” to the many quotable one-liners we all know and love, Mean Girls is full of glorious satire and wit.

I’m not going to tell you how many times I’ve seen this movie because frankly, it’s embarrassing. But I know some of you out there will understand and agree when I say that I will never get sick of it. Mean Girls was funny when I watched it in 5th grade. It was funny when I watched it in high school. And it was even funnier when I watched it last night. It’s a classic, and will go down in history as one of my favorites. Moral of the story: If loving Mean Girls is wrong, I never, ever, ever want to be right.

*****

Haute Couture and Hieroglyphics: Art in 2004

by Silviana Ilcus

The art crowd had plenty to talk about in 2004. In NYC, MoMA reopened in a building almost twice the size of its previous facility, designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Vermeer’s “Young Woman Seated at the Virginals”, whose authenticity had long been disputed, yet finally confirmed after a decade of research, was the first painting by said artist to go to auction in more than 80 years. A fire swept through London’s Momart art warehouse in May; some of the pieces destroyed were some 100 works of contemporary art owned by supercollector Charles Saatchi, including “Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995”, one of the best known works of Tracey Emin. Damien Hirst imprinted a biohazard symbol on one of his works, “Cancer”, by layering flies in varying degrees of thickness and gluing them together with resin on a canvas, as part of his series of fly paintings. Even the subtle art of military uniforms design had its moment in 2004, when the US deployed the new digitalized Universal Camouflage Pattern for its uniforms.

The art of haute couture, however, left its witnesses temporarily speechless; attendees such as Sarah Jessica Parker stuttered in awe “Aah! Oh! I just can’t even say anything,” after witnessing Dior’s 2004 Spring/Summer couture show. John Galliano, who designed the collection, had already accustomed his audience with his collections giving “a whistle-stop tour of world history each season”, as stated in Vogue UK. Yet the Ancient Egyptian themed collection was unlike anything preceding it, and possibly all else that followed it too. To this day, it stands as the only Galliano collection with its own Wikipedia page – should that be an indicator of its significance.

Galliano’s hot air balloon tour of Egypt, along with photos of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, inspired the Dior 2004 Spring/Summer couture collection. The Ancient Egyptian influence is evident throughout the show; beyond the hieroglyphic prints of the fabrics, or the gold headdresses and divine Osird beards made with the help of milliner Stephen Jones, he manages to reinterpret motifs such as the mummy bandaging through loosely wrapped graceful organdy dresses, or the lotus flower by twisting and folding hems into over-dimensional rich lotus-resembling structures.

The convergence between the Ancient Egyptian elements and the elegance of Avedon and Penn, which is highlighted by every pose stricken on the catwalk, underlies the collection, and not just conceptually. Quite literally, in order to obtain the collection’s leitmotifs, namely the “shooting forward effect” and the elongated “sphinx line”, which extends diagonally from a woman’s shoulders to her feet, “crossed with the elegance of Avedon and Penn”, as Galliano explained for style.com, the designer had hip-length corsets of various infrastructures be made and worn under each outfit.

While this collection did not significantly impact the succeeding trends, it raised many issues regarding haute couture in the press of the time; including the question as to where the boundaries lie between being an extraordinary couture designer and a costumier, and how seducing the audience obscures the creative process involved in designing the collection. The New York Times’ Cathy Horin even questioned what might be the ultimate value of looking at clothes that have multimillion dollar manufacturing costs when they just “pass by in a fury of hair and ornament and Nefertiti eyes”.

*****

I Don’t Think I’ve Proved Anything and I’m Not Sure Why I Did This: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

by Alec Arceneaux

It’s very difficult to look back ten years and try to determine what will enter the literary canon and what will be forgotten until somebody has to write a Throwback Thursday column on short notice. 2004 seems to have fairly few candidates, though most of the books that stand out to me are based on what my mom happened to be reading in fourth grade: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen, the sixth and seventh installments of theDark Tower series by Stephen King, along with a few books I remember reading: Gregor the Overlander, Chasing Vermeer, the eleventh Lemony Snicket Novel. The only books that still seem to be talked about are Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (one of my favorite recent plays, shouts out to the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman), Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (which like half my freshman dorm would not shut up about, whatever that means in terms of its staying power), and2666, Roberto Bolaño’s swan song and magnum opus. I haven’t read it, but Oprah really liked it, and a ton of other less important dudes say it’s one of the greatest works in the Spanish language. I figured there’s gotta be something to the hype, and if 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are any indication, futuristic novels with big numbers in the title are pretty good.

Hooooly shit it’s 900 pages. Scratch that. I’ll read the first chapter.

Goddamn it there aren’t any chapters. Ughh.

After only about twenty pages of the janky PDF I found buried on the Internet I started to realize how difficult it was to just remove myself from the book to even write this. Bolaño makes side characters like Dostoevsky, scarcely occupying a page but inimitably compelling. Strange subsurface motivations propel the handful of protagonists. The book starts out reminiscent ofWhite Noise or Herzog, describing academics who search for something greater than what they’ve found in the course of their studies. He wastes no time building up the characters, instead letting minor interactions shape how they’re told. Bolaño intersperses stories like García Márquez, breathless adjective-and-metaphor-filled flights that leave little more than an impression but help the book read like a steamroller plowing forward. There’s already melancholy pervading the text, broken bridges separating the characters that should be so easy to connect.

I’m not sure why I thought this would work. Well, it’s mostly because I have two other papers due tomorrow. But now I feel invested in a book I probably wouldn’t have picked up in years. This was a weird experiment and I’m not sure what I was trying to prove. Certainly not much about the state of literature in 2004. Well. If you’re looking for a book to read 20 pages of and then sigh and resume the work that’s burying you from all directions, you could do worse than 2666. And certainly better than Cloud Atlas.