1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times

By Ross Benes

From pro wrestling and Pokémon to Insane Clown Posse and Jerry Springer, this look at the low culture of the late ’90s reveals its profound impact and how it continues to affect our culture and society today.

"If you had a subscription to Spin or Rolling Stone as a kid in the 90s, this one is a must-read."—Chicago Book Review

The year 1999 was a high-water mark for popular culture. According to one measure, it was the “best movie year ever.” But as journalist Ross Benes shows, the end of the ’90s was also a banner year for low culture. This was the heyday of Jerry Springer, Jenna Jameson, and Vince McMahon, among many others. Low culture had come into its own and was poised for world domination. The reverberations of this takeover continue to shape American society.

During its New Year’s Eve countdown, MTV entered 1999 with Limp Bizkit covering Prince’s famous anthem to the new year. The highlights of the lowlights continued when WCW and WWE drew 35 million American viewers each week with sex appeal and stories about insurrections. Insane Clown Posse emerged from the underground with a Woodstock set and platinum records about magic and murder. Later that year, Dance Dance Revolution debuted in North America and Grand Theft Auto emerged as a major video game franchise. Beanie Babies and Pokémon so thoroughly seized the wallets and imagination of collectors that they created speculative investment bubbles that anticipated the faddish obsession over nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The trashy talk show Jerry Springer became daytime TV’s most-watched program and grew so mainstream that Austin Powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Wayans Bros., The Simpsons, and The X-Files incorporated Springer into their own plots during the late ’90s. Donald Trump even explored a potential presidential nomination with the Reform Party in 1999 and wanted his running mate to be Oprah Winfrey, whose own talk show would make Dr. Oz a household name.

Benes shows us how so many of the strangest features of culture in 1999 predicted and influenced American life today. This wild ride through pop culture uncovers the connections between the kayfabe of WWE and the theatrics of politics, between the faddish obsession with Beanie Babies and with NFTs, between faithful fans and political loyalists, between violent video games and society’s scapegoats, and much more. 1999 is not just a nostalgic look at the past. It is also a window into our contentious present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Release date: Apr 22, 2025
• ISBN: 9780700638581

Ross Benes

Ross Benes is a reporter at Digiday who previously worked for Esquire and Deadspin, where he wrote about sex, sports, statistics, and pop culture. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, Adweek, Quartz, Mental Floss, Business Insider, Salon, and Slate. A native of Brainard, Nebraska, he splits time between his home state and New York. 

Book preview

1999

Politics and Popular Culture

Linda Beail and Lilly J. Goren

Series Editors

1999

The Year Low Culture

Conquered America

and Kickstarted Our

Bizarre Times

ROSS BENES

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS

© 2025 by Ross Benes

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was

organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia

State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State

University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benes, Ross, author.

Title: 1999 : the year low culture conquered America and kickstarted our

bizarre times / Ross Benes.

Description: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2025.

Series: Politics and pop culture

Identifiers: LCCN 2024028939 (print) | LCCN 2024028940 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780700638574 (cloth)

ISBN 9780700638581 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. |

Political culture—United States—History—20th century. |

Television—Social aspects—United States. | Consumption

(Economics)—Social aspects—United States. | Rap (Music)—Social

aspects—United States. | Internet pornography—Social aspects—United

States. | Violence in video games—Social aspects—United States. |

BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Pornography

Classification: LCC E169.12 .B384 2025 (print) | LCC E169.12 (ebook) |

DDC 306.0973/0904—dc23/eng/20241118

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024028939.

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024028940.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in the print publication is acid free and meets the minimum

requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for

Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1992.

To my loving dogs,

who make watching trashy 1990s shows fun and fulfilling

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Party Like It’s 1999

1. The Jerry Springer Administration: How Talk Shows and Reality TV Foreshadow Political Movements

2. Gotta Catch ’Em All: How Beanie Babies and Pokémon Embody Capitalism

3. Pro Wrestling and the Making of the Modern World: How Kayfabe Bled into Society

4. United Church of Clowns: How Selling Outsider Status Creates Loyal Followings

5. Porn Paradox: How Smut Penetrated American Culture

6. Level Up: How Video Games Transformed from Scourge to Cultural Powerhouse

Conclusion. Parties Weren’t Meant to Last

Glossary

Notes

Acknowledgments

Among the several books I’ve written, this one has been the most enjoyable. Watching Beanie Baby news footage, Jerry Springer fights, Insane Clown Posse interviews, and video game documentaries was super fun. I read fantastic books on every subject I covered, most of which are cited in the endnotes numerous times. I spent part of paternity leave watching WWE’s twenty-part Monday Night War docuseries with my infant daughter and our hounds. After spending years reporting on Nebraska politics for my previous book, this project was a palate cleanser.

Thanks to my editor David Congdon for supporting this concept and providing useful feedback. It was great to work with the University Press of Kansas again. Andrea Laws and Justin Henning in marketing were a joy to work with. Thanks to Gonzalo Facio and Karl Janssen for creating an awesome cover. Thank you to my agent Joseph Perry for shopping the proposal.

Thanks to peer reviewers Dustin Kidd and Daniel Dockery for helpful suggestions. Numerous people provided feedback on chapters. They include, but aren’t limited to, Joseph Tobin, David Buckingham, Danielle Lindemann, Frederick Lane, Adam Graham, Chuck Rawlings, Henry Jenkins, Patrick Markey, and Christopher Ferguson. Thanks for your comments.

Like a Juggalo, I’m blessed to belong to my family.

1999

Introduction

Party Like It’s 1999

The countdown started. In a few seconds the twentieth century’s final year would arrive. In a studio above crowded Times Square, MTV broadcast a performance of Prince’s 1999. Except, it being 1999, MTV didn’t feature the brilliant and innovative artist. Instead, Limp Bizkit played the track because nu metal was the sign o’ the times.

Limp Bizkit followed Carson Daly’s introduction with tuned-down guitars, record scratches, death growls, and call-and-response routines that elicited tepid reaction. The sky was purple, there were people running everywhere. Trying to run from my destruction, you know I didn’t even care. Say two thousand zero, zero, party over, oops, out of time. Limp Bizkit appearing on the youth station as the clocks turned over demonstrated low culture’s domination.

Using a strategy that propelled Jerry Springer, Jenna Jameson, and Vince McMahon to 1990s stardom, Limp Bizkit gained attention by embracing its derided reputation. The band paid DJs to play their songs on the radio. They opened Ozzfest sets emerging from a thirteen-foot-tall porcelain toilet. Their 1999 album Significant Other begins: You wanted the worst, you got the worst. The one, the only, Limp Bizkit. The band was scapegoated for Woodstock 1999’s horrific failure. Even many of their fans felt their surging popularity was manufactured by Viacom executives. While acclaimed artists complained MTV devalued integrity, Limp Bizkit embraced it. Lead singer Fred Durst dated an MTV talent scout. In their album liner notes Limp Bizkit placed a picture of the MTV exec overseeing the program Total Request Live (aka TRL). If it weren’t for MTV there would eventually be no Limp Bizkit, because we would all be broke and poor and have to quit because the music business doesn’t work like you think it works, guitarist Wes Borland told disgruntled fans.¹

During a 1999 MTV summer special held on a Bahamas island, Durst asked the crowd, Y’all wanna blow this boat up? He imitated the Roadrunner cartoon and pressed a dynamite plunger. Flames engulfed the boat. The crowd roared. In an analogous way, trash engulfed pop culture and people couldn’t get enough. As the decadent 1990s approached the millennium, wrote low culture apologist Nathan Rabin, pop culture de-evolved into a glittery Sodom and Gomorrah forever tempting the fury of an Old Testament God with its extravagant stupidity.²

Several overlapping factors made trash flourish when Limp Bizkit dominated MTV. A growing youth contingent with plenty of disposable income met an increasingly unregulated entertainment industry. Media consolidation and debt-leveraged mergers drove down production costs while making cheap hits more lucrative for growing conglomerates. Meanwhile, digital technologies shook up media distribution and extended low culture’s reach. These trends collided at the end of the twentieth century and contributed to a glut of low culture that still shapes modern America.

Among that glut, I elected to write about talk shows and reality TV, animal toy franchises, pro wrestling, horrorcore rap, porn, and video games. These subjects stand out for their late 1990s popularity, the contempt they spawned, and their lasting significance. Consider them the highlights of the lowlights.

Late nineties critics ranked Jerry Springer the worst show in TV history. People were too entertained to care for this sanctimony. Springer beat Oprah’s ratings. His show was the first program TiVo recorded. His Too Hot for TV outtakes became the fastest-selling TV title in the history of home video. More than a dozen talk shows copied him. Their success contributed to an increased distribution of cheaply produced reality programs that dominate airwaves.³

The dramatic segments Jerry Springer made famous resurface whenever you watch the news or scroll through social feeds. Senators threaten to fight Teamsters during congressional hearings. People you personally know share their most revealing secrets for free on TikTok and YouTube because they want strangers to comment on their lives. We’re all talk show guests and reality stars, seeking attention through confession, equating entertainment with voyeurism. With a reality star president, we don’t just watch reality TV, we live it.

Jerry Springer and Beanie Babies peaked around the same time. Beanie Babies’ speculative valuation skyrocketed, prompting mail theft, robbery, murder, and divorcing couples to require courts to divide their collections. Guidebooks and CD-ROMs cataloging Beanie prices became bestsellers. The pretense of retiring the product line on New Year’s sent toy resale markets into chaos resembling an impending recession. When a semitrailer spilled Beanie Babies across an interstate bisecting Atlanta, Georgia, commuters hopped out of their cars and risked their lives to grab plush dolls. Beanies were part of an animal-driven children’s entertainment fad including Tamagotchi, Giga Pets, Nano Pets, Neopets, Furbies, Digimon, and Pokémon. In 1999, Pokémon’s first movie became a hit, its show achieved stellar ratings, its trading cards prompted class-action lawsuits, and its video games blanketed bestsellers lists.⁴

Beanie Babies represented a magical way of viewing consumer products. This fantasy is still with us. People pay exorbitant fees for digital collectibles even though these markets are full of scams and poor resale. Mania over AI (artificial intelligence), blockchain, cryptocurrencies, Web3, and NFTs is reminiscent of the dotcom bubble that coincided with the collapse of the Beanie market. What drives all of these fads is a philosophy of insatiable consumption. Pokémon’s gotta catch ’em all is the consumer mantra of our times.

When wrestling federations launched Beanie lines, it became apparent sports entertainment was everywhere. In 1999 wrestling viewership peaked, with WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and WCW (World Championship Wrestling) collectively airing fifteen hours of weekly programming that drew thirty-five million American viewers. A match held during the Super Bowl halftime show drew ten million viewers. When pro athletes and talk show hosts appeared in hyped-up pay per views, it was a sign wrestling crossed over. Wrestlers appeared in Surge, Sprite, 1-800-COLLECT, 1-800-CALL-ATT, Chef Boyardee, Mastercard, Walmart, Little Caesars, Monster Truck Madness, Quaker Granola Bars, and the Kansas State Lottery commercials. They starred in Mad About You, Baywatch, Arliss, Boy Meets World, That ’70s Show, The Drew Carey Show, Suddenly Susan, Nash Bridges, and Celebrity Deathmatch episodes. A&E, ESPN, and MTV produced wrestling specials. Wrestlers graced Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, and Playboy covers. Jesse Ventura was sworn in as Minnesota’s governor. WWE became publicly traded, minting its CEO a billionaire.⁵

As wrestling embedded itself into mainstream entertainment, the concept of pretending that something is real when it is not bled into American society. Wrestlers call this convention kayfabe. Powerful organizations practice kayfabe whenever they sell stories that require a suspension of disbelief. Oil companies that pollute the ocean and lobby against renewable energy claim to be environmentally conscious. Corporate apologists claim that private enterprise created the internet even though it was built by government researchers and academics. Advertising lobbyists who fight data regulation pretend to be working to benefit consumers. In today’s culture, kayfabe metastasized into alternative facts and emotional truths. WWE founder Vince McMahon makes a strong claim for grandfathering our post-truth era.

During the late 1990s, the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) achieved their dreams by wrestling for WWE and WCW. In 1999 the duo emerged from the underground to find themselves with America’s fourth best-selling album. No longer singing for a few hundred kids in packed auditoriums, ICP performed at Woodstock ’99. They regularly went on Howard Stern’s radio show. Feuds with Sharon Osbourne, a Disney label, and Eminem directed attention their way. High school dropouts whose early albums sold ten thousand copies, ICP suddenly found themselves with two records exceeding a million sales. Along the way they developed a loyal fan base that would sustain their career after their meteoric rise cooled. When music magazines rated ICP as the worst band of all time and the FBI designated its fans as a gang, the clowns didn’t crumble. They thrived on notoriety.⁶

The Insane Clown Posse perfected a gimmick that has since become influential in religious and political discourse. Today’s religious leaders imitate ICP when they sell a story of us versus the world while generating intense loyalty from those who buy into their outsider projections. The outsider label ICP personified is resurrected when religious figures lean on persecution accusations to rally people to their own causes. The believers who remain unite over their shared belief in receiving resentment.

The surging popularity of ICP reflected that profane entertainers were winning the decency wars. In 1999 two-thirds of prime-time TV programming contained sexual content. Sex and the City, Baywatch, and Beverly Hills 90210 drew viewers with steamy stories. President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial for lying about his sex scandal headlined news broadcasts. At the box office, nudity appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, American Pie, American Beauty, and Cruel Intentions. Sundance, Slamdance, and South by Southwest featured documentaries about porn stars and pimps. To close the millennium, numerous porn stars publicized attempts at breaking records for having sex with the highest number of partners in a day. One of those attempts was turned into the best-selling porn of the year. Girls Gone Wild ran a financially successful operation off exploitative premises. Oral arguments began for a Supreme Court case that Playboy Entertainment Group won. Porn viewing shot up on the emerging internet.⁷

Porn continues to guide the expansion of free speech, pump money into ancillary organizations, provide politicians fodder to rouse their base, and dictate which technologies people use. With each tech advance, porn’s boundaries become blurrier. The biggest porn producers aren’t magazine publishers anymore. They’re young people meeting on Tinder, sharing Snapchat nudes, posting Instagram thirst traps, and sexting AI chatbots. Porn’s evolving legal issues encapsulate the tension change creates.

Aside from porn, the internet disrupted and expanded the audience for many media, including video games. When Sega’s Dreamcast hit shelves on 9-9-99 (that is, September 9, 1999) it became the first game console with a built-in modem facilitating online play. Online sales would empower video games to become the highest revenue-generating entertainment format. There were other signs that gaming was becoming mainstream. Sony’s PlayStation was on its way to becoming the first console to sell more than one hundred million units. Grand Theft Auto’s first sequel and expansion packs came out, which helped convert GTA from a curiosity to juggernaut. Music in Tony Hawk Pro Skater provided a boost to ska and punk bands while showing that games could be used to market external products. The US military began developing America’s Army as way to use games as a recruiting tool. Today’s readers may find it unfair to categorize video games as low culture, but that’s how games were largely perceived in 1999 when they were culturally and politically condemned. The change of that perception is due to the transformation video games underwent in the late 1990s.⁸

Before video games became accepted, they were blamed for mass shootings. Since the invention of the written word, there have always been crusaders blaming social ills on new entertainment forms. What video games went through in the nineties contributed to a strong point along that continuum. 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.

These case studies definitively demonstrate that trashy 1990s entertainment oozed into contemporary society. This story is encompassing and far reaching. It could be told without mentioning Donald Trump. But nobody else co-opted these trends to such a significant degree. In Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, Kurt Andersen wrote that if Donald Trump hadn’t run for president, I might not have mentioned him at all. But here he is, a stupendous Exhibit A. To describe him is practically to summarize this book. A similar statement could be made about the book you are now reading. In the following chapters, I will touch upon how Trumpism coalesced around the President’s roles as a reality TV icon, practitioner of economic hubris, pro wrestling hall of famer, Playboy cover star, believer in persecution complexes, and politician who blamed America’s mass shooting problem on video games. Need further proof that late ’90s tawdriness guides contemporary America? When low culture began its takeover in 1999, Trump announced his first presidential run. We’ve been livin’ la vida loca ever since.⁹

Born eight months before the decade began, I’m a 1990s kid. My family watched Jerry Springer together. Beanie Babies were scattered in my bedroom. My buddies played Pokémon Red and Blue on their Game Boys wherever we went. I flipped back and forth between WWE Raw and WCW Nitro during the Monday Night Wars. I blared The Great Milenko on my Walkman. I was not above perusing online porn during my rare encounters with internet access. I smashed buttons chaotically hoping to execute Mortal Kombat fatalities on my brothers. I’m familiar with the subjects in this book because I’m a fan, or at least an unabashed user.

My perspective is also informed by a decade covering the entertainment industry as a journalist and market research analyst. I’ve written about pop culture for dozens of publications including Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Mental Floss, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, and Decider, where I had a column about terrible movies. My research on media companies is frequently cited by CNN, the Hollywood Reporter, Reuters, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, and I appear on radio and TV programs for NPR and Bloomberg. My approach is to highlight what made these derided entertainers so appealing to nineties kids like me. I will also provide dispassionate analysis of the business and political conditions that made the popularity of these pop culture products possible. I’ll connect how these nineties trends continue to shape current events, influence public figures, and condition people’s behavior.

Several writers covered low culture and 1990s pop culture in recent years. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book explored the disconnect between how people remember the 1990s and how the era actually played out, using pop culture references to redefine the decade’s perception. In Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, Rax King embraced a wide variety of gaudy brands and celebrities, from Creed to the Cheesecake Factory, to humanize joy derived from low culture. Through various books, Nathan Rabin celebrated the joy of trash. Collectively, these books examined low culture through personal anecdotes or examined the 1990s broadly. My analysis differs because it is about the late nineties, focused on low culture, and structured around economic analysis and social commentary.

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. Brian Raftery makes a convincing case that 1999 was cinema’s best year in Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Star Wars returned with Episode 1, which did tremendous financially but polarized reviewers. Memorable horror (The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, Sleepy Hollow), animation (The Iron Giant, Toy Story 2, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), indies (Boys Don’t Cry, Election), dramas (The Green Mile, American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides, Magnolia), comedies (Office Space, The Best Man, Analyze This), and mind-bending (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, eXistenZ, The Matrix) films came out in 1999.¹⁰

Others argued that TV peaked during the late 1990s. Warren Littlefield’s Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV provided an inside account of NBC’s record-smashing heyday when Seinfeld, Friends, and ER aired around the same time. In 1999, prestige TV began with the debut of The Sopranos and The West Wing. SpongeBob SquarePants premiered and became Viacom’s most distributed product ever and one of the world’s most beloved children’s franchises. Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show and elevated political satire.¹¹

In music, Rob Harvilla suggests in 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s that the 1990s was the greatest decade with memorable hits coming from every genre. In 1999, Lauryn Hill took home a room full of awards. Foo Fighters, Santana, and TLC created radio hits with staying power. Cuban musical ensemble Buena Vista Social Club became the subject of one of the all-time great music documentaries.¹²

There was additional acclaimed pop culture in 1999. Chris Rock was in the middle of one of comedy’s greatest runs as he created his own talk show, produced a stand-up special, made a hit record, hosted award shows, sold out arenas, and appeared in movies. Literature had standouts, too. Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories about Indian immigrants, became a runaway success. The Perks of Being a Wallflower challenged censors. Harry Potter mania gained steam with the Chamber of Secrets US release.

Cleary, many interesting and transformative events occurred in 1999 that extend beyond this book’s scope. My point is that despite this revered entertainment, low culture was plenty in-demand. And these lowbrow products teach us most about the world. But first, let’s examine what contributed to their popularity at that particular time.

The case studies I consider are about youth entertainment. Around the turn of the millennium, there were more teens than during the previous generation’s baby boom, and they were spending more money than ever. Teens run today’s economy, said a Warner Bros. marketing executive. There’s an innate feeling for moms and dads to please the teen, to keep the teen happy, to keep the teen home. And I think you can pretty much take that to the bank. The best-selling album of 1999 was Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, which broke the US record for most albums sold in its first week. The year’s most talked-about magazine cover featured Britney Spears laying on silk sheets in her underwear for Rolling Stone. On TV there was Freaks and Geeks, Dawson’s Creek, Party of Five, Boy Meets World, Felicity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, and Roswell.¹³

Media executives liked teensploitation because adolescent media products were low-risk investments produced cheaply and marketed extensively. Spice World parodied this development in a meta way. I’ve got an idea, says an aspiring producer pitching a movie idea. You’re gonna love it. It’s the Spice Girls. There’s five of them, and they’re singers. . . .  The producer gets cut off midstance. I love it, the studio executive interjects. The movie gets greenlighted before anyone finishes describing it because it’s obvious any project appealing to teens will succeed. Likewise, American Pie’s writer originally titled his script Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy Which Can Be Made for under $10 Million Which Studio Readers Will Likely Hate but I Think You Will Love. Made for just over $10 million, it grossed more than $200 million. Multiplexes in 1999 were full of teen movies, including Can’t Hardly Wait, She’s All That, Dick, Cruel Intentions, Never Been Kissed, Varsity Blues, Rushmore, The Virgin Suicides, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Jawbreaker, Idle Hands, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Adolescents have as much right as anyone to films of their choice, a right that has been served, wrote Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic. But now there’s a sense that teenage fingers are gripping the film world’s windpipe. In this environment, the Teen Choice Awards, Teen People, and CosmoGirl launched.¹⁴

The low culture discussed in this book shares commonalities with teensploitation. Namely, they’re produced cheaply or perceived to be young people’s entertainment. Let’s examine production costs. Dozens of talk shows, including Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake, sprung up because syndication companies realized that bare-bones talk could be profitably sold to markets around the world. When deregulations allowed broadcast networks to syndicate their own programs, the networks created reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother. Reality shows replaced famous actors with ordinary people, reduced the need for writers and designers, and favored freelance camera operators over seasoned editors and directors. Reality TV surged because production costs were recouped during initial showings and syndication revenues were nearly all profit.¹⁵

Beanie Babies began as $5 stuffed animals before morphing into financial speculation instruments. Pokémon set off a frenzy through issuing paper trading cards. Despite high ratings, few wrestlers earned paychecks comparable to pro athletes or TV stars due to unfavorable non-union contracts. Insane Clown Posse built a religious following by glorifying a low-class lifestyle that used discount soda like holy water. Porn became pervasive because producing, distributing, and accessing it became significantly cheaper when internet access expanded.¹⁶

Regarding low production costs, video games are an exception among the topics we’ve examined. It’s common for games to have budgets exceeding blockbusters. But what video games have in common with this book’s other topics is that during the 1990s, they were perceived as children’s entertainment. Adolescent pop culture—from comic books to rock-and-roll to video games—is usually perceived, at least initially, as low culture, and the nineties were no different. The typical gamer is now in their mid-thirties, in line with the US population’s median age, but that’s not the image gaming holds in many minds. Politicians, academics, and activist lawyers who tried to censor games uniformly portrayed video games as products for children. Even a Nintendo executive accused Sega of lying during a congressional hearing when Sega suggested gamers were getting older.¹⁷

Like video games, the subjects I cover were recognized or feared as being directed at youth. When Jerry Springer’s interviews with political figures drew poor ratings, Springer changed the show’s format, telling his producer, Let’s go young. The retooled circus caught on by attracting high school and college viewers. Young people are just much wilder in their personal lives, Springer said, much more open, much more emotional. So, the show started to go crazy. Reality TV leaned on youthful audiences when MTV pushed The Real World, Road Rules, and Jackass.¹⁸

Beanie Babies were designed as children’s toys before adults used them to develop cottage industries and crash e-commerce markets. Time called Pokémon a pestilential Ponzi scheme that engaged children through a multimedia and interactive barrage like no other before it. When wrestling viewership peaked in the late nineties, the average fan was twenty-three years old, about half the age of today’s wrestling viewers. Insane Clown Posse gained national recognition when they were expelled from their Disney label the day their album dropped. When the FBI designated ICP fans as a gang, the National Gang Intelligence Center reported that Juggalos consist of Caucasian males ages 16 to 26. Congress’s first attempt at regulating online speech was driven by the desire to shield children from viewing porn.¹⁹

Why were media conglomerates placing so much emphasis on cheaply made pop culture for young people? The late 1990s business environment, advertising targets, and technological distribution channels offer clues. Regarding the business environment, mergers and acquisitions were conducted at unprecedented levels in 1999. Telecom firm Vodafone’s takeover of Mannesmann remains the largest acquisition ever. Pfizer’s purchase of Warner-Lambert became the largest pharma acquisition ever. Viacom and CBS created the largest media merger at the time. Clear Channel purchased AMFM Inc. in the largest radio acquisition ever. This happened just after Walt Disney and Capital Cities/ABC combined forces and Time Warner merged with Turner Broadcasting. These mergers were made possible by deregulations that eliminated corporate ownership restrictions.²⁰

To make these deals happen, conglomerates took on piles of debt. Their massive size and investor obligations increased pressure on showing profits while reducing their ability to take programming and merchandising risks. They laid off record numbers of people. They cut budgets for standards-and-practices offices and curtailed public-interest programming. They replaced current affairs reporting with combative, opinionated news commentary. They sought cheaply produced entertainment that appeals to the highest number of people. By seeking the lowest common denominator, they chased fads and dragged standards down.²¹

This entertainment was overwhelming produced by and starring Caucasians, reflecting that whites accounted for more than four-fifths of the US population. You have to wonder if at one of their secret meetings the entertainment executives passed a motion reaffirming segregation, remarked Vanity Fair in September 1999. Because one of the most inescapably striking aspects of the youth boom is how prescriptively white it is. This entertainment was also usually created by men to appeal to men. Leading into 1999, less than one-fourth of primetime TV executive producers were women, and the numbers were even lower for writers and directors. As a young white male, I belonged to a demographic that marketers and entertainment producers overvalued.²²

If media concentration helps explain why cheap content proliferated, marketing assumptions help explain why people like me were targeted. Marketers sought young people because their habits aren’t as engrained as adults. The lifetime value kids represent to brands is high because they have so much of their life ahead of them. If you hook a fifteen-year-old on a particular soda brand, they could purchase that soda for eighty more years. Try to hook an eighty-year-old, whose habits are already set, and the clock on their contribution to the brand’s bottom line is already ticking. Aside from children, young men were targeted because marketers believed men held more disposable income and they could be swayed to spend it on packaged goods and luxury brands before marriage. These assumptions have changed since the 1990s after more women became ad execs, it became evident that women control a sizeable portion of purchasing decisions, and it became clearer that older demographics outspend youth in most consumer categories. Online advertising’s advanced targeting options trained advertisers to focus less on broad demographics and more on specific niches and consumer preferences. Nowadays the 18–35 male demographic is not the holy marketing grail. But leading up to and through the 1990s, it was.²³

This bias underscores Limp Bizkit’s engineered rise, Tom Green starring in movies, Howard Stern mania, Disney signing Insane Clown Posse, Jerry Springer beating Oprah, Jackass becoming a successful franchise, cable networks battling each other with pro wrestling, rampant sexual depictions in Hollywood and primetime, and the rise of shooting and fighting video games. Late nineties low culture wasn’t exclusively male, of course. There were popular Lifetime movies, dating shows, and girl groups that appealed to women. Many other products—Beanie Babies, virtual pets, New Age infomercials, reality TV, talk shows—appealed across demographics. But when looking back on nineties low culture, the overabundance of media targeted at young males is inescapable.

Media distribution changed significantly at the end of the century. TiVo and Napster launched in 1999, revolutionizing media access, file sharing, and on-demand viewing. This happened while print circulation held steady, radio sustained listenership, cable TV expanded, and the internet emerged. Mass media was becoming increasingly interconnected, and digital media hadn’t yet cannibalized traditional outlets. There were more entertainment channels than ever, requiring record amounts of programming. At the same time, there were fewer rules governing ownership and sensibilities.²⁴

Trashy entertainment reached new heights through heavy cross-promotion and online sharing. Media interconnectedness, youth marketing, and consolidating conglomerates pushing cheap content worked in tandem. When a talk show segment resulted in one guest murdering another, the story wasn’t confined to tabloids. The story began on Time Warner’s Jenny Jones show. After the murder led to a lawsuit, the story transferred to Warner’s Court TV. Following the verdict, it was covered by Warner’s CNN website. Viacom made Howard Stern an icon by producing and distributing his radio program, TV show, book, and movie. Through its various holdings, Disney manufactured numerous teenyboppers into stars. Corporate executives call this synergy. With 1990s entertainment, synergy usually produced profitable trash.

To say this entertainment was trashy does not imply that it wasn’t enjoyable or that it shouldn’t have been created. Far from it. These products were popular because people gravitated toward them. To hell with censors, sanctimonious critics, and moral reformers. The media conglomerates peddling trash gave the people what they wanted. By the 1990s the notion that high culture constituted some sort of superior reality, and that people who made it were superior beings, was pretty much in the toilet, wrote New Yorker contributor John Seabrook. When I get nostalgic, I have more fun recalling WCW angles, Miss Cleo commercials, American Pie custard thrusts, and Jerry Springer segments than I do discussing Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy winners. Judging from merch sales, TV ratings, and box office receipts, I am far from