American Pop: 1999: The Year at the Edge
American Pop: 1999 follows the year through the machinery of popular culture as well as the culture itself. HBO discovers what an original series can do for a subscription business. Teenagers voting for videos on TRL understand perfectly well that the pop stars they love have been manufactured. A movie trailer becomes an event months before anyone can see the movie. Pok mon cards turn elementary-school recess into a functioning market. A college student writes a program that makes finding a song easier than buying the album containing it. Television can still gather tens of millions of people at an appointed hour, even as the conditions that made that possible are beginning to loosen.
Along the way are The Sopranos, Britney Spears, The Matrix, Columbine, John F. Kennedy Jr., Woodstock '99, The Phantom Menace, Napster, Dreamcast, the WTO protests, The Blair Witch Project, the extraordinary movie season of 1999, and the long-promised computer crisis that ended with the lights still on. They appear here in the company they actually kept: trade reporting, advertising campaigns, lawsuits, ratings, box-office numbers, fan communities, corporate decisions, magazine covers, government briefings, and arguments whose outcomes were still unknown.
Drawing heavily on contemporary sources, Taylor Prescott reconstructs a culture already fascinated by its own date and remarkably busy inventing new ways to make, sell, circulate, and argue about popular culture.
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