Nowadays, people's digital lives seem to meet their yearly conclusion in the same format(s). The blogosphere is drowning in "Top X" lists (a fad that has claimed my attention as well), reflections, predictions, promises and random ramblings that somehow try to mark the transition to a new decade.
As I'm calmly sipping my tea in a backwards mountain village in rural Austria, I flick through A-Trak's fav sneakers, Pitchfork's top 100 of the decade and a handful of the abovementioned personal reflections and promises (e.g. random ramblings). Yes indeed, I feel compelled to add to this body of procrastinatory (if that's even a word) literature with my own views on last year or the coming ones, but I am unsure how.
I'll just try to merge the above categories, creating a smorgasbord (this is an actual word! try ordering a super supreme at any American pizzeria and you'll understand) of information that might or might not entertain you in the last hours of 2009 (or the first of 2010).
Like an extended essay, I feel like I should have started writing this thingy a while ago - how can one succinctly summarize a decade with only a few hours to spare before the next one hits? On the other hand, the proximity of the deadline calls for a certain amount of inspiration and creativity (not necessarily in that order) for the project to succeed in any way... Just like an extended essay :) Because I want to spare you the pains of having to read thousands of nice words and woolly explanations disguising badly planned argumentation, this massive reflection won't be as massive as the term massive usually suggests. Here goes.
Introduction is ovah! Time for the reflection, the promises, the predictions and the favorites of the 00's.
THE TWO THOUSANDS
(really, what the fuck are we going to call them in ten years?)
For me, the 00's were an era of transitions. Transitions in space (I moved 3 times), transitions in time (it's hard to believe, but I grew older), transitions in style, and transitions in life. I hardly remember what kept me busy a full ten years ago, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with computers, books and a crapload of other paraphernalia we used to call 'geeky'.
Here's my most important memory from those days, one that completely changed my life.
Yeah, I was one of those swept up in the madness that followed the release of this video. This video, and this video alone, got me into music and dance the way I experience it now. Though we've come a long way since the Bomfunk MC's, they marked the starting point of my epic journey through hip-hop, b-boying and electronic music.
Pretty soon after I started breaking down my parents' living room I discovered the internet. I bet you can all remember that shit 10 years ago - most of us didn't even have it, and those that did either had crappy dial-up or 'super high-tech ISDN'. This was back in the dark ages of Compuserve and MSN 2.0, a time before Facebook, before Hyves, even before CU2.nl (if you even remember that!).
The internet taught me (im)proper English, a great deal of b-boying (even though I wouldn't fully understand it until after my stay in Brussels), and it gave me an opportunity to virtually travel the world. I embarked on a massive cyberjourney and, truth be told, I'm still sailing. The cool part is that there is no final destination to this exploration, even though I have to admit the internet was a lot more 'adventurous' a couple of years ago.
You guys remember when Newgrounds just came online? Or the birth of 4chan? Or when you spazzed out over your friends opening your cd drive with a hacking app you could download anywhere? When we were still searching with Altavista instead of google? When every geocities webpage was the shit? When you discovered that you could play Super Nintendo games on your computer with the right emulator?
Maybe you don't, maybe you do, but I was a huge nerd and I loved every part of it. Who needs a social life if you can infiltrate the fucking Yankees base with your double-pistol wielding Tanya (DA!), who cares about playing outside if you can record your voice and speed it up 40 times so you sound like a chipmunk, who cares about baking fucking cupcakes if you can read comics online. It's a shame we lost that childlike sense of wonder over the past decade, because the internet was and still is absolutely amazing. I lost it too, because I eventually became way more intrigued with the instant physical effects of alcohol and the ensuing social interactions. Which can also be, by any standards, pretty amazing - or interesting, at the least.
Anyway, here we get to the early 00's, say 2000-2003 - the years that The Offspring was the norm on the cool-o-meter, when nu-metal died out and grunge had a little revival (all those Nirvana-shirt wearing skatepunks...), when Dutch trance was at its gayest and when we collectively stopped watching Pokemon and Dragonball Z. I kind of surfed through these shallow waves on my not-so-bboy-yet board, trying to make sense of what it meant to 'belong'.
When we were 13, life seemed so damn hard, probably because it was so damn digital. You were cool or you were absolutely lame, a fact for which you deserved to be bullied. You listened to skatepunk or you listened to hip-hop, but in any case, you had to listen to the Peppers. You dressed preppy or you dressed like a bum. With Jackass coming to our screens, a new era of retardation took over high school fashion and cool-kid behavior. Here and there someone picked up a guitar, a skateboard or a soccer-ball - all that mattered in this stage of life was staying as far away from a classroom as your schedule permitted, and investing as much time as you could in what would become your defining hobbies.
I saw my friends become musicians, artists, skaters and scholars. We have landed somewhere in the time that The Return of the King was released, and all the girls in your classroom had a poster of Viggo Mortensen and/or a whiny Elijah Wood next to their pony pictures and Hitzone CD's. Uh-huh, with those lesbian TATU chicks, that horrible 'Year 3000' shit and 50 cent's entry on the scene. Can't believe it's already 7 years ago that we went 'In Da Club' and straight out again, but somehow he still makes a lot of money. Next time someone shoots him, fucking aim. Oh yeah, Avril Lavigne's sk8rboi kind of wrapped up the whole skatepunk fad and completely stamped it uncool again. Didn't really matter that she was hot, real skatepunks just did not want to be affiliated with 12 year old girls trying to be badass by wearing safety pins instead of earrings.
I slowly and reluctantly followed my new Belgian friends into mayhem, dropping my pants to acceptable levels and ditching midday classes to buy sandwiches and waffles in the village. We got into basketball, snowboarding, and for some reason we started reading hardcore fantasy - in English. Enter 2004-2005, the years of the Shapeshifters, Bush's re-election, Spongebob, 'the first beers', the heartbreaks and first kisses, N.E.R.D. and Dragosta Din Tei. When b-boying turned into a culture I was part of rather than a hobby, when I first passed out in the middle of a street in The Hague puking my brains out, when I took a midnight swim in a pond in Brussels, and when I first went to Lowlands.
Yeah, eventually you got bored of that skateboard and watching reruns of Friends, so you started causing serious trouble with your older friends. The first ciggy, the first handle of vodka, and the first concerts. The end of the first half of the first decade of the first century of the third millenium A.D. was drenched in the type of drama only 15 year old kids can think of, in (my) daily life as well as (inter)national politics. Nevertheless, I had a badass time travelling overseas to visit my American brother from another mother and meeting some of my future best friends.
In all these years I acquired a certain taste for eclectic music, a direct result from the influence of my decidedly 'rocky' Belgian friends and my love for b-boying and hip-hop culture. The bands that marked my mid-2000's included Soulive, Looptroop, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jurassic 5. All this during the era of Lange Frans & Baas B, De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Daddy Yankee and Schnappi Das Kleine Krokodil. No - in terms of legit, groovy pop culture the 2000's were bleak times, with the exception of possibly De Jeugd.
Fate took me from the relative safety of my villa in Brussels to that desolate shithole I came to love so much... Dizzy Den Helder. Oh yes, some of my fondest memories of the past 10 years were in the lamest of places - the Den Helder town square. By this time, Warcraft 3 was gathering dust in a box while I raided the local bike shop for cardboard so we could go Style Wars all the way. With my new partners in crime, I founded the Den Helder b-boying scene and I started hanging out at a small bar in one of the dodgier areas of town: the Bliksem. 2006 it was! Basshunter, Gnarls Barkley, Juanes and Fedde le Grand. Doesn't seem that long ago, does it? Oh man, the golden days of Bittorrent. My music and movie collection exploded, and I frequently visited Amsterdam for gigs and, well, Amsterdam. This was before Fall Out Boy hit the European scene... I remember the 4th of February '06, walking through rainy Amsterdam to check out FOB in the Melkweg. And Atmosphere was playing in the room next door - FML, in hindsight.
Time fucking flew by, and I floated away from mainstream culture bit by bit. Heck, by now I have to look up hitlists of the following years to even remember what was playing back then. I stopped watching TV, I stopped listening to the radio, I basically disconnected from whatever was going on in the world. I wish I could come with more savvy references to the highlights of 2006-7, but it was kinda boring/terrible as far as world news went. Milosevic died in The Hague before ever finishin his trial, a kid got killed in Brussels Central Station for his iPod by two other kids, Zidane headbutted Matterazzi in a historical final World Cup match (one of my favorite moments of the decade, I have to say) and the cinemas were dominated by Borat, V for Vendetta, that gay cowboy movie and Zwartboek.
Woah - 2006 went by already?! Fuck me, I'm graduating from high school. By this time, I find myself hanging out with a stable group of insane people from Den Helder and a few from Belgium, I arranged for some marines (courtesy of daddy, hehe) to kidnap my teachers for our senior year prank, I hosted intense parties in my attic and garden and I traveled to Italy and France for those inevitable senior year getaways. Finals came and went, and I was accepted into the venerable institution of University College Utrecht, another major transition.
Nothing much happened in the world in '07. Geert Fucking Wilders entered the spotlight, my addiction to Coheed & Cambria and the Mars Volta reached new epic heights, I went to New Orleans to help rebuild after Katrina and Rihanna released Umbrella. Ella. Ella. Ey.
As my last high school summer oozed by, I was sucked into the drunken vortex of college life. Those introduction days are awesome and memorable in their own vague, drunken way. You can't really call something you can't remember memorable, yet Introweek '07 definitely still stands as one of the most epic weeks of debauchery the decade has seen. These were the days that jumpstyle fell out of fashion (but Jekyll and Hyde still released new tracks), Di-Rect still sadly tried to make a dent in the Dutch pop market, and 300 and Superbad were released. Yeah, 2007 was all sex, drugs and rock & roll - with doner kebab at 4 AM, obviously.
My turntables were discovered by a frat member and before I knew it I was DJ'ing on campus, a pastime that would eventually take over a large part of my life. I joined frats (plural, ahuh), committees, initiatives, seminars, crews and parties and for the first time in my short life, I honestly fell in love. 2007 was by far the best, awesomest, most gnarly and tubular year of the decade, even with Umbrella-ella-ey.
2008 marked the decline of all the awesomeness that had been building up over the past years, and finally culminated in a disastrous summer. Wish that it were just personal grief, but no, the whole world had to suffer: Peter R de vries brought his Joran drama to international TV, a man called Fritzl is revealed to have abused his daughter for 24 years in a dank cellar in Austria, Spain winning the European Championship, the credit crunch in October, and Katy Perry releasing I Kissed A Girl. Terrible, terrible things in 2008 - with one notable exception, an ironic point of light in an otherwise completely failed year: The Dark Knight. This movie might stand as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the 21st century, who knows - at least Heath Ledgers' iconic role as the Joker certainly will, may he rest in peace.
Time went by far too slowly for my taste, but I couldn't speed it up. Another barrier was broken when Obama won the '08 presidential elections and America spent a few weeks in complete political upheaval. A black president, wow. As of yet, the man still has a lot to prove, but like Robin Williams said in his last show: "America was on this drug called 'fuck it' for the past 8 years, and we're just getting out of that trip" - he implied, correctly in my opinion, that we should all mellow the fuck out a bit before forcing each other to make some dumb decisions again. As the world economy crumbles, the year soberly fades into the next... And we have landed in 2009.
Ok, I don't want to do 2009 in words anymore. My experiences in America have been sufficiently blogged about, and my other adventures are far too numerous to describe in detail. I would share them all if I could, but this post is getting too long as it is. Therefore, I will satisfy your tired eyes with a bunch of pictures of 2009 - the good, the bad, and the ugly, but still my favorite moments of the year.
Sometimes, pictures tell more of the story than words possibly could.
To all the sweet people and ninja's I've met the past ten years: I wish you a crazy next decade filled with excitement, adventure and possibly a glass of alcohol or two. I hope to be part of it as much as I have been in the previous years, because it was quite a fucking ride.
Here's to the Stray Cats, Decimus, the Four Musketeers, the Bliksem gang and all the other notable figures that shaped the Two Thousands. Happy New Year, let's make it wild.
... If you're about 20 years old and have lived in the Benelux for the past decade, your life might have taken some similar turns, or you might recognize some of the references. Then again, you might not at all, but I hope to have taken the reader on somewhat of a memory train through the 00's - be it an extremely biased one, a memory train nonetheless :) If you made it this far, I can only thank you for your attention, and please leave a comment. Thanks!
Coen
