Happy new year dummies! If any of you met me at the Platform NYE party it wasn’t me, it was a guy called Ned Biggs who looks a lot like me, albeit slightly less good-looking and charming. He was sullying my good name by accepting drinks on my behalf and probably goosing girls’ arses or going through people’s coats looking for money.
This isn’t some “It was my evil twin I swear” story, he looks like this:
Uncanny isn’t it? He got mistaken for me three times. BEWARE CHEAP IMITATIONS (he has a weird nose compared to me).
Anyway, here are ten things that I will remember about the last ten years. It’s a gross nostalgia piece but I’m easing myself back into the new working year with a simple one…
Remember when social networking was really disorganized and pages took ages to load? 2004 was a great year for that. There were loads of flaws in the set up which is why it’s an internet ghost town these days. But some things about Myspace were cool, like how it was acceptable to cold call hot babes in a way it totally isn’t on facebook, and it was good that you could see if a message you sent had been read or not, cos then you knew who gave a shit and who just ignored you. Facebook was initially just for nerds who hated having fun but eventually everyone realised that having everyone you knew in alphabetical order instead of the order they joined the site made things way easier to deal with.
Minidiscs came and went
Minidiscs were the 90s/early 2000s 8-tracks I suppose. They were a huge deal; people had them in their cars and their living rooms. It was easy to copy CDs onto them back when laptops didn’t all have burners, but then Ipods came along in Oct 2001 (right before 9/11, coincidence? I think not…. JUST KIDDING) and fucked the minidisc’s shit right up. I don’t really know if this was worth including in this list, but I found a bunch of my minidisc mixes at home over Christmas and they looked so cool, all day glo and whatnot. It was funny how I managed to fit a 20 track list of songs onto the postage stamp sized label that they had on them too. Ah, memories… (minidiscs were shit).
Downloading killed porn (and music)
I remember in 1999 trying to download an 8 second clip of a penis entering an arsehole and waiting at my parents’ PC, 16 year old dick in hand, for a fucking half hour. Now if the entire 34 minute anal scene won’t load in less than a minute, so I can flick through to make sure it’s the kind of thing I want to bust a nut to, I’m not interested.
Or I panic about how my laptop’s getting old and how I’m going to have to shell out a grand for a new one, then I completely lose my erection (fiscal responsibility is a real boner killer for me). It’s a shame that now porn stars aren’t getting paid as much because of all the free porn and the hot ones will go onto legit modelling or something and we’ll be left with the toothless methheads and the fat rotters. All this applies to music too btw.
Garage was totally gross. It was all slick and r’n’b-ish and everyone involved in it wore a poloneck and horrible loafers. It was so sophisticated and smug it made me want to vomit all over their Audis (although they would have beat the shit out of me). So Solid Crew were cool and pretty gangster, but they still had that smooth r’n’b vocal thing. More Fire Crew were really getting there but then kids started making tracks on that Playstation music game and shouting really fucking loudly into cheap microphones about stabbing. This was exciting and scary like sex with someone who has been to prison for a violent crime - which is what happened to many a middle class white girl at some of those early raves.
Overall, I suppose 9/11 was a bad thing, but wasn’t TV on the day fucking amazing? All those live streams (I even saw the second plane hit the towers cos my dad woke me up in time) and everyone trying to work out who was behind it live on TV (they took ages to work out how to pronounce and spell Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaeda). It was the most gripping TV ever. That day set the tone for a decade of gnarly things happening in the world live on TV with a red ticker tape of fresh information running along the bottom of the screen, and days off work cos all the buses have been cancelled in London. Big news days are the best.
NME was really big
The following things were really lame about British indie music in the 00s: Trilbys, ties on polo shirts (ties with vests were the worst), being ‘shambolic’, singing in a cockney accent, Grindie, songs about London being beautiful, Peaches Geldof, braces, pointy shoes, acoustic sessions in flats, songs about nicknames and The Mighty Boosh. Everyone involved in any of these things were fucking dickheads and in 2004 I got really into rap.
New Era hats were on people’s heads
New Era hats were fucking cool, thanks to grime they got really big in like 2005/6 and everyone got a different one. I always had a Boston Red Sox ones because they just come with a big B on them and my name is Bob. They made me look way tougher than I am and they were fun to swap with your pals, like Pokemon for grownups. But around the time boring super nice MCs like JME started rapping about going to university, the hats started to get a little bit shit. Batman and Mario hats got issued and everyone wearing them started to look like kids TV presenters. (Oh, also remember this as the decade they let a woman with one hand be a kids TV presenter – surely that’s the very definition of progress?)
Girls’ Jeans were on people’s legs
Remember how on our quest for having the tightest jeans we all just went for it and got girls’ jeans? That was weird, huh? I wore girls’ jeans for two years, why did no one say anything? I have a pot belly and a fat neck because I eat incredibly badly so I looked like a cartoon of a frog all the time, and if I wore trainers any bigger than Reebok Workouts I looked like a golf club. I got really paranoid that I would look short if I wore a slightly wider cut of trouser and wore them for an extra 6 months past everyone else until my girlfriend convinced me I had to move with the times.
There was no proper name for the decade
Look what just happened when I google imaged ‘Naughties’! We’ve just spent a decade being in a decade with no name! Idiots have called the last ten years the naughties, which is ridiculous. You’ve got to ask yourself what are historians on serious documentaries about the War On Terror going to call this decade in years to come? Imagine if they were talking about some heavy shit or other to do with WMDs and they had to utter what is essentially a word only used to chastise a child or in sexual situations (it’s bad that those are the two uses?) I propose calling this decade the 00’s, pronounced the zero zeros, a fitting title given the role the binary code has had in the development in technology. Makes sense right? People should listen to me more.
When this decade started out I was 16, I hadn’t even done it with a girl. I only wore big punk t shirts and I watched South Park all day long. Now I have at least done it with a girl. Boom boom. BUT SERIOUSLY I’ve done nothing I thought I was going to do by now. I’m 26 and I haven’t even shot a wild boar in the head with a Magnum .44 (that’s a private joke but also something I absolutely intend to do). Where does the time go? I’ve got wrinkles, rent to pay, I have to watch what I eat and I worry about my tax return, but I still listen to Metallica and Dr Dre most days and think about girls kissing each other in their knickers ALL DAY LONG.
Fuck you naughties, you turned me from a boy to a man and I didn’t want that shit to happen.