Episode 197: 1999 The Year In Pop Culture(5-28-2025)

This week we're gonna party like it's 1999!

Episode 197 is all about what was going on in the world of pop culture in the year 1999. Music, television, weird news stories, and more will be brought to you in this show.

It begins with a look back at the world of television in 1999. New shows(Family Guy), hit shows(Friends), underrated gems(Freaks and Geeks), and more. There is also a look at the overall landscape of the industry as a whole.

We go way back in the day for a deep dive into music in 1999. The return of pop, new teen idols, the end of Woodstock, the rise of digital music, and so much more.

This week's Top 5 is chock full of weird and wacky news stories from the year. Chimp show protests, geese v. rollercoasters, and the Y2K panic are included.

There is of course a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around what made a Cape Cod summer special back then.

This entire episode is a celebration of the birthday of my oldest niece, Kaleigh. I hope that you enjoy it! 

Don't forget to become a free member and to go vote in the polls for Listener's Choice Episode 200 over on Patreon!

Helpful Links from this Episode

• Purchase My New Book Cape Cod Beyond the Beach!
• In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod Travel Guide(2nd Edition)
• Hooked By Kiwi - Etsy.com
• DJ Williams Music
• KeeKee's Cape Cod Kitchen
• Christopher Setterlund.com
• Cape Cod Living - Zazzle Store
• Subscribe on YouTube!
• Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog
• Webcam Weekly Wrapup Podcast
• CJSetterlundPhotos on Etsy
• Cape Cod Baseball League
• Cape Cod Melody Tent

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello, world! And welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 197. This is a very special episode, a return to looking at a specific year in pop culture. This week we're going to do 1999. We're gonna look at television, we're gonna look at music, some weird and funny news stories. You'll get this week in history and time capsule centered around 1999. All of it has to do with the birthday, the birth date of my oldest niece Kaleigh. I thought if I can't give her a million dollars, the next best thing I can do is create a podcast episode totally dedicated to her year of birth. So everybody, sit back, relax, cast your minds back to the end of the 20th century as we take a deep dive into 1999, the year in pop culture, coming up now on episode 197 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I usually start this off by saying, What are we gonna talk about this week? But I think I pretty much described it. 1999. Everything. Well, except maybe the song 1999 by Prince, because that's from 1982. So how's everybody doing this week? Where you are? I hope the weather Memorial Day weekend was better than it was on Cape Cud, at least to start. Last week on the podcast, I had windows open, I had a fan going, I had to edit out all kinds of buzzing during the podcast because of the fan. This week, windows closed, no fan. As of recording time, it's 47 degrees and cloudy. Last night I had to get winter clothes on because obviously I've had the heat off for a month because you know it's spring and it's the end of May, but I can't complain because in a few weeks it's gonna be nice and warm, then it's gonna be too hot and humid, so I'll complain about that. A big thank you to all of you who tune into the podcast, who share it, who let others know, check out this wacky guy's Gen X Nostalgia podcast. I have so much fun doing these, recording them. Editing's not as much fun, but sharing them, promoting them, even the research. It's constant research. I'll be watching YouTube videos, and an idea will pop in my head, and I'll pause it and go throw it in one of my many Word documents that have to do with the podcast. Also, don't forget, go to Patreon, become a member, free member, and vote in the polls for what's going to be in Listener's Choice episode 200 coming up in a few weeks. You out there, you're voting for everything that's going to be on the show, except for the host. You can't get rid of me. The only way someone different will host the show is if I whack my head and lose my memory and then have some kind of different voice on here. Severe concussions aside, you're stuck with me, but you can vote on whatever you want for that episode. The polls are up on Patreon. As I said, it's open for all members, free and paying. And if you want to become a paying subscriber to my Patreon channel, you can do that. It's so much appreciated. Five dollars a month gets you access to bonus podcast episodes, including one that's going to be going up in a few days, and access to the remastered without a map live streams that I used to do for the podcast. They were on Instagram. I think I did somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 of them. And of course, I cannot start this show off proper without thanking my Patreon subscribers. Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Marguerite, Neglectoid, Crystal, Mike. You are my biggest backers, my biggest fans, my biggest supporters. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for literally putting your money where your mouth is. And let's get into it. So, as I've said a few times, this podcast is 1999, the year in pop culture, created for the birth week, the birth month, the birth year of my oldest niece Kaylee. So let's start it off by looking at TV in the year 1999. A running theme that you're going to be finding here in the year 1999 edition of the podcast is the year 2000, Y2K. It was an interesting time. Y2K was real, it was a real fear. And here we were straddling the line between two centuries, the 20th going into the 21st. And in the world of television, it was very similar. Television was straddling two different eras, with one foot rooted in the analog traditions of network broadcasting, the other one stepping towards a digital on-demand future. In the decades leading up to the year 2000, there was lots of chatter about what the world would be like, what kind of innovations we'd have. For the most part, it was kind of underwhelming. There wasn't anything crazy like the cartoons or TV shows from the 50s and 60s said the year 2000 would be. But we also hadn't been conquered by aliens, so I think it was a fair trade. In many ways, the year 1999 in television, it was a final snapshot of the industry before streaming, smartphones. So let's start it off by looking at some of the new shows that made an impact in 1999. I would think many of you out there, if I said what was the biggest show to start in 1999, you would probably say The Sopranos. This television show, it changed the landscape forever. Created by David Chase, a story of mob boss Tony Soprano struggling with anxiety and family life. It blurred the line between TV and cinema. It was on HBO. It had the theme song by A3, Woke Up This Morning, which is on my workout playlist to this day. The Sopranos ran for six seasons and 86 total episodes between 1999 and 2007. It had that confusing, divisive series finale with Tony Soprano in the cafe with Journeys Don't Stop Believing and It Goes Black. It made a star out of James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, who I remember playing just this creepy scumbag in the film 8mm with Nicolas Cage. Incredibly, 1999 was also the year of the debut of Family Guy on the Fox Network. This was a very different animated show created by Seth McFarlane. It premiered after Super Bowl 33. I love Family Guy. It was a show that you had to watch it more than once to catch all of the jokes and the cutaway gags. The show centered around the Griffin family living in the fictional town of Cohog, Rhode Island. Peter Griffin, Lois, Meg, Chris, and the baby Stewie and their dog Brian. The show is still on to this day, but what's incredible is it was canceled in 2002 because of how controversial it was. Luckily, the DVD sales of the first couple of seasons were so good that Fox couldn't ignore it, and in 2005 they brought Family Guy back, and it's been a staple of their lineup ever since. I haven't watched Family Guy in years. I got into The Walking Dead, which aired at the same exact time, and so I kind of fell out of the most recent seasons. But all you have to do is go on YouTube and find any sort of Family Guy compilation of just clips of jokes, and you'll see why it's been so popular for so long. It also doesn't hurt that I can do a Stewie Griffin impression. I was able to kind of get the George Harrison one down based on him being on The Simpsons, where he comes up to Homer, he's Hello Homer, I'm Jules Harrison.

Speaker: 8:37

And I said, Oh, that's pretty good. So you take Jules Harrison and you turn him up a little like this, and then suddenly you've got Stewie Griffin. Hey Brian, do we have to go outside and walk ya?

Speaker 1: 8:49

Granted, it's not great, but still, it is good for some laughs at work. A show that was way ahead of its time, and it was short-lived was Freaks and Geeks on NBC. It was created by Judd Apatau, and it was a teen dramedy. It became a cult favorite for the realistic portrayal of high school life in the 1980s. The show launched the careers of James Franco, Seth Rogan, Jason Siegel. It's wild. Freaks and Geeks only had 18 episodes, but it's 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. It is seen as maybe a number one as far as shows that got canceled too soon, were too ahead of their time. When I think of the greatest one-season shows ever, it's usually a toss-up between Freaks and Geeks and probably my so-called life. 1999 also saw the debut of SpongeBob SquarePants, who lived in a pineapple under the sea. I remember seeing this show for the first time visiting my friend Barry at his parents' house. We were in college at the time, and his youngest sister, gosh, she was probably five or six, and she was watching SpongeBob. And I remember saying to Barry, This reminds me a bit of Renan Stimpy. Like, you wouldn't feel bad watching it in college because it felt a little more adult than it was letting on. SpongeBob SquarePants now has more than 300 episodes on Nickelodeon. And I think those characters were important for the kids of the time. And there are other new shows that came out in 1999, but we'd be here forever. We've got to move on to what were the big shows, the juggernaut shows. Longtime listeners to the podcast will know every time I do, or most times I do, time capsules from the 90s, ER is always number one or usually number one. So that was a huge show, the medical drama with the fast-paced storytelling, emotional depth, and occasional big name guest stars. The show ended up being on for 15 years and 331 episodes. If you weren't a fan of ER, you were probably a fan of Friends, which in 1999 it was in its fifth season and at the peak of its popularity and importance. Friends was a show where the cast was the ones that they finally got paid appropriately for the importance and popularity of the show. By the end of season five, the ensemble cast, they were getting about $125,000 an episode. And in the last two seasons of the show, everyone was making a million dollars per episode. You also had giant comedies like Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond. There was even smaller shows with passionate fan bases like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And of course, I couldn't do 1999 in television without giving you a few forgotten or weird TV shows that came and went. There was Manchester Prep, which was a show based on the movie Cruel Intentions. It lasted a whopping three episodes. There was Family Rules, which was on the UPN network about a basketball coach raising his four daughters after his wife's death. This show lasted a whopping six episodes. There was Oh Grow Up. And there's a talking dog. It lasted 11 episodes. Finally, there was two of a kind. This show was on ABC, and it starred Mary Kate and Ashley Olson in their first TV project since Full House. It lasted 22 episodes and was considered a massive fail because of the star power of the Olsen twins. Side note here. So there were plenty of TV shows from the WB and UPN networks that were just total bombs and fails. I could have made a huge list just based on those, but what I'm gonna do is eventually top five lists for the worst, weirdest shows from WB and UPN. So don't worry, I didn't forget any of those. It was just really low-hanging fruit, and I wanted to put some effort into my research. So that was what was on TV. What about television as an industry in general? While the internet wasn't yet a mainstream viewing platform, it was beginning to shape fandoms and buzz around shows in 1999. You had growing numbers of fan websites, online forums, and spoiler culture, which that became way more prevalent in the late 2000s to now. 1999 saw some trends and changes, like the rise of premium cable. HBO had been gaining ground, and then when the Sopranos came out, that cemented the idea that cable could rival or surpass the networks and quality of shows. And the Sopranos success started to shift TV towards darker and more complex storytelling. There was an increase in nostalgia and youth culture, with networks leaning heavily on teen dramas like Dawson's Creek and Felicity, nostalgia shows like that 70 show, which I loved. These were geared towards Gen X like me, millennials. And like I said a minute ago, this was when the WB and UPN networks were trying to make their mark. They never got above a niche market, but they threw everything at the wall. You'll see when I do these top fives eventually on those shows, you're gonna be like, I can't believe that was a real show on TV. In 1999, you were starting to get HD TV. It wasn't really until the mid to late 2000s that HD TV became more of the norm. You also had a lot of shows that were beginning to be shot in widescreen format. In 1999, an average new HD TV would cost you somewhere in the range of $5,500. That's kind of an average number. So even though the vast majority of people couldn't afford that, the FCC was making stations start to broadcast their shows in HD as well for those people. I don't think I saw an HD TV in person in someone's home for several years. You also in television had more globalization with the success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the TV show. It proved that international formats could be adopted for American audiences. This would open the door for later hits like Survivor and Big Brother, which debuted in the US in the year 2000. I remember in 1999, still having the big boxy TV. We had a good cable package, so we had a lot of cable TV. We had our gateway computers still, so I could surf the internet slowly and find clips of TV shows or movies that would take forever to load. And with my niece Kaylee, as a newborn, it was a lot of Sesame Street, and then later on Teletubbies and Barney. But that was going but that was what was going on in the world of television in 1999. This week in history, we are going back 580 years. No, I'm just kidding. We're obviously going still to 1999. It was Memorial Day weekend on Cape Cod. So I want to give a little bit of what it was like on Cape Cod Memorial Day, summer of 1999. You're coming down, crossing over the bridges. Maybe you're gonna stay somewhere for the weekend. You could go to dinner at Penguin Seagrill or Alberto's Restaurante. Maybe get ice cream at Cream Cone or Lil Caboose. Naturally, all the beaches are there. I don't think the weather would be great for swimming the end of May on Cape Cod. Still kind of chilly the water was. Mini golf, bike trails, hanging out at the Cape Cod Mall when it was rainy out. The two big things that I wanted to talk about for this week in history. First is the Cape Cod Melody Tent. This is one of the biggies for a lot of people in the summer, whether you live on Cape Cod or you visit. So who was playing the Melody Tent in 1999? There was a lot of big names. Chris Isaac, who had the song Wicked Game nine or ten years before this, so he was still riding that wave. Tom Jones, who obviously had It's Not Unusual and What's New Pussycat. Little Feet, who's a Southern rock band, they had songs like Dixie Chicken. Weird Al Yankovic, the king of parody music. And if you need to know more about Weird Al Yankovic, you can go back to episode 55. I did a whole segment on him. You also had Willie Nelson playing the Melody Tent, which he's got tons of songs. If you don't know him, I'd be shocked. Peter Frampton, who had the songs Show Me the Way and Baby I Love Your Way, that Frampton Comes Alive album. Bruce Hornsby, who had the songs That's Just the Way It Is, and Mandolin Rain. 80s Megastar Cindy Lopper, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, and so many others. Joan Baez, who's a folk music legend. And of course, you had the annual WWF Wrestling Show. The one in 1999 was Maine evented by Kane versus The Big Show, who had just defected to the WWF from WCW. Ironically, I didn't go to that show. I went to WWF at the Melody Tent in 97 and 98. So you could come down to Cape Cod in the summer of 1999, go to the Cape Cod Melody Tent, or you could spend some time watching the Cape Cod Baseball League. I feel like the Melody Tent and the Cape League are two of the big Cape Cod traditions that we who live here don't mind going to. There are some touristy things that were like, well, we locals don't do that. But Melody Tent and Cape League, a lot of us do. The Cape League in 1999 had a lot of future major leaguers playing on the rosters, including future all-stars like Chris Capuano, David De Jesus, Brad Hopp, and bigger stars like Chase Utley and Mark Tashera. The MVP for 1999 was Lance Necro, who played for the Orleans Cardinals. Outstanding pitcher was Rick Currier, who played for the Chatham A's. Outstanding pro prospect was Mark Teshera, who also played for the Orleans Cardinals. I'll link to CapeCodleague.com where you can go through all of the history and the awards. A big thing for those of you listening that have never been to a Cape League game that might be coming down this summer, these games are all free, quote unquote. All of the 10 teams in the league are nonprofit, so they work with donations. So yes, you could go to a Cape League game and just sit and not pay, but it is nice if you even chip in a few dollars. So that was what was going on in Cape Cod history in 1999, but we've got to do a time capsule here. So obviously, we're going back 26 years to May 31st, 1999. What was going on in the world of pop culture back then? Well, let's find out. The number one song was Livin' La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin. Boy, you talk about a song that reminds me of my little niece Kaylee in her formative years. Her mom, my sister Kate, would play this all the time. Ricky Martin already had kind of a name because he was in the boy band Minudo in the 1980s. The song was off of Ricky Martin's self-titled fifth album, and it was number one for five weeks. Overall, combining his Spanish and English albums, Ricky Martin has sold more than 70 million copies of his music. The number one movie was Star Wars Episode One, The Phantom Menace. Boy, what a divisive movie this was. Super, super hyped, and probably the lowest rated movie in the Star Wars franchise. It details the rise of Anakin Skywalker when he's a little little boy. The movie is 54% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and it made a shade over one billion dollars on a budget of 115 million. So it's obviously a massive, massive hit movie, but with diehard Star Wars fans, it's very low on the list of ones to see. It's like you know the importance as far as the overall story goes, but Jar Jar Binks kind of ruins it for a lot of people. I bet if you ask a hundred Star Wars fans what they liked least about the whole series, it would probably be Jar Jar Binks. The number one TV show was Home Improvement. This was the finale of the Tim Allen show. It lasted eight seasons and 204 episodes, with this week being the 204th. It's a quintessential 90s show about Tim the Toolman Taylor and his television show, his family, and the stupid monkey noise he would make when he got excited for his tools. So we'll wrap up this week in history looking at 1999 with some celebrities who were born that year. Singer Sabrina Carpenter, rapper Lil Nas X, actor Chandler Riggs from The Walking Dead, basketball player Luka Doncic, and football player Brock Purdy. Celebrities who died in 1999 include football legend Walter Payton, New York Yankees baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, basketball icon Wilt Chamberlain, professional golfer Payne Stewart, WWF wrestler Owen Hart, John F. Kennedy Jr., filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, singer Curtis Mayfield, and singer Dusty Springfield. A few of the companies founded in 1999 include Cricket Wireless, Rockstar Games, who created the Grand Theft Auto series, Appital Productions, which created Anchorman, 40-year-old Virgin, Super Bad, and also founded in 1999 was Napster. Whatever happened to them. I have a feeling in a few minutes when we dive into music in 1999, we might hear a little bit about Napster. But that wraps up another time capsule, another This Week in History centered around 1999. Now we get a fun and wacky top five as we look at weird and funny events and news stories from 1999. Some of these I promise I'm gonna have a hard time getting through without laughing, so let's get into them. Yeah, so this is the part of the show that's a little bit of the lighter side, laughs, foolishness. As this top five, we're gonna look at some weird slash funny events, news stories from 1999. Believe me, there are some definite head scratchers, ones that, like I said, I'll be trying hard not to laugh through the whole thing. This will be like most of the top fives, where I've got a few honorable mentions, the top fives in no particular order. It's interesting when you're starting to look for weird or unusual news stories from a particular time, just the beginning of that research, kind of seeing what the internet thinks is a weird story or archives. A little behind the scenes when doing this research, it starts with kind of a base level. I'd put in weird news stories 1999, and then what I'd end up doing if I didn't find all I needed, I would change the words from weird to unusual, bizarre, odd, all the synonyms. It's like I bust out the thesaurus to help me do my research. But enough behind the scenes. Let's get into the top five itself. So we're gonna start with the honorable mentions for weird news stories from 1999. One honorable mention is the Y2K panic books that came out in 1999. The Y2K problem, I don't want to get too deep into it. It was thought to be a computer glitch that was possibly coming up where computers couldn't register changing from 99 to double zero, that they thought it would go back to 1900 and possibly shut down all kinds of things that were run by computers. So there was all kinds of fears and panic, and there were a lot of books about that. Another honorable mention is a hotmail issue. This was in August 1999 when millions of hotmail accounts were hacked by a group that simply used the word A, like what Canadians are supposed to say all the time, EH, and somehow that hacked all these people's accounts. That was quickly resolved by Microsoft. And the final honorable mention is one that you can't help but laugh at. You imagine you rob a place and you're like, yeah, we did it, and then you get out and you've locked your keys in your car. It sounds like something that would be on a TV show, but it was real. That one was hard to put as an honorable mention, but you'll see with my top five, the last one in the top five was the toss-up with that or the blockbuster video one. You can be the judge if I made the right choice. Alright, we're getting into the actual top five in no particular order, starting with number one, a euthanasia tech conference. Yes, euthanasia as in putting people to sleep or putting people down, not young people that live in Asia. This conference was held in Seattle in November, and it was two days, it was hands-on. So hands-on euthanasia tech conference. The whole idea of euthanasia, assisted suicide. Jack Kavorkian is the man that was the like head of that when you think of the stuff that happened in the 90s. The nuts and bolts of it, it's the right to die activists from six different countries met to demonstrate these devices for non medical assisted death. Apparently, the top piece of tech that was there was from a man from Vancouver, British Columbia called a D. Breather. There was a mask and a hose that ran to a jar filled with some kind of substance that the man would not tell anybody about. It's supposed to slowly get rid of your oxygen, but also filters out carbon dioxide, thus eliminating the body's natural panic reflex. I couldn't find out who this man was or if he ever patented his whatever this deep breather was. Number two is the cornflakes art piece. Boy, this is just you gotta shake your head at this kind of foolishness. It's way more lighthearted than the Euthanasia Tech Conference. In July 1999, in the town of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Les Levine and some volunteers stole 250 boxes of cornflakes from a school breakfast program. This was to commemorate a piece he had done 30 years earlier in 1969. What he did was he took these boxes of cornflakes and dumped them out in a park, and these boxes of cornflakes were eaten by local seagulls within a few minutes. The school officials were not happy saying they could have fed all the students in the school district for a year with those boxes of cornflakes. It just goes to show you there are some really weird stunts that are considered art or done in the name of art. I don't have the exact numbers, but in doing research, it looks like the price for a box of cornflakes in 1999 was just under four dollars. So you're looking at about a thousand dollars worth of cereal dumped into this park. We go from weird art to weird demands with number three, I guess I'll just call it homing pigeons. We go to September 99 in Frankfurt, Germany. A man named Alexander Nemeth was attempting to extort money from the Nestle Food Company by poisoning the food on the shelves of supermarkets. Nemeth wanted 14 million dollars, but his demands were that the money be put in pouches around the neck of homing pigeons. So not dropping the money off in a suitcase somewhere. He wanted pigeons to deliver the money to him. All the police had to do was put radio transmitters in those pouches with the money and send the homing pigeons, and when Nemeth got all the money, he was immediately arrested. The combination of being evil and stupid is just really bad. Poisoning food is no good, but asking for your ransom money be delivered by pigeons is too funny. Number four is the model and the roller coaster. This has to do with famed male model Fabio. This is dated March 31st, 1999, and it is Fabio riding a roller coaster. It was at Bush Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, and he's coming down the descent of the roller coaster, going who knows how fast those things go. And the roller coaster is going over a pond and it spooks all these geese. One of the geese struck the video camera on the front of the roller coaster. The goose was killed, the camera shattered. Fabio luckily turned his head in time, so when he got hit in the head with pieces of camera and goose, at least he had his head turned. Because it happened on March 31st, a lot of people the next day thought it was an April Fool's joke. Fabio got hit by a goose on a roller coaster. It does sound fake, but oh, it's real, and there's pictures to prove it. Last but not least is number five, and this is the one I was torn between the blockbuster video robbery and this one. And I'll just call it the Chimp Channel Show Protest. The Chimp Channel was a short-lived show on TBS. The idea is that all of the actors, quote unquote, are chimps with human voices. The show lasted for only 13 episodes before getting canceled around Christmas time 1999. But one of the creators of the show was fired before the show even went on the air. The man named Tom Stern protested the show's producers, saying they reneged on a lot of promises with him. But I guess rather than going to the people and talking about it, he staged a protest where they filmed a performance of Stern on the Chimp Channel set where he broke bottles and stripped naked. He was complaining that he had perfected chimp directing technique, and these producers were just getting rid of him when they could have had a great show. So he got his degree in chimp directing. I wasn't able to find out the result of the lawsuit. I'm assuming it was settled. I don't know. It was something about the chimp channel and the idea behind it, and this guy flipping out and breaking bottles and getting naked on camera. That made me want to put it in the top five, even though the blockbuster video one was funny too. So that'll wrap up the top five weird, funny news stories from 1999. Which of those was your favorite? They're all different levels of weird and levels of stupid, but now let's move on to music to your ears in in the form of what was going on in the music industry in 1999. The year 1999 was a seismic moment in music. It was a bridge between decades, a collision of genres, a breeding ground for the stars of the new millennium. It was a year when pop music reclaimed its throne, Teen Idols ruled the charts, and the industry itself teetered on the edge of a digital revolution. If you go back and look, it definitely is an interesting mix. If you Google top billboard chart hits 1999 and look at the top 20, you've got the new artists like Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, established stars like TLC and Whitney Houston. You've even got rock legends like Santana, music legends like Cher. For me, I believe this was still the time that I was making mixed tapes and not mixed CDs, because I don't think I had a CD burner. That would come the next year in 2000 when I moved to Las Vegas. Digital music was starting to become a thing. I mentioned Napster earlier, but CDs were still the mainstay. By 1999, Pop had fully reasserted itself as a commercial powerhouse. Leading the charge were Teen Pop Acts. Brittany Spears, she exploded on the scene with her debut album Baby One More Time. That album would sell more than 25 million copies worldwide. And then Christina Aguilera followed in Britney's wake, debuting her self-titled album with the song Genie in a bottle. It's interesting that Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera got so big in '99 because when the 90s started, they were both on the Mickey Mouse Club. Same with Justin Timberlake, who would go on to be in InSync. By 99, InSync and the Backstreet Boys were duking it out in a powerhouse battle for boy bands with other ones like 98 degrees kind of hanging out in the background, looking for scraps at the table. Backstreet Boys had their album Millennium that featured I Want It That Way, and InSync had their hit song God Must Has Spent a Little More Time on You. The battle between these two bands, quote unquote, was really dominated by Backstreet Boys. They are the best-selling boy band ever, with sales topping 130 million albums worldwide. InSync, as a group, has sold about 35 million albums worldwide, which isn't bad, but when you think about the fact that Justin Timberlake on his own has sold almost 120 million albums, it's obvious he made the right choice to go solo. 99 saw a big batch of breakout stars. First and foremost was Eminem. He broke through with the Slim Shady LP produced by Dr. Dre. Eminem, he always had dark humor, raw storytelling, but a lot of controversy in his lyrics. He was very polarizing. He was either beloved or hated, and there was kind of no in-between unless you lived under a rock. Kind of on the other side of the coin, you had Macy Gray, who brought more of a retro soul vibe to pop music. Her album On How Life Is had the song I Try. That song would win Macy Gray a Grammy for Best Female Pop Performance. I actually saw Macy Gray open for the Dave Matthews band. I think it was in 2001. I didn't know any other song except I Try, and everybody sang it when she was up there, so that was cool. Blink when 82 with their pop punk radio friendly music. They hit the mainstream with their album Enema of the State with the song All the Small Things. They were kind of the leaders of the pop punk movement. Green Day became a part of it. Also the offspring as they got more into like comedy spoof music. Other pop punk bands that were around this time and into the early 2000s, you had Some 41, Good Charlotte, Yellow Card, Jimmy Eat World, even No Doubt. And then you had Jennifer Lopez, JLo, crossing over from acting to music with her debut album On the Six. This had the massive hit If You Had My Love. She basically became the next generation's Paula Abdul. And what I mean is someone that was good looking and could dance, but their voice for singing was marginal, maybe average. That's not a knock. You see all the albums that JLo has sold, so obviously she's got a successful formula. In addition to the ones that I have mentioned, some of the biggest albums that came out in 1999 included Ricky Martin's self-titled album, which I talked about in the time capsule. Also Destiny's Child's album, The Writings on the Wall. This was where Beyonce got her start that had hits like Bills, Bills, Bills, and Say My Name. Much like Justin Timberlake with InSync, Beyonce made the right choice going solo. By 2016, her solo album sales had passed what she had sold with Destiny's Child. For me, one of the biggest albums from 1999 was Santana's Supernatural. This was a surprise comeback for Carlos Santana, the Latin rock with pop band, all collaborations, including the song Smooth with Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20. The album ended up selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The crazy thing is that Santana opened for Dave Matthews' band in 1999, leading up to the release of Supernatural. They didn't play any songs from that album, though. I was very familiar with Santana's music from the late 60s, 70s. Man, that song Smooth was everywhere though, in 99 into 2000. And that album dominated the Grammys in 2000. Not everything was Sunshine and Rainbows in 1999. Even some of the big names stumbled. Speaking of Rainbows, Mariah Carey's album, Rainbow, underperformed compared to her earlier mega successes, and it began a period of rocky times in her career. A polarizing one is Limp Biscuit's significant other album. It was bringing in that new metal trend, which is another one. If you hear one new metal song, you've kind of heard all of them. I remember enjoying Limp Biscuit's album with Nookie and Rearranged. Again, though, it's once you've heard those songs a couple times, you're like, okay, I get what this genre is, and that's kind of it. New metal, it was on full display with the infamous Woodstock 99 show. It was held in Rome, New York, in July 1999. It was the third in the Woodstock series, with the original from 1969 being one of the most important moments in the history of music, and then the follow-up 25 years later being a very well-received successor. 1999, not so much. This is where the corporate greed comes into play with everything being overpriced. There were 200,000 people there, price gouging, not enough facilities. It devolved into fires, riots, sexual assaults, and at the center of it was the new metal bands like Limp Biscuit and Korn. Not saying they caused it, it's just their music is now synonymous with the issues that went on at Woodstock 99. Whether fairly or unfairly, they're seen as kind of the scapegoats, them and the corporate idiots that gouged everyone with four dollar bottles of water. Not to mention overflowing porta potties, but for some of you eating, I don't want to get too deep into that. 1999 was a year of transformation in how music was consumed and distributed. In June of that year, Napster was launched. Initially it was just a little niche, but it soon upended the entire music industry. The concept of sharing MP3 files for free over the internet challenged the traditional record label model and set off a digital music revolution that would define the 2000s. Before Napster, you would either have to buy full CDs, CD singles, there were still cassettes. And if you bought a full CD and didn't like it, it was like too bad. You really couldn't return it and exchange it. I mean, every so often you'd find a place that would buy used CDs, but you would get like 10% of what you paid for it. For people like me and of my age group that had spent probably thousands of dollars on CDs in their lives, the idea of being able to get MP3s over the internet was too much to pass up. And now in 99, 2000, that time, getting these MP3s, downloading them, that was a roll of the dice. It was like Russian roulette. Maybe you'd get a clean version of a song you're looking for. Maybe you would get one that sounded like it was recorded through a paper towel tube, or worse, maybe you'd download it and all it was was a Trojan horse virus to destroy your computer. Napster's heyday was very short. We're talking a year, because by April of 2000, the metal band Metallica had already filed a lawsuit against them because them and all these other artists were losing money on people downloading their music for free. Yes, I engaged in it as well, but I also spent a lot of money at the same time still buying CDs. I still have the books and books of CDs to prove it. In 1999, MTV hadn't totally gone against what they had been founded on. They still had music videos, they still had TRL, Total Request Live. That turned musicians, artists into icons nearly overnight. This was also a time when you had a lot of genre mashing. Like I mentioned New Metal, I mentioned pop punk, there was Latin pop, even hip-hop was getting blended into more of the mainstream. You had the rise of electronic music, Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim. To round it out, in case you were wondering, the top five singles according to the Billboard charts for 1999 were Shares Believe, No Scrubs by TLC, Angel of Mine by Monica, Heartbreak Hotel by Whitney Houston, and Baby One More Time by Britney Spears. 1999, it marked the peak of the physical media era, the dawn of the digital disruption with Napster and MP3s. Artists who debuted or broke through would go on to shape pop culture for decades. The rise of teen pop, early signs of streaming's takeover, and the growing importance of image and branding all originated in or were crystallized during 1999. And the echo of 1999 still resonates in how we make, share, and experience music today. But until next time, that is going to wrap up episode 197 of the In My Footsteps Podcast, 1999, the year in pop culture, dedicated to the birth date, birth year of my oldest niece Kaleigh. I hope this gave you a better view of what the first year of your life was like, at least in pop culture form. Stay tuned next week for episode 198. We're going to look at The Goonies, the movie Turning 40 Years Old, the movie that inspired me to become a writer when I was eight years old. We're also going to be looking back at the debut of the Disney Channel and some of the first TV shows that were on it. So we'll kick off the month of June with that and more on episode 198. And don't forget, only a couple of weeks till episode 200, listener's choice. Go to Patreon, become a free tier member. That's all you've got to do. And vote in the polls to see what's going to be on there. Obviously, I make sure whatever I put up there for choices in the poll, it's stuff that I want to talk about. So I don't have a favorite in any of the votes. Although I guess it would be funny if I put one of the subjects be something that I really hated, and then it wins, and I'm stuck talking about it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for making it to the end here. I hope you enjoyed your weekly dose of Gen X nostalgia. I love putting it together, researching, finding things I think you'll enjoy. If you enjoy my content, there's plenty more out there. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Likely by the time this podcast goes up, I will have a new long-form interview with the stars and the producer, director of Frank Durant's newest documentary, The Old Men of the Mountain. It's about a pair of 70 plus year old men who are best friends and they kind of chat and reflect on life as they hike Mount Washington. I was lucky enough to interview the cast, and I've held on to it for a little while. I did this back in March. I'm waiting closer to the time that the film that I will be making my debut in comes out. If you're interested in the documentary, The Old Men of the Mountain, I'll put a link to it in the description of the podcast, and then it'll be in the description of the video when I put the interview up. In addition to that new video, I have hundreds of others on YouTube. I've got hundreds of blogs, almost 200 episodes of this podcast, and also nine books, which are available everywhere. Amazon, my website, Christopher Setterlund.com. I wanted to take a moment to send my condolences to the family and friends of Brian Shortsleeve. He's the founder of Cape Cod Life magazine. He passed away this past week. For me, Brian Shortsleeve, he gave me the opportunity to contribute many articles, getting close to two dozen articles to Cape Cod Life magazine. That's a big thing. For those unfamiliar or who might be familiar, I contributed the Shape of the Cape articles to Cape Cod Life, dealt with shoreline change and erosion on Cape Cod. Just that series alone was like 18 articles. And Brian was the one that gave me that opportunity. Granted, I had to show that I was worth it. He wouldn't have let me do all those if I didn't have some kind of writing chops. But I will always be grateful to him for that opportunity, and I send my deepest condolences to his family, friends, and the staff and team at Cape Cod Life Magazine. Obviously, a big happy birthday shout out to my oldest niece Kaleigh. This whole episode was basically my present to you. The cover art is a present to you. I did it complete without a lot of embarrassing stories about you. That I will leave to your mother. Kaleigh started the next generation of my family tree. She's one of the most important people that I've ever met based on what she did simply by existing, tightening the bond with my family. I don't want to get too deep into it, but in late 1998, my family was basically spread all across a bunch of different places. My sister Kate being pregnant with Kaleigh and then having Kaleigh was the uniting force for my immediate family. So Kaleigh's importance cannot be understated, at least as far as I go and my family goes. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. Thank you all again for tuning in to episode 197. This has been the In My Footsteps Podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. Talk to you all again soon.