When people talk about ’90s music now, they generally don’t mean Boyz II Men or Mariah Carey. The biggest of those bands sold millions of albums, they filled arenas and festival grounds, and they did a whole lot to define the era in the popular imagination. This column hasn’t really done much to address the early-’90s alt-rock boom, and there’s a simple reason for that: The alternative rock bands from this era did not make #1 hits. Even more than most of the songs that appear in this column, Loeb’s one #1 hit is all tangled up with its cultural moment, and it always will be. Lisa Loeb went on to a long career, but she never really became a pop star. Loeb wasn’t a pop-industry professional she was a recent college graduate trying to get a career off the ground in between shifts at her office-temp job. It’s a messy, personal romantic-argument song with no chorus and no clear structure. Lisa Loeb actually wrote “Stay (I Missed You)” with a particular pop star in mind, but it’s nobody’s idea of a conventional pop hit. Months after the movie was out of theaters, “Stay (I Missed You),” a song written and recorded by Ethan Hawke’s across-the-street neighbor Lisa Loeb, became the first-ever #1 hit from an unsigned artist. But the end-credits song from Reality Bites took a different path. Reality Bites opened in theaters in February of 1994, and it did just-OK box-office business. But there’s no denying that Reality Bites, a movie that I love, was very much a product of its cultural moment. The authentic jerk looks and maybe acts like Ethan Hawke, after all. An authentic jerk was preferable to a likable sellout.” I’d argue that there are extra layers at work here, too. It’s an isolated, freestanding period where a person’s unwillingness to view his existence as a commodity was prioritized over another person’s actual personality. In his book, Chuck Klosterman argues that this particular plot logic ties Reality Bites inexorably to the moment in which it was made: “As it turns out, the mid-’90s were the only time when the validity of this romantic conclusion was the prevailing youth perspective. Spoiler alert for a 28-year-old film: Winona Ryder chooses Ethan Hawke, and this is presented as a happy ending. The other guy is Ethan Hawke, a sullen but poetic loser who often acts like a total dick to Ryder but who, attractively, has no ambitions or career prospects. He works for a slick MTV-type network, and he wants to turn Ryder’s documentary work into digestible television fare. One of them, played by Stiller himself, is kind and loving and financially secure, but he’s also motivated by commercialism. In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder plays a recent college graduate and aspiring documentarian who’s torn between two guys. The film is a likable mainstream romantic comedy, but its character and point of view are defined by their inherent suspicion of things like likable mainstream romantic comedies. This makes the existence of Reality Bites somewhat paradoxical. The way Chuck describes it, Reality Bites is a film where the entire story hinges on the generational fear and distrust of the idea of selling out. In his new book The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman holds up Ben Stiller’s 1994 film Reality Bites as an avatar for a certain Gen-X mindset that flourished during a very specific moment in time. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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