Pop Cultured

I never thought I’d hear the words Interview magazine pop culture quiz again in my life. I had put that pre-millennium humiliation out of my mind until a friend mentioned it at a party this weekend.

When I first moved here I managed to get interviews at magazines like Paper and Interview and places like MTV even with no editorial experience or internships. Of course, I never actually got any job offers and ended up at AmericanBaby.com so the joke was on me. I thought the late ‘90s were competitive, but everything I read online leads me to believe that youngsters of today are unemployable no matter how impeccable their education and experience. Who knows.

I bombed the pop culture quiz, which consisted of a long list of names that I had to identify. I knew Sophia Coppola and Douglas Coupland, not Faith Popcorn or a good 50% of the remainders. Maybe I should’ve been reading Interview more closely before showing up. Straight from Portland and immersed in zine culture not NYC hotshot, I had no fucking clue who these tastemakers were. Gossip and culture blogs (well, there was Suck, which I randomly started clicking through and immediately came to a 1997 quote about youth from an Interview interview with current pop darling, Robyn) didn't exist. Twelve years later, and I see how little it mattered.

This couldn’t happen today, though. The internet is just too pervasive. I don’t particularly want to know about this genre’s current crop, but it’s impossible to read anything vaguely gossipy or media-related online or and not absorb names. No one should be required to be aware of Mary Rambin, Lorenzo Martone, Mark Ronson or Plum Sykes. I would kill (maybe just maim) to see if Interview still administers such as quiz and who’s currently on the list.

I’m not sure which is worse, my not recognizing Harmony Korine (that wasn’t an actual example—I can’t remember the names I couldn’t identify because I didn’t know them, duh) in 1998 or a poor Gawker writer having no idea who Laurie Anderson is in 2010

'90s humor snippit from Suck