JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Out of print for years, Twisted will be published this year in a new edition! Stay tuned for updates.

It was not the best of times, it was not the worst of times, but it was the era of my youth and everything seemed golden and alive with possibility. Well not exactly, because we can only see how wonderful a time was when it is safely in the past. To recognize the good times while they’re happening is to curse the rest of your life: from hereon it’s downhill all the way.

The more I think about it, the more idyllic the 1990s seem. Not just because my hair was black and required no coloring, not just because I could eat an entire pizza without thinking of carbs and cholesterol, not just because I could stay up till 4am and wake up a few hours later without feeling like the undead. The 1990s were great because they were slow. If we wanted something, we had to wait. While we waited, we were bored. And while we were bored, we could think at leisure. We could talk to ourselves and chew on our ideas without rushing to be the first to post them online. “Online” did not exist. What we had was actual life.

The Internet was new and expensive, and social media did not exist. Remember that squealing sound as your clunky modem connected? Everything was slower and required more effort. Say you wanted the new album by Elvis Costello. You couldn’t just go online and download it, you had to wait until the local branch of the record company (Remember when A&R was the job everyone wanted?) released it on cassette and, for the people with money, CD. If you couldn’t wait, you had to start plotting. Did you know anyone who was going to the US who could buy it for you? Did you know a source of bootlegs?

Ours is the generation that got its music news from photocopies of Rolling Stone and Spin (and much-handled issues of Jingle). MTV was dominant, so dominant that I spent much of the Nineties and Noughties correcting people who used the name of the channel instead of “music video” (“Have you seen Alice In Chains’s new MTV?” “It’s music video!!!”). We had piles of cassette tapes of songs missing their first and last notes, because the radio DJ would talk over them. Imagine hovering over your tape recorder, waiting for the song to play on the radio and trying to hit “Record” a millisecond before it started. It required a combination of patience and psychic powers.

Each experience was intensified by anticipation. By the time we held the album in our hands, we had invested time and effort on it, so it was precious. It had a value that not even mediocre writing or production could deflate. I am writing this in quarantine—months of isolation have given me a greater appreciation of slowness. There’s slow food, slow cinema, and now I practice slow living. What’s the hurry? Call me when the pandemic is over.

The news of the day were brought to you by the newspapers, like TODAY, the broadsheet my column appeared in. If you took issue with something that I wrote—and I managed to offend a lot of people without trying—you had to grab a pen and a piece of paper, compose your thoughts, and express your indignation as succinctly as you could. Then you had to type your letter, put it in an envelope, find the newspaper’s address, get dressed, go out, and find a mailbox or visit the post office. That is assuming that the thought of the entire process of sending a letter did not already tire you out so you didn’t even write it. Once the letter was posted, you had to wait several days until it reached the newspaper office, was opened, and given to me or to my lovely editor, the late Abe Florendo. The reply would be composed, laid out, printed, and on the stands the following day.

Say it took a week between your initial reaction and my response. Likely your anger would have dissipated, or the burning issue would have cooled somewhat. In any case the discussion would be between the two of us, and not the entire Twitterverse. No one would be cancelled, no anathema pronounced, no reputations trashed. It was a more civilized age.

Of course the Internet and social media have changed our lives irrevocably, and there’s little point in trying to bring back the past. We can take short trips back, and I see the book as a portable, limited time travel device.