I remember most of these, though I associate some of them with 1997. I remember Diana died on the last day of August – I was at my grandparents’ and it was on TV – so that means “Candle in the Wind 1997” had four months to run through its chart life and it still made number eight for 1998. Wasn’t it the biggest-selling single of all time or something, at least in Britain?

That Janet Jackson song is from The Velvet Rope album, which was her last gasp of commercial success before people just knew her as Jacko’s sister. “Rhythm Nation” it was not. I remember the album because there was something notable about it at the time, like it was released to notably bad reception or something. I’m too young to remember that duet she did with Michael on his greatest-hits-you’re-forced-to-buy-because-it-comes-packaged-with-his-new-album-or-alternatively-greatest-hits-album-that’s-propping-up-the-sales-of-a-post-1993-Michael-Jackson-album, with the stupid title HIStory, Vol. 1: Past, Present, and Future. As with Limp Bizkit’s concept album The Unquestionable Truth, Part One, there was never a part two.

If I looked up the song I might recognize the Usher song – bland R&B was all over MTV in 1998, under the name “MTV Jams”, which left a 12-year-old me very disappointed when I tuned in expecting to jam out. I do like that song he did with Lil Jon, though – “Yeah”, it’s the one that goes “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!”. You’ve heard the synth riff. I can’t think of a less-than-awesome Lil Jon song, actually; he might be my favorite rapper, though I’m not a connoisseur of the genre.

I remember the K-Ci & Jo-Jo song for a quip a DJ on WWZZ 104.1 FM-Washington made when introducing it: “K-CI is the one with the shaved head. Jo-Jo… is the one with the shaved head.” They apparently were indistinguishable one-hit wonders even in ‘98. The Brandy & Monica song was all over MTV and the radio, too, though I wasn’t open to the style of music at the time and if I heard it now I… nah, I’d still think it sucks, because it probably does. Brandy had other hits and I think was in movies and stuff; what kind of moron comes up with the ever-distinctive moniker “Monica”?

The Savage Garden song I remember as being in 1997 because the only middle-school dance I bothered to attend was in October ‘97 and they played that song as a slow dance thing. It was the most “1997 sixth-grade-dance” thing ever, or at least I thought at the time. The bigger entertainment was this kid who came in a Scream mask and one of those abaya-like black robes who made mischief, exactly what, I don’t remember. Most memorable was that I got a large drop of urine on the front of my pants after shaking and I hid in a stall until it dried.

The last time I went skiing was with my Boy Scout troop (it was one of the last things I did with them before quitting – Cub Scouts you do fun shit; Boy Scouts is about being a model citizen and doing incredibly homoerotic things with other adolescent boys) in winter or spring 1998. One song that was playing all the time was a little-girl-with-guitar song that started “she had two babies, one was six and one was three, in the war of ‘44” before going on to a pop chorus – I don’t remember whether that was “I Don’t Want to Wait’, “You’re Still the One”, or some other godawful song of that period. All that trip it never stopped playing and it was fucking nails on a chalkboard. I haven’t actually revisited any of these songs.

I actually have the Third Eye Blind album, btw – I spotted it for a dollar at a pawn shop and bought it for that song about smoking meth and fucking. Joke’s on that guy, you can’t get it up on strong stimulants – at least I could never get rock-hard on speed or coke, even in my prime. (If you’re ever watching a porno and the guy is fucking for like an hour and is having trouble staying hard, especially if he’s chewing on his tongue or something, he’s coked out.) “How’s It Gonna Be” was the meh single from that album – “Jumper” (I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend, da da da, I WOULD UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAND) was better. I remember these songs probably first from MTV but sometime in 1998 I switched from the top 40 station to the modern-rock station that suited me better. In Metallica’s chronology, it was after “Fuel”: I think “The Memory Remains” was the single then but it could have been an older song they pulled out.

“Gives a homeless guy some chicken” – lol, I read that as “some [a] chicken”, as in “some chicken or another”, not “some [of] chicken”, or “some Popeyes”.