Yessss! I started following music late in this year, when the Titanic song was blowing up and there were alternate radio cuts with movie dialogue overdubbed on top of that song and I guess its B-side, the music when the port is first encountered in the movie (how the fuck did I know that? I only saw it once and beside liking Kate Winslet’s tits, I was in sixth grade and Leonardo di Caprio was caught up in post-Hanson backlash against pretty boys by middle-school boys. Leo was a fag lol deurgh.

I really like “Unbreak My Heart”. “I believe I can fly” (wasn’t focusing on typing, don’t feel like going back and retyping so leaving as-is) I always thought was earlier – like ‘95, even, not just when I started listening to pop radio but from when I was first aware of pop music.

Other notables from the period from when the Titanic song was dominating the charts to when I switched to the rock station when “The Memory Remains” was current – we’re part of a generation that knows Marianne Faithfull best for sounding like an anti-smoking advert, not Mick Jagger:

K-Ci and Jo-Jo - “All My Life” (I thought this song was lame but time almost immediately was kind to it. Good R&B ballad with a concrete memory attached to it – the DJ introduced the track once, “K-Ci is the one with the shaved head. Jo-Jo is the one with the shaved head.” I knew it wasn’t a clever line, of course, but for some reason the memory remains, if you will.)

Savage Garden - “Truly Madly Deeply” (lame street. Custom-made middle school slow dance material.)

Sublime - “Wrong Way” (the very first MP3 I ever downloaded, in 1997! It didn’t matter the quality, the miracle was that it was done at all. The song’s content went over my head at first.)

Sublime - “Santeria” (CHINGA LA ESTA CANCIÓN)

Sublime -;”What I Got” (there was a whole subgenre of Jamaican-influenced groove-rock bands who spent whole careers chasing what that dead junkie achieved here in three minutes)

That song from Romeo + Juliet (since LDC, as Billdude probably knew him, was a fag, lol deurgh, this was an uncool movie and any music from it was fruit of the gh3y tree)

“She had two babies, one was eight and one was three, in the war of forty-fooour” (an earworm, obviously. Is that the Dawson’s Creek theme?)

Both Goo Goo Dolls hits that sounded alike once they turned from grunge-adjacent to AC (legitimately shit)

Sugar Ray - I think their first hit was in ‘97. They were self-consciously aware that they had a big hit by a fluke and just kind of wrote good late ’90s alt-rock (is there a word for this genre, which is post-grunge in no sense but the temporal?). Their second album was called 14:59.

South Park started in the first semester of sixth grade and it completely took over. I had just gotten cable for the first time – hitherto it was a treat for weekends at Nana and Papa’s or sleepovers – and before I had been warned off from The Simpsons, Beavis & Butt-Head and MTV generally, together with Dungeons and Dragons. Much to my surprise, after we watched an episode together one episode from the first run, “Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride”, my dad said his only objection was that it made homosexuality seem okay, so I was allowed to watch it. But he also chuckled at the “now I know how all of those white women felt” joke in “An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig” (if you don’t get the joke I’m talking about, put two and two together.)

You’d see people writing or even carving on desks things like “Notorious BIG” and “Pimp Ma$e”. My first day in science class I asked someone what they meant and that person said that, I quote you directly, they were gang signs. I believed his cornbread ass until I started listening to music soon thereafter.

Is it considered airing dirty laundry to remark at how comparatively tame pornographic content could be in 1997 that will get your wife to sleep on the couch after she catches you? The first porn I saw was from my dad’s stash, a woman pulling a can of Coke out of her pussy, opening it, and drinking from it. If we only knew.

I’ve got one hour’s content left in WWF 1995. This isn’t the absolute lowest they were as a company – that was mid-‘96, after Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Sean Waltman defected to WCW and left big holes in the roster at all levels.

After that is 1997. It was a very good year, in wrestling as in life.