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      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      Everything but the Girl Breaks a 24-Year Silence With a Bang

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      Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s personal partnership has thrived since their duo’s last release. During the pandemic, they reconnected musically for “Fuse,” reclaiming the group’s modern melancholy.At first, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt didn’t want to admit to themselves that they were re-emerging — after 24 years — as Everything but the Girl.The duo, who built a dedicated following in the 1980s and ’90s making elegantly troubled music and had an international smash with “Missing” in 1995, returned to writing and recording together during the pandemic. But Thorn and Watt carefully labeled their first new collaborations “TREN” — for Tracey and Ben — instead of reviving a moniker with as much of a back story as Everything but the Girl. They were well aware, as Thorn said understatedly in a video interview, that “it’s not going to be a small deal to come back after this length of time.”They spoke from their home in London, sitting side by side and dressed in shades of gray and black, in a room where they’ve sometimes recorded music. There was a small keyboard on a table behind them, next to full bookshelves. Each listened fondly and attentively as the other spoke.Thorn and Watt, both 60, remained partners while Everything but the Girl was dormant. They have been together since 1982, when they were students at University of Hull in England, and they raised three children — now adults — after suspending Everything but the Girl, which gave its last performance in 2000. In April, the duo returns with “Fuse,” its first album since 1999 and one that fully lives up to its best work.During the intervening decades, Thorn and Watt maintained separate, prolific careers. Watt produced albums; traveled the world as a D.J.; founded a label, Buzzin’ Fly; and made solo albums and toured as a singer-songwriter, which he’d been planning to do in 2020 when the pandemic shut things down. After some years devoting herself to their toddlers, Thorn got back to songwriting, releasing four solo albums; she also wrote books, including the wryly revealing career memoir, “Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star,” and “Naked at the Albert Hall,” her reflections on the physicality and mentality of being a singer.Working independently, with projects appearing at different times, allowed them to “tag-team” bringing up their family, Watt explained.“We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” he said. “And I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”But they hadn’t entirely put Everything but the Girl behind them. In the 2010s, Thorn and Watt oversaw expanded reissues of the group’s catalog that found an eager audience. By then it was clear that their music had aged to sound classic, not dated.“There’s an emotional simplicity and directness that’s just so powerful to me lyrically,” Romy Madley Croft of the British band the xx said in a phone interview; she first heard Everything but the Girl because her parents were fans and “Missing” was on the radio. Thorn has recognized their musical kinship by recording her own version of the xx’s “Night Time” in 2011.“You feel close to Tracey and in her words and voice that is very, very intimate and just the emotion that is carried,” Madley Croft said. “One of my goals always is to say a lot while saying very little, and to leave people with space to make their own minds up about what it means, and I definitely think that Tracey does that. When you hear that line that just says a huge amount very, very simply, it’s very satisfying.”Everything but the Girl got its name, with post-punk cheekiness, from the sexist tagline of a local furniture-store advertisement that showed a model next to the goods on sale. “For God’s sake, if we had known we were going to carry on for years we would have come up with a better name,” Thorn wrote in “Bedsit Disco Queen.”For its first decade, the group maintained a solid midlevel recording career — until 1995, when a remix of “Missing,” by the American D.J. Todd Terry, became an international smash. With each album, Everything but the Girl took a different approach: from skeletal to maximal, bossa nova to rock, retro Wall of Sound to sleek Los Angeles pop. Its songs used subtlety as a stealth tactic, with smooth, richly tuneful music concealing lyrics that challenged political and psychological assumptions. Through every change of style, Thorn’s voice — low, smoky and pensive, rarely indulging in vibrato or ornamentation — gave the duo’s songs an emotional equipoise.“I can see the through line,” Thorn said. “We’re exploring things with a different costume on. You know, if you were a film director, your vision, or the ideas that you keep, might be identifiable whether you make a western or a detective movie or a romance. There’s something of that going on in these records. Complexity and simplicity is very key to it.”Watt picked up her thought. “Ambivalence and mixed feelings is a big through line in all our stuff as well,” he said. “That’s true both in the choice of notes we use and in the lyrics that we write. There’s that element of suspension. The space that you leave allows room for the listener. I always like the idea that people can step into our audio picture, you know, and almost walk around in the reverbs.”A life-threatening health crisis for Watt in 1992 — he has a rare autoimmune disorder, Churg-Strauss syndrome — led Everything but the Girl to pare away verbal and musical frills to reveal rawer feelings on “Amplified Heart” and “Walking Wounded,” the albums that would mark its artistic peak in the 1990s.“There was a period in the ’90s where we had to learn what it was like to live with each other again, mostly because of the aftermath of my illness, which left me a very changed person,” Watt said. “And Tracey had to witness that change, which was very difficult in its own way. Both ‘Amplified Heart’ and ‘Walking Wounded’ — it’s there in the titles of those albums, you know? — they’re very much songs about us both feeling isolated by the experience, but also learning to live with each other again.”“Amplified Heart,” released in 1994, included the original version of “Missing.” Then Terry’s club-ready remix with a new, danceable beat, carried Everything but the Girl to a worldwide audience; the single went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain. The song has had an endless afterlife, and a broad influence, for its precise chemistry of melancholy, suspense and propulsion. With Thorn’s voice leaping as she sings “like the deserts miss the rain,” “Missing” is a dance-crying milestone: equally potent on the dance floor or at home alone through headphones.Watt and Thorn were already intrigued by the fast-evolving music in London’s dance clubs. For its late-1990s incarnation, Everything but the Girl merged moody introspection with electronic dance music for two albums: “Walking Wounded,” and “Temperamental” from 1999. It’s a sound that “Fuse” reclaims and determinedly expands.“We talked about trying to find new ways of writing, new ways of using our voices, new ways of landing on different notes,” Watt said.“Fuse” embraces electronic soundscapes and grown-up empathy. It opens with a subterranean bass throb and a declaration of vulnerability in “Nothing Left to Lose,” as Thorn sings, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” And it ends with a husky, ardent mission statement that sums up Everything but the Girl’s dual imperatives. In “Karaoke,” Thorn vows that she sings both “to heal the brokenhearted” and “to get the party started.”In between, “Fuse” proffers compassionate advice in the gloomily majestic “When You Mess Up,” goes on a surreal European club-hopping chronicle in “No One Knows We’re Dancing” and makes a pinging, handclapping, gamelan-tinged plea for “something I can hold onto” in “Forever.”It took the pandemic to bring Thorn and Watt back to working together. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now? Are we going to go back to what we were doing? Or is this the start of something new? And we weren’t really sure.”Isolated at home — and sometimes distancing even from each other because of Watt’s illness — they began trading small musical ideas: chords, lyrics, sounds.“We were trying to do that thing that artists sometimes do,” Thorn said, “where you trick yourself into thinking that we’re not really doing this thing that feels like a bit of a big deal. We’re doing something much smaller and more manageable. We’re just making some music. We don’t need to tell anyone. We don’t need to have anyone waiting on it or expecting anything of it or putting pressure on. Let’s just see what happens.”The album’s beginnings were decidedly lo-fi. “I started to put things on my phone,” Watt said. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”The music that emerged at first was slow and atmospheric. Danceable, upbeat songs came later, after the duo relocated to a recording studio in Bath, England. “The record started out in this mood of, you know, ‘We’re not putting any pressure on,’ with a couple of fairly downbeat, quite ambient-sounding tracks,” Thorn recalled. “And within about three days of being in the studio, we started getting more and more excited. There was a period when we had about eight tracks and, ostensibly, you know, we’ve almost got an album here.“But I think that was the moment when we both had a kind of awakening and sat up and went, ‘Do you know what? This can be better,’” she added. “We started with low expectations, but actually we’ve impressed us. Our expectations had gone right up. And if you’re going to come back after a long gap, then come back with a bang.”It took the pandemic to reunite Everything But the Girl. “We were confronted with that decision that a lot of people were confronted with,” Thorn said. “What are we going to do now?”Edward BishopThey also reveled in technology that arrived after Everything but the Girl last made an album. In some songs, digital effects warp Thorn’s vocals. “We allowed ourselves to be a bit more disrespectful of Tracey’s voice,” Watt said. “It wasn’t just this kind of sacred sound that always sat on the top of the music. We started mistreating it with pitch-shifting plug-ins and Auto-Tune, seeing if we could just turn it into a texture rather than a vehicle for the lyrics and the emotion of the track. It was another interesting color to add onto the canvas.”In one new song, “Lost,” Thorn sings a list — “I lost my place/I lost my bags/I lost my biggest client” — that moves from prosaic to heartbreaking. Some of the lyrics, Watt said, came from typing the words “I lost” into Google. But as the song unfolds, a quietly devastating line arrives: “I lost my mother.”Amid all of the electronic modifications, Everything but the Girl never hides its heart. Thorn and Watt strove to stay in a freely creative state as they made the album, but their usual self-consciousness wasn’t far away. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency in a lot of the lyrics about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”There are no plans for a tour. “It brings a lot of baggage with it, more so than with recording an album,” Thorn said.“One of the problems with touring, in part, is that you have to constantly look backwards for your audience,” Watt said. “You’re expected to perform the hits, so you are as much an entertainer as you are a creative artist. And if we’re really honest, neither of us have a great appetite for the old stuff. You know, it was good at the time. We respect it.” He shrugged. “We did our best.” More

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      Steve Mackey, a Mainstay of the Britpop Band Pulp, Dies at 56

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      Shortly after he joined that long-running group in 1987, it rose from obscurity to chart-topping success in what came to be called the Cool Britannia era.Steve Mackey, the lauded bassist, songwriter and producer who made his name laying down dance-floor-friendly grooves for the British band Pulp during its 1990s pinnacle, as it transformed itself from a little-known art-rock collective to a festival-headlining Britpop powerhouse, died on Thursday. He was 56.His death was announced on social media by his wife, Katie Grand. She did not say where he died or cite a cause, although she noted that he had died “after three months in hospital, fighting with all his strength and determination.”With Hollywood-worthy looks and an image of tailored cool, Mr. Mackey provided the pulsing bass lines that helped whip audiences into a frenzy as Pulp cycled through glam-rock, acid-house, disco and indie-pop influences on 1990s anthems like “Common People” and “Disco 2000,” two of the five Top 10 singles the band notched in Britain.Pulp also had five Top 10 albums, including the celebrated “Different Class” in 1995.Mr. Mackey recorded five studio albums with Pulp over the course of a decade, starting with “Separations” in 1992. His tenure coincided with the most commercial and critically acclaimed era for this long-running, ever-evolving band, as it emerged from obscurity in Sheffield, England, and, after a series of false starts, took its place in the English pop firmament along with Oasis, Blur and other supernovas of the so-called Cool Britannia era.In 1995, the influential British music magazine Melody Maker anointed Pulp the band of the year — a notable accomplishment in a year that also saw the release of Oasis’s era-defining album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” That same year, the band headlined the star-studded Glastonbury rock festival after the scheduled headliners, the Stone Roses, dropped out.It was a meteoric rise for a garage-band bassist who had started his association with the band as a mere fan.Stephen Patrick Mackey was born on Nov. 10, 1966, in Sheffield, a historically industrial city in South Yorkshire, England. He was in his late teens when he started catching gigs by Pulp, which was already a respected band on the local scene.Jarvis Cocker, the band’s lead singer, made an immediate impression with his haunted air and chiseled looks. “I was amazed by Jarvis,” Mr. Mackey said in a 2021 video interview. “He was really a striking frontman, and the songs were really powerful; they’re quite dark as well.”It was while he was playing in band called Trolley Dog Shag that Mr. Mackey befriended Mr. Cocker, although he did not entertain thoughts of lobbying to play with Pulp. “They seemed self-contained, quite aloof,” he said in a 1996 interview for the band’s website. “I was into really noisy bands, garage bands, and Pulp were like an art band.”Besides, the band, formed in 1978, hardly seemed on a fast track to stardom. By the time Mr. Mackey joined in 1987, Pulp had cycled through multiple lineups and had failed to generate much of a stir with its first two albums, “It” (1983) and “Freaks” (1986).The band began developing a more pop-friendly sound, and the first single from “Separations,” the ice-cool dance track “My Legendary Girlfriend,” finally gave Pulp a taste of mainstream success. The British music newspaper NME named it a “single of the week.”Pulp would continue to chart for the rest of the decade, but disbanded after its 2001 album, “We Love Life.” In the ensuing years, Mr. Mackey, who had contributed to the writing of the band’s songs along with Mr. Cocker and the other members, kept busy as a producer and songwriter, working with bands like Arcade Fire and Florence + the Machine.He had a cameo role in the 2005 film “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” as the bassist for a wizard supergroup called Weird Sisters, alongside Mr. Cocker, as well as Jonny Greenwood and Philip Selway of Radiohead.Mr. Mackey was an avid photographer, and he spun out a side career in the 2010s shooting fashion campaigns for brands like Armani Exchange and Marc Jacobs while collaborating with his wife, a stylist and fashion journalist, on her fashion magazine, Love.He joined Pulp on a reunion tour in 2011 and 2012, but declined to join one scheduled for this year, explaining on social media last October that he desired “to continue the work I’m engaged in — music, filmmaking and photography projects.”In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Marley; his parents, Kath and Paul; and his sister, Michelle.After Mr. Mackey’s death, Mr. Cocker posted on Instagram a photo of Mr. Mackey trekking up a rocky trail in the Andes in 2012.“We had a day off & Steve suggested we go climbing in the Andes,” Mr. Cocker wrote. Calling it a “magical experience,” he continued: “Steve made things happen. In his life & in the band. & we’d very much like to think that he’s back in those mountains now, on the next stage of his adventure.” More

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      Coolio, ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ Rapper, Dies at 59

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      From a bookish, asthmatic child to crack addict to mainstream hitmaker, the West Coast M.C. charted a unique path to hip-hop stardom.Coolio, the rapper whose gritty and sometimes playful takes on West Coast rap and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” made him a hip-hop star in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59.His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.Mr. Posey, who worked with the rapper for more than 20 years, said he was told that Coolio died at about 5 p.m. at a friend’s house. No cause was given. Coolio, whose legal name was Artis Leon Ivey Jr., achieved mainstream superstardom and critical success with “Gangsta’s Paradise” in 1995. The track, which featured the singer L.V., spent three weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 and was later named the chart’s No. 1 song of the year. It won the Grammy for best rap solo performance in 1996.The song, later certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, outshone the movie it was featured in, “Dangerous Minds.” Its music video won best rap video and best video from a film at the MTV Video Music Awards.“Coolio still builds his raps on recognizable 1970s oldies, and he delivers intricate, syncopated rhymes as if they were conversation,” Jon Pareles wrote in an album review in The New York Times, noting that “Gangsta’s Paradise” uses “the somber minor chords” of “Pastime Paradise,” by Stevie Wonder.The song nearly did not make it into “Dangerous Minds,” The Times critic Caryn James noted in 1996. She wrote that the late addition “turned a preachy Michelle Pfeiffer film about an inner-city teacher into a hit that sounded fresher than it really was.”Coolio’s other hits included “Fantastic Voyage” — the opening song on his debut album — and “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New),” which were both nominated for Grammys. “C U When U Get There,” which samples Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” was a standout track on his third album of the 1990s, “My Soul.”But nothing could match the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” a song that, with its piercing beat and ominous background vocals, became instantly distinguishable for millions of ’90s rap fans, especially with a memorable opening verse based on Psalm 23:“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.”The song would expand the commercial possibilities of hip-hop, but Coolio would later say that he sometimes lamented how the track seemed to overshadow his other bodies of work, particularly follow-up albums.Still, he told PopkillerTV in 2018 that the song had taken him on “a great ride.” Its popularity has endured for decades, with the music video garnering a rare billion-plus views on YouTube.Artis Leon Ivey Jr. was born on Aug. 1, 1963. He grew up in Compton, Calif., a place known for producing some of hip-hop’s most successful artists, such as Dr. Dre and Kendrick Lamar.He told The Independent in 1997 that as a child, he would play board games with his single mother, to whom he later dedicated his success. After a turbulent youth — the bookish, asthmatic child became a teenage gang member, juvenile offender and drug addict — Coolio worked as a volunteer firefighter.In his 20s, he moved to San Jose to live with his father and fight fires with the California Department of Forestry, The Ringer reported. There, he became more spiritual. He later credited Christianity for helping him overcome his addiction to crack.When he embarked on his music career, he quickly gained a following among the rapidly growing audience of hip-hop fans, who had been enraptured by the music of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.After performing with the group WC and the Maad Circle alongside WC, Sir Jinx and DJ Crazy Toones, Coolio went solo. His debut album, “It Takes a Thief” (1994), garnered praise for clever lyrics infused with funky rhythms.“Gangsta’s Paradise” had a vast cultural imprint, even spawning a parody in Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise” that replaced the streets with pastoral lyrics about churning butter and selling quilts.Reflecting on his career, and on the success of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Coolio told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he was on tour in Europe when the song went No. 1 on the charts and he realized: “I was No. 1 all over the entire planet — not just in the States. I was No. 1 everywhere that you can imagine.”On Wednesday, the rapper Ice Cube recalled the significance of Coolio’s music at the time, writing on Twitter that he had witnessed “first hand this man’s grind to the top of the industry.”Coolio, whose spindly and sprouting cornrows defined his look, went on to sell 4.8 million records throughout his career, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as Nielsen Music.He expanded his influence by writing and performing the theme song for “Kenan & Kel,” a Nickelodeon staple in the late 1990s. Coolio later became a fixture on reality TV, starting with “Coolio’s Rules,” a 2008 series that focused on his personal life and his quest to find love in Los Angeles.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Coolio had four children with Josefa Salinas, whom he married in 1996 and later divorced.Years after he topped the charts and solidified himself as a mainstream artist, Coolio confronted legal trouble, pleading guilty to firearms and drug charges.The rapper, who struggled with asthma all his life, served as the spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, according to his official online biography. At a 2016 performance in Brooklyn, N.Y., Page Six reported, he had an asthma attack and was saved by a fan who had an inhaler.In recent years, Coolio had become aware of his indelible mark on hip-hop. He said in 2018 that after years of lamenting over his struggles in the music industry, he had realized that “people would kill to take my place.”“I’m sure after I’m long gone from this planet, and from this dimension,” he said, “people will come back and study my body of work.” More

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      ‘Do Revenge’: Paying Homage to Teen Classics by Way of Hitchcock

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      Though Gen Z is the subject, the director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson wanted to honor and critique high school movies of the ’90s.“You’re probably going, ‘Is this like a Noxzema commercial or what?’” Cher Horowitz mused in the opening montage of “Clueless,” laughing with friends in her Jeep Wrangler and splurging at Tiffany’s on Rodeo Drive. That scene, set to the Muffs’ pop-punk cover of “Kids in America,” painted a heady portrait of ’90s youth and excess.Twenty-seven years later, a new version of “Kids in America” — by the indie-pop singer Maude Latour — plays in “Do Revenge” as throngs of rich, Gen Z teens spiral into various states of ecstasy and despair after they unwittingly ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms at a school dinner.The Netflix dark comedy (out Sept. 16) is full of such winks to its teen film forebears. There’s a guided tour of the school’s cliques (as seen in “Mean Girls,” “10 Things I Hate About You” and more) and a requisite makeover (a staple in “Clueless,” “She’s All That” and so many others). But many of the “Do Revenge” references also serve as a playful reckoning, blending nostalgia with wholly contemporary tastes and issues.“I’m obsessed with high school movies,” the director and writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson said. “But, very specifically, this type of film that I just feel like doesn’t get made anymore.”While in postproduction on her first film, the 2019 rom-com “Someone Great,” she and one of the producers, Peter Cron, began analyzing her favorite ’90s entries in the genre — “Clueless,” “Cruel Intentions,” “10 Things” and “Jawbreaker” — and common threads of campiness and satire emerged. And, with the exception of “Jawbreaker,” they were all reimaginings of classic works. (That would be “Emma,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” respectively.)Camila Mendes said her role defied the usual studio note to make women more likable: “What ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters.” Kim Simms/NetflixRobinson and Cron brainstormed vintage material they could rework in a high school setting. Cron suggested looking to Alfred Hitchcock. “Rear Window” had gotten the teen treatment in the 2007 thriller “Disturbia.” What about his 1951 noir “Strangers on a Train”? Instead of two grown men swapping murders, two teen girls could concoct a plot to “do revenge” of the nonviolent kind on their exes.The similarities pretty much end there, but from that germ of a concept, Robinson and her co-writer, Celeste Ballard, crafted the acerbic tale of Drea, a queen bee who becomes a social pariah after an intimate Snapchat video she sent to her boyfriend, Max, is leaked to their entire Miami prep school; and Eleanor, a mysterious outsider looking to bring down a girl from summer camp.“Teenage girls are fascinating. They are these little engines of chaos,” said Robinson, who created the MTV series “Sweet/Vicious” and co-wrote “Thor: Love and Thunder.” She added, “High school in and of itself is its own stage and the perfect way to tell these types of twisty, turny stories.”She found her leads in the “Riverdale” star Camila Mendes and the “Stranger Things” actress Maya Hawke. In supporting roles are standouts from other recent teen-centric fare, including Austin Abrams (“Euphoria”), Alisha Boe (“13 Reasons Why”), Talia Ryder (“Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between”) and Rish Shah (“Ms. Marvel”). The assembled cast, fittingly, dubbed themselves “The Revengers.”Both Mendes, 28, and Hawke, 24, were skeptical about taking on another teen role, but Robinson’s vision and the characters’ complexities on the page convinced them this wouldn’t be a typical return to the genre.“I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart. And it’s not just another high schooler. It’s the most badass, psychopath high schooler that I’ve ever read,’” Hawke said of her character, Eleanor. She’s not simply chaotic and crazy, Hawke added, “she’s a hurt person with motive.”Camila Mendes, left, and Hawke were both wary of playing another teenage character but signed on after reading the script. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart,’” Hawke said.Kim Simms/NetflixMendes, who plays Drea, echoed her: “You get this note so much in Hollywood that’s always like, ‘We don’t want her to be too unlikable. She’s got to be likable.’ And then what ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters. Drea is not that.”While a leaked Snapchat serves as the MacGuffin and texting is pervasive, the director, along with the production designer Hillary Gurtler and the costume designer Alana Morshead, didn’t try to force too many Gen Z-specific trends. Instead the three millennial women tried to create a vibrant “girl world” that blended the past and the present in a colorful way.“Between Gen Z and millennials, you’ve got an incredibly smart audience, visually attuned more than any other previously,” Gurtler said. “So instead of pandering directly to somebody, it’s like, let’s build this incredible world, and their tastes and vision will meet it.”Morshead modeled the Rosehill prep school uniforms after those common in South Korea but reimagined them in a Miami-fied pastel palette of lavender and mint. She sourced accessories and streetwear from small labels run by women and people of color, including Miracle Eye, the Mighty Company and Muaves, and added a smattering of vintage couture where the budget allowed.But perhaps most important in crafting the film’s overall feel, Robinson said, was the music. To achieve a no-skips CD experience like the movie soundtracks she loved as a teenager, Robinson opted for hits by Hole, Meredith Brooks and Fatboy Slim alongside newer needle drops from Olivia Rodrigo, Muna and Caroline Polachek. She hired Este Haim and Amanda Yamate to create an original, neo-noir-tinged score, and enlisted the music supervisor Robert Lowry to pull it all together.“I didn’t really care about them being the most recognizable songs. I wanted them to elicit a feeling in you,” Robinson said. “It was less about the name-iness of the artists or the songs, and it was way more about, does the song bring you back to a time?”Visual nostalgia is likewise key. Teens play croquet on a lawn à la “Heathers.” The popular kids perch on a fountain just as they did in “Scream.” There’s a “10 Things”-inspired paintball date. Eleanor drives a vintage luxury car in a nod to Sebastian’s prized possession in “Cruel Intentions.” And to explicitly tie up the connection between “Do Revenge” and ’90s pop culture, Robinson cast Sarah Michelle Gellar in a small but satisfying role as Rosehill’s headmaster, virtually the only adult character.The costume designs used a Miami-inspired palette of pastels. Kim Simms/NetflixYet, unlike the homogeneity of many high school films of the past, the filmmakers wanted “Do Revenge” to more broadly reflect the youth of today. It centers the stories of Latina and queer teens and, aspirationally, doesn’t allow characters to hurl insults about physical appearance or sexuality. These girls might dub someone a “human Birkenstock” but never a “full-on Monet,” a shift Robinson said she felt a “responsibility” to convey.“We tried to root it all in character, rather than appearance or identity,” Robinson said. “You can be biting. You can be satirical. But those surface-level jabs, those types of mean comments, I hope that they just go away. They’re so boring. If you’re going to be mean, be smart.”Here, the popular bad boy is a nail-polish-wearing, earring-adorned trust fund kid whose androgynous style was partly inspired by that of Harry Styles. “I liked updating that from the mean guys in those ’90s movies we’d seen before,” the costume designer Morshead said. “He doesn’t have to be the stereotypical, brooding jock.”Max’s villainous nature hides behind performative ally-ship — he starts a school club called the Cis Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League — and faux feminist gestures.“I know so many people like that in Hollywood,” Mendes said. “There’s definitely this ongoing joke with me and my female actress friends where we talk about how there are so many Maxes in Hollywood, it’s insane. They’re adored by the public, but all the people in the industry know what they’re capable of, and it can be incredibly frustrating.”In fact, in “Do Revenge” no one is what they seem on the surface. The lines between good and evil characters are blurred, and many who do terrible things find their way to accountability and redemption by the film’s end.“I think that cancel culture is stunting people’s want and ability to actually grow past the wrongs that they’ve committed,” Robinson said. “This whole film is about saying, ‘Yeah, you did some bad stuff. You made some bad choices, but every day is a day where you can become better if you want to turn the corner.’” More

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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      ‘All the Streets Are Silent’ Review: Hip-Hop and Skateboarding Collide

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      This documentary is a portrait of downtown New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s that revels in nostalgia.In the late 1980s and early ’90s, long before hypebeasts spent hours waiting for coveted drops outside the Supreme store in SoHo, skaters assembled at a smaller shop on Lafayette Street. There, they would smoke and watch skate videos, listen to music and crack jokes with friends.“All the Streets Are Silent,” a documentary from the director, Jeremy Elkin, is a portrait of that time, capturing the transformative moment when hip-hop and skateboarding culture converged in New York. It draws on archival footage of influential figures like Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter, among dozens of others, and incorporates new interviews with major players like Fab 5 Freddy and Darryl McDaniels, of Run-DMC. Throughout, Elkin explores how racial associations with both subcultures crumbled as their worlds collided.The film revels in fuzzy, intimate home videos from the period, courtesy of the narrator, Eli Gesner, who spent much of his youth filming the scene on his camcorder. There are shots of skaters dodging traffic at Astor Place or partying at the now defunct hip-hop nexus Club Mars. At one point, a young Jay-Z appears, rapping at lightning speed over a breakbeat. The film immerses us in this world, rendering a loving, tender homage to the city’s street culture before it went global.Ultimately, “All the Streets Are Silent” has little more to give than nostalgia. An ending that considers the mainstream explosion of these subcultures is ambiguous and offers surface-level analysis. The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.All the Streets Are SilentNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour and 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More