Analyzing a single piece of popular culture, even for over an hour, on a podcast isn’t enough to make determinations about a time and place. Here are some other pop items that Western culture produced and consumed in the same period that gave us “Love Actually.”
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December 2003 in music
Outkast was at numbers 1 and 2 on the Billboard hot 100 this week in 2003 with "Hey Ya" and "I Like the Way You Move" respectively.
Both singles come from Big Boi and Andre 3000's fifth studio album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which would go Diamond in sales and be win the "Album of the Year" Grammy.
Although Outkast had been producing music for over a decade by 2003, it was this era that they really shined in the spotlight. I can't help but think that this is because they were not just experimenting with sounds outside of hip hop, but doing so while appearing that they weren't experimenting at all. In other words, this is the product of true artists who were properly capturing and using all of the means to make music of the era.
Oh yeah, they were still making these back then:
December 2003 in Television
I came across this upload of The Price is Right and it is such a fun window back in time exactly 20 years to December 19, 2003.
I've mentioned The Price is Right many times before because it acts as an artifact in several ways, most of all to show us the value of various consumer goods at any given time.
This upload goes all the way to the end, though, and the promos after the show are just as enlightening. Rob Lowe starred in The Christmas Shoes, a TV movie based on a book based on a song all of the same name. This media outpouring based on the same source material took place over just four short years! Then the spot about the purse parties...all of these are such wonderful documents of that different world we call the early 2000s.
December 2003 in mass media
Some of the top media and pop culture stories from this day 20 years ago reflect companies and regulatory agencies reacting to the rapid changes brought about by the Internet and digital technology development. There's also signs of these entities trying to read the popular culture tea leaves and try to figure out the best course of action to stay relevant in the coming years.
Between Viacom and Comcast merging, News Corp. acquiring DirectTV and Napster still being in the news, one can witness the mass media waves that were splashing into each other in the early 2000s.
On demand may have paved the way for streaming, and music sharing was going to transform into downloading through Amazon, but MTV was not the investment of the future after all.
December 2003 in fashion
Target’s December 2003 "Favorite Things" ad campaign supports what Erin and I discuss on the podcast about Love Actually. The minimalism, heavy use of white, and monochromatic design may be one part to project the "futuristic" feel of the 2000s, but it also symbolic of the fresh start or new era that we had entered.
Much of early 2000s culture seemed to be going out of its way NOT to be merely an extension of the 1990s, but its own blank canvas or slate.
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December 2003 in film
Although I would love to report that the topic of the podcast was the biggest movie of December 2003 (Love Actually actually premiered on November 7th), that title goes to the last installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. Although Star Wars was in the midst of its second trilogy of films, a lot of attention was turned to Peter Jackson and his epic story based on the high fantasy classic books by JRR Tolkien.
Not to subtract from Star Wars Episodes I-III’s reflection of the era, because it is there, but Lord of the Rings with its epic struggle for the survival of civilization was the story of the time period. With a coalition of various peoples all on the side of either good or evil, LOTR is a bit more appealing to an early 2000s audience than finding out the details of how Darth Vader came to be.
Oh, but to connect this #1 film to the topic of the podcast, Erin was on the same flight from New York to London with Elijah Wood a few months after both movies came out. How serendipitous!
As we discuss at various points of the podcast, September 11th still loomed over society and culture by the end of 2003. Even if it wasn’t overt, just the way pop culture was reorganizing itself or trying to start anew speaks to the New Era we had entered in the most horrible way possible.