"Steal My Sunshine" is a historical relic, a portal through which we can look back at the moment of greatest potential in American history, and wonder what life would be like if we hadn't thrown it all away.
Standing alone as the undisputed leader in the democratic capitalist sphere, and with the democratic capitalist sphere in a state of unchallenged supremacy, the United States found itself with all the resources necessary to put down a crisis, but without a crisis to put down. So we launched a space station, brought the internet into homes across the nation and lived, if only for eight or nine years, the life of a nation that really believed that a utopia was coming for no other reason than we could build one if we wanted to.
That's the historical context of "Steal My Sunshine," which is a song that is risible because it's openly joyful and optimistic. It embodies the past we turned away from and the future we rejected.
I listened to this song hundreds of times when it came out in 1999. I've listened to it probably thousands of times since. I do not know the lyrics, nor do I know what those lyrics signify.
Here's what I do know, and I'll quote from Wikipedia:
"When Len had signed to Work Records, one of its demands was to be able to direct its own videos. The group used a $100,000 budget to make the video. They flew to Daytona Beach, Florida with two dozen friends while the area was crowded with people on their spring vacations. They spent much of the budget on alcohol, buying so much that they broke their hotel's elevator trying to lift it. They shot the video in the afternoon so that they could recover from hangovers in the morning and drink in the evening. The scenes were shot without a script or storyboard."
I'll repeat that: They bought so much alcohol they broke their hotel's elevator trying to lift it.
What a statement that is. What a monument to the excess of a time in which nobody thought prosperity and happiness were temporary conditions.
Looking back on that video, and that song, it's hard not to be completely shocked by how dramatically life and culture have changed since 9/11--and regardless of whether or not the attack itself could've been prevented, we as a nation volunteered for the course that came later. We volunteered to take part in a permanent and pointless war in the Middle East. We volunteered to replace the politics of optimism with the politics of fear. We volunteered to devalue the individual's quality of life through oppressive surveillance and ineffective security theater. We volunteered to interpret a European rebuke of neoconservatism as a signal that "capitalism" is the most important word in democratic capitalism, which, combined with the devaluation of the importance of quality of life, is how we got the housing crisis, and the banking crisis, and how we decided that the recovery of the economy at large constituted the recovery of corporations, without asking whether workers, who'd been conned and exploited in bad times, had ever gotten back on their feet. And that's how we got Citizens United.
And Citizens United, in concert with the politics of fear and racism of the War on Terror, brought us a federalist system undermined by the ability of a few archconservative elites to buy state and local governments wholesale, while leveraging the politics of fear into mass hysteria and gun violence, some of which is sponsored directly by the state.
We live in a time of fear and sadness, of trying not to think about how bad things actually are, and our entertainment media reflect that. Our pessimism and defensiveness betray this as we clothe ourselves in irony and define ourselves by what we're against rather than what we're for.
That's how the most culturally influential show on television is one of the most unapologetically violent and nihilistic works of fiction ever broadcast on mainstream television, with scenes of rape, murder and torture shot through a blue filter against a backdrop of filth and squalor and cold.
We're just not happy enough, as a culture, for a song like "Steal My Sunshine" to be a No. 1 hit. And I don't see a way back. Maybe it's because I've only ever been an adult in a post-9/11, post-housing crisis, post-Citizens United world, and I can't see a way back because this is all I've ever known. But "Steal My Sunshine" was a No. 1 hit just 16 years ago, and it feels completely alien today.
So you're welcome to look at "Steal My Sunshine" and laugh at the sincere silliness of the song, or the outdated clothes, or the the uncomfortable closeness between the brother and sister who sing it. But I look at "Steal My Sunshine" and start wishing for a time machine. Not out of nostalgia, but because it represents a time of unlimited potential, which our nation squandered with grotesque profligacy. It's a window into the better future we could have had.
