The truth about The Box
Music television that shall be controlled no more.
It’s strangely, if fleetingly, heartbreaking to learn that The Box – music television I have not controlled for some decades – is being shunted off to that great big carefully curated playlist in the sky.
Slated to be euthanised at the end of June, The Box is currently broadcasting its last hurrah. A star wheezing out the final vestiges of its energy across the universe before extinction, except instead of the reflective light of the sun that will one day consume all of creation, it’s showing videos from its ‘classic era’, so lots of Five, Usher, and Deuce. Maybe even a Supersister, if you’re (un)lucky. The channel has also reverted to the definitive (read, dated) branding of its glory days, much like I occasionally pull my 2003 Paul Frank T-shirt over my head, expecting to look 27 again and finding only that my nipples are a good 5mm lower than they were.
The nineties was the era where consumer choice became king. The Box was by no means the pioneer in handing over control to the proletariat rather than being decided by earnest trustafarians in dayglo T-shirts and Stussy dungarees, but MTV’s default offering was the same ten songs played at us with an odd episode of The Real World spliced in-between. Enter player 2: The Box, and the same ten songs again, but this time, depending on what time of day it was, selected by stoned students, bored stay-at-home parents, toddlers with impressive cognition and motor skills, and record company employees engaging in guerrilla marketing.
The Box was a formative part of my student experience. Student digs were actual dumps, back then: DIY SOS outtakes bathed in the cheapest magnolia and furnishings older than God’s dog – none of those Gattacan, concierged towers with identikit desk arrangements and one burnt-orange feature wall. The Box beamed out into living rooms cluttered with house clearance furniture, thanks to a chipped cable TV receiver bought off some guy with three teeth who knocked at the door. The Box was the soundtrack to late nights with essays unwritten, to reclusive housemates stumbling out of their room in tatty boxers or oversized Forever Friends T-shirts like anaesthetised koalas in search of eucalyptus – or, in their case, Safeway Corn Flakes with UHT milk.
It was the backing track to being still up from the night before, overflowing ashtrays on our laps, the glug-glug-glug of vodka into the stolen pub glassware, or days off from college vegetating as the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls whirred past in a nonstop zoetrope flicker.
The Box was the channel you turned down when drunk dialling a useless ex or making a booty call from your brick of a mobile phone or, more likely, the shared house phone – a nicotine and dirt-coloured Tribune with the 7 button missing and Wotsits’ dust smeared on the coiled wire.
The Box was the first hour back from the pub, that sweet spot between the best kebab you’ve ever tasted and yawning it all back up in terrifying IMAX 3D before slinking off to bed in shame, never getting to see your ten requests for ‘Barbie Girl’ coming to fruition.
I thought I’d left The Box behind when I graduated, but sure enough in my first houseshare in Edinburgh, there was yet another souped-up cable box, and Britney writhing around in her red catsuit or Robbie Williams ripping off his skin surrounded by heroin chic’s sveltest envoys, on rollerskates. But with responsibilities, early mornings, temp timesheets to chase, and Topman suits to have dry cleaned, The Box had lost its slacker allure.
The strange thing with most products or experiences that chime with your youth but face the axe once you’re grown is that, obviously, you don’t need it anymore, but you like to think of bequeathing it to the next generation, having it out there somewhere, forming at the DNA of someone else’s coming of age. No doubt everyone who was a teenager when wax cylinders were à la mode cried buckets as 78s became the default.
In memory of The Box, here are the songs I remember most from its heyday when it was, for better or worse, my main source of new music. There's a handy playlist here, with a few highlights below.
2 Become 1
The Spice Girls were inescapable for the latter half of 1996, and while I wasn’t a huge fan of the music, I admired their firework energy and passion for clompy shoes. I have crystalline memories of ‘2 Become 1’ being every fourth song in the six-week run-up to Christmas. The deer! Geri’s eyebrows! Those closing strings! Still a deeply great song.
If You Ever
I am categorically not a fan of East 17, or this version of the song – although I have a soft spot for Gabrielle – but get violent flashbacks of my friend and I crooning this to each other in the WORST American accent ever and switching out the heartfelt lyrics for ones which questioned East 17’s ability to pull a lady like Gabrielle.
All I Wanna Do
While big sister Kylie was pulling on her indie jeans once again, Dannii was revelling in a cottage-core version of Babestation and broadcasting out to the nation through the bulkiest PC monitors the world has ever known. Still a banger!
Torn
Natalie Imbruglia’s luminous lemur-esque peepers and that perfect pout under that shaggy pixie cut, the baggy combats, dragon vest and chunky Acupunctures – the birth of the mythical ‘cool girl’. Plus, for my burgeoning reappraisal of my sexuality, Jeremy Sheffield, looking 100% nineties gorgeous. Last night I saw a man brought to life, indeed!
Are You Jimmy Ray?
Still no idea what was going on here, tbh.
…Baby One More Time
Still one of the best debut singles of all time. I can practically taste the tea and toast and feel the springs of my best friend’s battered old sofa as we watched this video for the hundredth time that day.
Barbie Girl
The phenomenon of 1997, I imagine if the minions at The Box didn't already game the system, they had to when Aqua’s debut hit was added to the playlist, otherwise no other tune would’ve been played for the rest of the year. It was always on, and my first selection whenever I got control of the phone. The song followed me to my year abroad in Belgium – standard if you did a language degree – where it was number 1 for months and a mainstay of MTV Europe. The video is still brilliant and the song is packed full of hooks. I can listen to it only once year now but I do love it.
I Want it That Way
To me, a terrible song, performed with nowhere near enough irony by five men who looked like they were under-qualified to take your money on the dodgems let alone be international popstars. The Box’s less discerning viewers requested it to death. It did, at least, give rise to the merciless parody video by Blink 182 on ‘All The Small Things’, another Box smash.
Beautiful Stranger
A quirky long lost banger from Madonna’s millennium zenith. Read more about my memories of this Madonna banger in The Madonna Diaries.
No Scrubs
Oh yes, son, I’m talking to you. Late nineties R&B felt so exciting and fresh and ‘No Scrubs’ was its pinnacle. I simply can’t be friends with anyone who doesn’t love this song (full Left-Eye rap version only) and that love was forged on a grainy rental TV with the colour turned up too high.
Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)
Similar in novelty to ‘Barbie Girl’, sure, but with more vinegar. ‘Give it to me baby, ah-ha, ah-ha’, in a screeching New Jersey accent, was all anyone in my university said for a good two months and I will never forgive this song for that – yet the memory of it is so warm and happy I can bear it no ill will. A wink from the future to the me who needed it, back then, perhaps.
Business: Fourth novel Leading Man is out now on hardback, ebook, and audiobook.
Pleasure: I had an amazing time in Edinburgh promoting it at the First Date festival, a fantastic start to Independent Bookshop Week, and organised by wonderful Edinburgh indie Lighthouse Books. So much fun! Thank you to everyone who came to see me, Bethany and Ada on our romcom panel.
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Pleasure: Catch me in Manchester on Wed 26 June hosting Hachette’s Pride in Writing event with a brilliant lineup of authors: Madeline Docherty; L.D. Lapinski; Daniel Tawse; Soph Galustian; Tanya Byrne, and Han Smith.
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"No Scrubs" is still my guilty pleasure. I have to watch that video every few months, singing along with my sick frog voice. My husband just rolls his eyes.
Oh man this is how I find out that The Box is being retired… it’s also how I found out it was still a thing!