ARCADE KID (12)
By:
December 19, 2023
We are pleased to present ARCADE KID, a ’90s “drivethru” written, illustrated, and soundtracked by HILOBROW friend Nikhil Singh. Our readers are urged to check out Nikhil’s dystopian psychedelic-noir novel Club Ded (Luna Press, 2020).
Late nineties. Pre-millennial tension. Vintage Americana. Quiet kinda-50’s throwbacks. ‘Our town’ rebranded as sour town. That Weezer video with the Fonz. Terror Twilight. A nostalgia style-trend that peaked at the turn of the Millennium. Sepia backlit against an endless stream of CGI apocalypse. Blockbuster floods. Asteroids. Alien invasions. Killer viruses. Meteor strikes. Daniel Clowes, dreaming of better days that never were. Pleasantville. The dead-stop of the Coen Brothers. My personal birth of Salem Brownstone. Rowland S Howard’s seminal Teenage Snuff Movie. Selling on the high street. Right alongside Bob Dylan’s late-to-the-gate title track for Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. He used to care. Now, it was just Vincent Gallo bowling. John Turturro bowling. The re-invention of Barry Adamson via Maxinquaye. Rowland S Howard’s album again and again — a nihilistic marker of things to come. Stylistically followed by HTRK, whose debut he would later produce and play on. The 90’s, in fast forward. Rapid expansion of Aragon’s ‘dream arcades’. Available to purchase online. Snakes and ladders. A cycle, definitively cosmic in its dreariness. Involuntary, unbreakable. A turn of ten centuries. The world would end soon. Scanning skies for UFO’s or ICBM’s. The coming apocalypse. Best excuse for a party. We would all be skeletons before the year was out. And, if that year failed to deliver oblivion, then surely the next would. The Millenium arrived. Discrediting armchair prophets and sign holders. The Noughties, a name which never properly caught on, was underway. How future anecdotes would be mutilated by its acronymic deficit. A groundswell. End-Is-Nigh fever. The last few drags of the filter — again. All in all, a painful lapse. The death of rave became memorable. Cultural pre-ejaculation. All those neon corridors. Promising to lead somewhere magical and spectacular. Arriving only at the same dismal Monday morning. The prehistoric, unchanging work-dawn we all feared. That which lay at the end of the world. Many woke with a hangover. Immediately went corporate. Dove headfirst into whirlpools. Heroin, religion, white-collar crime. All the black holes you could imagine. Opening and staying opened. Dreadlock die-hards. Charting far corners of the globe. Chewing all the flavour out of travel. Experimenting with hiking gear. Eastern mysticism. A ménage a trois in ‘the Orient’. A cash boom of dingy internet cafes, DIY airlines and long-distance cards. Everyone was finding secret beaches. Polluting them with amazing drug experiences. General bewilderment. A global scattering that quickly became the breeding ground of a new and radical conservatism. Nobody had wanted the world to end after all. They just wanted higher quality merchandise. A house ‘just like their grandparent’s.’ Only bigger and with more stuff. Many hard-line 90’s Greenpeacer’s suddenly forgot their population explosion. They began to breed in time to advertising jingles. Soundbyte-culture. A new and militaristic commercialization of the music industry. The last decade of the century: a carnival of dysfunctional flashbacks. Too many party masks. Not enough time to get undressed off before swapping partners. Jarvis Cocker on repeat. After a while, even sunshine seemed sinister. People just wanted to go home. Never take the trash out ever again. The world could still go to hell. Now, it was Dollar-time.
More NIKHIL SINGH at HILOBROW: DREAMING MEDIA (Q&A) | JOURNEY TO IXTLAN | HASHTAG FASHION POLICE PROBLEMS | ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | HATE ISLAND. ALSO: HADRON AGE SF (2004–2023) | ORIGINAL FICTION at HILOBROW.