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Authors: Rob Sheffield
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pleasant evening by saying ‘get home safe.’” I never heard anyone say “Get home safe” until the mid-nineties, then boom, it was everywhere. How did this become acceptable as a way to say goodbye? I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It’s tantamount to saying, “Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy,” or “Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.”
I will never understand. But I hate “get home safe.” As valedictory clichés go, I would trade it to the seventies for “have a nice day.” Hell, I would swap it to the eighties for “later.” I have no idea why this chatty little curse got so popular, so quickly. But it did. And it’s evil.
Certain fads can show up and seem like they’ve been around forever. It may be shocking, but the thumb-and-pinkie “call me” gesture? Did not exist before the nineties. People had been holding their phones that way for decades, yet nobody thought to wiggle a thumb-and-pinkie as a social invitation before. First time I saw it was on The Arsenio Hall Show , in 1992. (David Alan Grier, star of In Living Color , was the guest, greeting a foxy lady in the studio audience.) Then it spread until the novelty wore off. You still see it today, even though there aren’t any phones you hold that way anymore.
I don’t know how it works, but sometimes that’s how it happens: Abnormal behavioral quirks get normal overnight. People singing along with machines, to instrumental tracks, reading the lyrics off a screen—once it might have looked sick, even sinful. Yet people fell in love with it fast, so they decided to see it as normal, the way previous generations regarded bow ties, shuffleboard, Quaaludes, or witch-burning. You go to the movies, you expect a karaoke scene, just as forties audiences weren’t fazed to see a World War II pilot light a stogie while gassing up his Tomahawk.
Sometime soon, be it two or twenty years from now, people will stop saying “get home safe,” and then we’ll all make fun of our earlier selves for saying it. But we still haven’t realized this about karaoke. That’s one of the most glorious miracles of our time.
NINE
10:35 p.m.:
99 Luftballons
As the summer of 2001 ended, with a string of hundred-degree dog days, I was still living downtown, by the World Trade Center. Apartment 7Q felt like a dead white box in the sky, and I still felt like an alien in my steel-and-glass ice chamber. But I didn’t have the energy to move out, so I renewed my lease for one more year, effective September 1. When my hunger pangs got stronger than my inertia, I walked a block down the alley to the Thai restaurant, in a strip mall called the Excelsior Plaza, to eat in a brightly lit white room—much like the one I slept in—not even tasting the noodles, just sitting in my table next to the air-conditioning vent and listening to myself breathe and thinking, “These people are near you but they can’t hurt you. They can’t see you or hear you. It’s okay. They will go away. They will leave this room. We will all leave this room. Nobody will remember you were here.”
The Thai place always had the Top 40 station on, usually playing something by Destiny’s Child, who were a rare sign of life on the radio. The girls sang like machines until they turned into machines, chanting “say my name, say my name” in heavy rotation. The lyrics were about paranoia and jealousy, but the music was about calming down and chilling out and not giving a fuck. The production was scientific and precise. I loved it.
None of the machines around me seemed to function except Destiny’s Child. My time was spent rushing from one narrow metal tube to another—apartment, staircase, sidewalk, subway, street. The subway station led to a maze of underground tunnels. It could take up to an hour to find my way up to the sidewalk,
I will never understand. But I hate “get home safe.” As valedictory clichés go, I would trade it to the seventies for “have a nice day.” Hell, I would swap it to the eighties for “later.” I have no idea why this chatty little curse got so popular, so quickly. But it did. And it’s evil.
Certain fads can show up and seem like they’ve been around forever. It may be shocking, but the thumb-and-pinkie “call me” gesture? Did not exist before the nineties. People had been holding their phones that way for decades, yet nobody thought to wiggle a thumb-and-pinkie as a social invitation before. First time I saw it was on The Arsenio Hall Show , in 1992. (David Alan Grier, star of In Living Color , was the guest, greeting a foxy lady in the studio audience.) Then it spread until the novelty wore off. You still see it today, even though there aren’t any phones you hold that way anymore.
I don’t know how it works, but sometimes that’s how it happens: Abnormal behavioral quirks get normal overnight. People singing along with machines, to instrumental tracks, reading the lyrics off a screen—once it might have looked sick, even sinful. Yet people fell in love with it fast, so they decided to see it as normal, the way previous generations regarded bow ties, shuffleboard, Quaaludes, or witch-burning. You go to the movies, you expect a karaoke scene, just as forties audiences weren’t fazed to see a World War II pilot light a stogie while gassing up his Tomahawk.
Sometime soon, be it two or twenty years from now, people will stop saying “get home safe,” and then we’ll all make fun of our earlier selves for saying it. But we still haven’t realized this about karaoke. That’s one of the most glorious miracles of our time.
NINE
10:35 p.m.:
99 Luftballons
As the summer of 2001 ended, with a string of hundred-degree dog days, I was still living downtown, by the World Trade Center. Apartment 7Q felt like a dead white box in the sky, and I still felt like an alien in my steel-and-glass ice chamber. But I didn’t have the energy to move out, so I renewed my lease for one more year, effective September 1. When my hunger pangs got stronger than my inertia, I walked a block down the alley to the Thai restaurant, in a strip mall called the Excelsior Plaza, to eat in a brightly lit white room—much like the one I slept in—not even tasting the noodles, just sitting in my table next to the air-conditioning vent and listening to myself breathe and thinking, “These people are near you but they can’t hurt you. They can’t see you or hear you. It’s okay. They will go away. They will leave this room. We will all leave this room. Nobody will remember you were here.”
The Thai place always had the Top 40 station on, usually playing something by Destiny’s Child, who were a rare sign of life on the radio. The girls sang like machines until they turned into machines, chanting “say my name, say my name” in heavy rotation. The lyrics were about paranoia and jealousy, but the music was about calming down and chilling out and not giving a fuck. The production was scientific and precise. I loved it.
None of the machines around me seemed to function except Destiny’s Child. My time was spent rushing from one narrow metal tube to another—apartment, staircase, sidewalk, subway, street. The subway station led to a maze of underground tunnels. It could take up to an hour to find my way up to the sidewalk,
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