When the Wall fell, popular culture rose to a new level of social relevance. Wind of Change? More like a tsunami! The Nineties washed over the increasingly globalized media landscape in a tidal wave of catchy tunes, cult movies, TV series and show stars. FACES rolls up the decade – and publishes an encyclopaedia on the age of grunge, girl groups, GZSZ and crooners in loose succession.
Ballads? Big Time! The vocal chords of the cuddly pop queens vibrate almost in canon during the decade-long bitchfight for the title of the ultimate queen of semen remover.
Just the memory of their great moments, their signature hits, makes the ankles vibrate like high-performance vibrators: Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Céline Dion. Okay, Toni Braxton, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, LeAnn Rimes, Annie Lennox… are still in the “distant future”. But the Big Three of female vocal wonders in particular smashes the male competition (Collins, Michael, Meat Loaf…) to smithereens. Her up to five-octave homages to fulfilled or dissolved love go beyond all dimensions. Guinness Book entries, gigantic concerts, airplay en masse, astronomical dollar amounts: Record contracts in the two-digit million range, sales of sound carriers in the three-digit million range. Even the movie theater is not spared: “Bodyguard”, “Glitter”, “Titanic”… Like the latter, however, they all suffer shipwreck together in the next millennium. Driven to the grave by coke (Houston), marked by commercial disasters and too many Botox injections (Carey) or simply fallen out of time (Dion).
