1992 is a year of technological innovation whose surviving artefacts now have the appearance of semi-ancient relics. The year sees the launch both of the first smartphone (the IBM Simon Personal Communicator) and the first hand-held digital mobile phone (the Motorola International 3200). The latest operating system is Microsoft Windows 3.1, and the most popular web browser is the recently launched ViolaWWW. The first ever text message (“Merry Christmas”) is sent. American and Russian Presidents George HW Bush and Boris Yeltsin formally declare an end to the Cold War, though the programme of extraterrestrial exploration begun by the ’space race’ in the 1960s and 70s continues when the American space shuttle Endeavour is launched for the first time in May.
For the first time, sales of CDs overtake those of cassettes. Until now the cassette had been a massive cultural medium, offering the easiest and most portable way of listening to music yet created, and making possible the invention of the mixtape. A much-romanticised cultural form (Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has edited an entire book on the subject) the mixtape created a customised, uniquely personal way of listening to and distributing music; “cassette culture” was arguably a DIY art movement in itself, one that now seems another relic in the age of streaming and Spotify.
Perhaps due in part to this transition stage between old and new media, sales of singles are initially low, while there will only be 12 new number ones across the entire year. Dr Dre’s The Chronic is released in December and goes on to become recognised as one of the most influential hip-hop albums ever, while the release of Blur’s ‘Popscene’ and Suede’s ‘The Drowners’ within a couple of months of each other is retrospectively claimed as the inauguration of Britpop. Prince’s video for ‘Cream’, with its Godfather-parodying introduction, wins ‘best dance video’ at the MTV Video Music Awards, though his ideas appear to be getting stranger; he releases an album with an unpronounceable symbol as the title, copyrighted by Prince as ‘Love Symbol #2’ and later to replace ‘Prince’ as the name he performed under (his label send floppy disks loaded with a custom typeface to journalists so they can still write about him).
More of the soul/funk zeitgeist is Sade’s Love Deluxe: soul as style, desire as luxury item, some of the lushest sound ever produced. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85–92, which sublimates into borderless soundscapes and influences/anticipates decades’ worth of developments in electronic music — not bad for an album recorded on the now-supposedly-obsolete technology of cassette tape, let alone cassette tape that was, as has been reported, damaged by the musician’s cat. All somehow very 90s records — though the same cannot be said of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, which, recorded and produced largely with 1970s analogue technology, is unashamedly a throwback record.
At the BRIT awards, pop situationists the KLF fire a machine gun loaded with blanks into the crowd during their performance of ‘3am Eternal’. Later that evening, they win ‘Best British Band’, joint with Simply Red, though they’re not around to pick up the award — they’re too busy leaving a dead sheep outside the entrance to the official post-show party. Away from the charts and the annual ‘best of’ lists, in the pages of The Wire Simon Reynolds writes enthusiastically about the hardcore rave scene, complete with citations of Johnny Rotten, Dostoyevsky and French philosopher Paul Virilio. “Ardkore frenzy is where the somnambulist youth of Britain snap out of the living death of the 90s, and grasp a few moments of fugitive bliss… Speed-freak youth are literally running away from their problems, and who can blame them?”
Listen to a 1992 playlist curated by SPIN here.
Quentin Tarantino’s breakout film Reservoir Dogs comes out, complete with what will become the director’s hallmarks: pop-culture hyper-referentiality, ultraviolence, and soundtrack-based nostalgia. Tim Burton, meanwhile, offers his distinctive take on a superhero film: the darker and more offbeat content Batman Returns, starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito, is unpopular with the film’s corporate sponsors but gives it an enduring reputation as a forward-looking take on the character. Alongside it on the list of the year’s top-grossing films are controversial director Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct — and The Bodyguard, a film originally written for Diana Ross but which sends Whitney Houston to the top of the music charts.
Éric Rohmer adapts the Shakespeare play of the same name for A Winter’s Tale, the second film in his ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’ series, while two horror films appear from legendary directors: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the prequel to his cult TV show. Widely panned at the time (including by Tarantino) critics take two or three decades to come round to it; in 2019 the BFI ranks it as the fourth-best film of the 1990s.
Among the novels of 1992 is Donna Tartt’s preppy murder mystery The Secret History, the latest and highest-selling novel to come out of a single class of Bennington College students with an improbably dense cluster of successful novelist — including, alongside Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. This cultural moment will develop its own minor mythology in the early 2020s, becoming an object of fascination whose appeal perhaps derives from the sense that it was the last time that highbrow-designated literary authors were able to cultivate this kind of celebrity and mainstream stardom. With The Secret History on the bestseller lists is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, a football memoir subtitled a ‘a fan’s life’ — specifically an Arsenal fan’s life, which may go some way towards explaining its tonal mixture of edge-of-sublime rapture and existential despair.
Speaking of football: Leeds United win the First Division, with Manchester United and Sheffield Wednesday qualifying for the UEFA Cup just behind them. Ian Wright, of Crystal Palace and then Arsenal, finishes as top scorer with 29 goals. 1992 then sees the launch of both the Champions League and the rebranded Premier League (the original ’super league’). In the Premier League’s first season, the Players’ Player of the Year award is won by Aston Villa’s cult hero Paul McGrath — this despite the fact that, by his own admission, he barely trained in seven years at Villa due to injury problems (“some days I would just have a bath”). As the journalist Philip Quinn once put it: “Paul McGrath played football as though he was wearing a silk smoking jacket with a crystal glass in his hand”.
Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson collaborates with visual artist Dennis Ashbaugh and art publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. on Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). The work features a poem by Gibson on a floppy disc, embedded in an artists’ book designed by Ashbaugh — the catch being that the poem is programmed to encrypt itself after a single reading, while photosensitive chemicals are used on the pages of the book to ensure that the words and images they hold fade on their first exposure to light. A book that can only be read once; a text without memory or future.
Elsewhere in the art world, Charles Saatchi puts on the first of his Young British Artists exhibition series at his gallery in St John’s Wood, north-west London. The other major exhibition of that year is a Richard Hamilton retrospective at the Tate, his first showing there since 1970. One looks to the past; the other, supposedly, to the future. But accusations that the ‘YBAs' were responsible for importing the techniques of commerce and marketing hype into art must have sounded familiar to Hamilton, who famously described the pop art he helped to invent as: “Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Wicked, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business”.
Paul Rand, along with Armin Hofmann, resigns from his position at Yale University, and in an essay for the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design grumbles about the state of the discipline: “the deluge of design that colors our lives, our print, and video screens is synchronous with the spirit of our time. No less than drugs and pollution, and all the fads and -isms that have plagued our communities, the big brush of graffiti for example, has been blanketing our cities from Basel to Brooklyn. Much of graphic design today is a grim reminder of this overwhelming presence… a collage of confusion and chaos, swaying between high tech and low art, and wrapped in a cloak of arrogance: squiggles, pixels, doodles, dingbats, ziggurats… indecipherable, zany typography…”
As if on cue, the summer issue of Eye magazine, a typography special, runs a feature on the “frantic scribbles, arbitrarily chosen images and weird typographic mechanisms that look like something Jean Tinguely might have dreamed up on a day off from making auto-destructive sculptures” of British studio Why Not Associates. In an interview, Neville Brody declares that, though it will “terrify ardent Modernists”, we are moving into a “modernism of the individual, where the individual has access to the means of communication… It’s a mistake to think that graphic design should be anonymous or impersonal”.
The rock magazine Ray Gun is co-founded and art directed by David Carson, while typography journal Octavo releases its notorious final issue — titled multi-media, or multi-mediocrity and the baggage of the past? — as an interactive CD-ROM. Published amid widespread fears about the so-called ‘death of print’, Octavo 92.8 will soon become almost unreadable due to technological advances rendering its format obsolete; turning it into another mystical dead-tech artefact.