Pop Culture Died in 2009
Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. Today, we have a very special Q&A with Matt James, the genius behind the storied celebrity blog Pop Culture Died in 2009.
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My Instagram feed is full of 2000s nostalgia accounts now, but the one true original is Pop Culture Died in 2009. Matt James started his pitch-perfect blog on Tumblr back in 2013, when he was still in high school, and in the intervening years he’s provided a thorough and exacting compendium of the wildest tabloid moments of the mid-aughts.
From the real story behind Paris Hilton and Britney Spears’ friendship to Topher Grace’s forgotten romance with Ivanka Trump to Hilary Duff’s blurry party pics, I’m always delighted and appalled to read whatever Matt feels like sharing. Here, we discuss the origins of PCD2009, how much (or how little) the tabloids have changed in the last decade, the conversation around the Britney documentary, TikTok gossip, and more.
You started Pop Culture Died in 2009 back in 2013. Can you tell me what you were thinking about at the time?
It’s very weird to think about now — I don't even think of myself as that much older. It's just been one big blur, refreshing feeds and everything. Then again, I think that's everybody's life in the social-media era. When I started it, I was feeling a little nostalgic for these crazy images that I was seeing as a kid growing up in the early-to-mid-2000s. I was entering the world in the era of E! True Hollywood Stories, VH1 countdowns, The Soup, and all these shows dedicated to spoofing these ridiculous public figures. Every day was a new scandal. Every day was a new career-ending meltdown. And it didn't make sense to me at the time, when I was a little kid. I was like nine years old when Britney Spears shaved her head.
It wasn't until I started this blog back in my sophomore year of high school that I really started to make sense of all of it, and what I knew then is really only a fraction of what I know today. I just became really obsessed with piecing it all together and coming away with an understanding of all this craziness that I was growing up with.
One of the things I love most about your blog is the level of media analysis you do — you’re piecing together so many different elements and bringing in the original context. What’s your gossip media diet and how do you source everything?
When it comes to current gossip, I really don't look at much. I'm subscribed to magazines still, but mostly out of habit. I give them a quick scan, and it's pitiful. I lurk Page Six, sometimes even the Daily Mail, but I mean, most of those good celebrity gossip outlets from 10 years ago are gone. So mostly I just bury myself in old gossip. I have my collection of physical magazines that I'm constantly building. I love to go through archives of gossip sites — Dlisted, Perez, X17 Online. I love just seeing what people were saying about things even 10 years ago, since it's so different from what it is today.
I love when you share the covers of the tabloids from 10 years ago. Does anything surprise you about the headlines?
Here’s the thing when it comes to celebrity magazines: I don't think they've changed at all in terms of the headlines. And I know people are offended by them. I always see whenever I do those weekly tweets, people are sort of aghast, but if you actually just stop and look at the ones in the supermarket now, they're pretty much the same. It's just that nobody buys them anymore. That's the difference.
I would say gossip sites and the attitude they've taken has changed. But I still think that ugliness manifests itself in other places, so I don't think we've made this complete shift. Everybody wants to think that we’re magically better; I think we’re relatively the same. We may have mastered a sort of cultural language, at least in internet circles, about what we can and can’t say about people, but we do find a way to sort of shoehorn it in in other places. I mean, there are entire essays and think pieces now that are thousands and thousands of words that boil down to “so-and-so is an asshole.”
I was thinking of you when the Britney Spears documentary aired and people suddenly started to reconsider how interviewers like Diane Sawyer treated her. And then on Twitter, people started surfacing questionable David Letterman interviews of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and so on. I’m wondering what you think about that conversation, given how long you’ve been covering this era and these kinds of media figures.
Ooh, okay. Well, I think most of the discourse has been a struggle. A lot of these things are being picked apart without context — not to say that with context, some of these comments are better or justifiable, but you can’t dredge up an interview clip from 15 years ago and respond to it like it happened yesterday. I also felt a lot of the discussion on social media was patronizing. There was a lot of talk about how the media quote-unquote destroyed these women, as if they’re pathetic wilting victims of bad publicity. And they aren’t! I don’t think Britney Spears was destroyed by the media. I think she destroyed herself and the media profited from it and sometimes even exacerbated it — but the media didn’t cause it, and that delineation needs to be made.
I tend to think her breakdown was inevitable, but her fame intensified it and made the stakes too high for her to ever truly rebound. And long after her breakdown, it wasn't really the media that was maintaining the narrative that she was crazy. For the most part, those TV networks and magazines had a vested interest in promoting her comeback, since comebacks are profitable. It was the people I talked to day to day. They would hear the name Britney Spears and snark and ask if she was still crazy. You can only blame the media boogeyman for so much — public culpability needs to be acknowledged, too. We’re a part of the problem. Britney was on the cover of the tabloids because she sold well; people were buying them.
That’s not to remove the fault of the magazines in the first place, but it’s complicated. Most of the conversation in the past few months has been shallow and self-serving. It became a game of who could dig up the most vile and offensive comments towards famous women from 10 years ago and share them again with outrage for likes and retweets. And it hasn’t done anything to really help Britney or question the dodgy ethics of her conservatorship. It just became another way for people to say, “I'm better than you.”
One of my favorite recurring features that you’ve done was on Bella Thorne as a “LiLo-in-training.” I’m wondering when you look at famous young people now — which in my mind, that’s Addison Rae and the TikTok stars — do you see anyone as interesting or worth covering as a potential Lohan-type figure?
No, not at all. I downloaded TikTok, and I’m trying to figure out how to use it. But I don’t get it. There are corners of it that are concerned with celebrity gossip, but the gossip is weird. Everyone on there talks like Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor. Everything’s a conspiracy, everything’s deadly serious. They talk about backstage drama on a Nickelodeon show from 15 years ago like it’s the Pentagon Papers. It’s weird!
Good gossip has some levity and self-awareness. Those old magazines and gossip columnists acknowledged that what they were peddling was trivial, and that’s what made it fun. The people on TikTok go from zero to 100 really quick. If a celebrity glances at them the wrong way in Starbucks, they’re the scum of the Earth. I don't know how it got to this.
Do you think the kind of celebrity gossip we got in the mid-aughts is a dying art?
I do think — and this is just my opinion, and I know a lot of people would disagree with me — celebrity gossip is worse now than it was then. Not in terms of quality, like, ooh, there’s no juicy scandals. That I don’t care about. I think the actual impact it has on the celebrities is worse now. Which a lot of people don’t think, because we’ve moved past the aesthetic of flashy tabloid covers and paparazzi mobs to the more quote-unquote democratic social media process, where you’re able to connect directly with people. I think in a lot of ways, that’s worse.
Back then, unless you were Britney, unless you were Lindsey, unless you were Paris, you were not being swarmed with photographers at the supermarket. Unless you were a really big star, you weren’t being touched by that era of celebrity obsession. You were able to sort of live your life with whatever degree of anonymity you chose. And now, everyone is up for criticism. Everyone is ripe for analysis. Not to say that there weren’t forums and LiveJournal communities 15 years ago for gossiping about C- or D-list actors on a CW show, but it was so much harder to seek out and find those things then.
Now, since everything’s been centralized to these same few apps, all you have to do is search your name and you will see every nasty, negative thing anyone says about you, right there, a scroll away. And with smartphones, everybody’s just sneaking pictures, which to me is worse than the paparazzi. I would rather be confronted face-to-face by a guy in baggy shorts and a giant camera than somebody sneaking a photo when I can’t see it. So I think it's even more anxiety-inducing now to be a famous person than it was.
Thanks so much for opening this email. I’ll be back tomorrow with your weekly gossip update. As always, please feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments or by replying to this email.
Dylan Dreyer
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