Pills, Police And Endless War: 20 Years Ago, Primal Scream Saw Our Future

At the start of the 21st century, popular culture held up a persistent warning: Capitalism is peaking, and doom is just around the corner. You can see it in turn-of-the-millennium artifacts like Fight Club, The Matrix, Rage Against the Machine's The Battle of Los Angeles, Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, Grant Morrison's comic series The Invisibles. You can hear it in the era's radical thought, even if the glib anti-consumerism of No Logo and Adbusters feels less potent today than it did back when name-dropping Noam Chomsky for intellectual cool points was at its height. It was the cloud around the WTO protests that shut down Seattle near the end of 1999.

And yet, that future still read most often as dystopian science fiction. Bolstered by the relative peace and prosperity of the late-Clinton, pre-9/11 era, the dominant mood in American culture was still one of optimism: a pervasive assumption that this moment of stability was going to be permanent. Which led one British rock band — perhaps — to call the danger out by name.