I'll never forget being 11 and reading my dad's Rolling Stone magazine about Columbine and other school shooters, and seeing Kip Kinkel's face and rundown. That day he became my fav school shooter, the OG loner with the alliterative name. He was more authentic than Kliebold and Harris, more rock to their metal.
But Columbine was the perfect storm. The name alone is so memorable, ominous. It seems oddly predestined. The name is like Columbus, a typical peaceful high school name, but the "bine" imbues a weird menace evoking a combine thresher, machinery, like a barrel rolled onto the end of Columbus, terminating the word, trapping the students inside the word like fish in a barrel. It's the name of a flower yet the word seems to detonate. columBINE! Run and hide!
The perfect storm. Summoned by two media baiting teen narcissists turned final bosses. Possibly inspired by Scream (Scream 3 and Teaching Mrs Tingle were changed due to them). They radiated a VHS spectral look, MTV black suns. School shooter fashion arrived: "Trench Coat Mafia" was cycled ad nauseum on CNN. Every high school's cipher of blackclad cig-fingered loners was profiled. Movies like The Crow and NBK, and Nothing Records, and DOOM, literally the id, had tweaked up the mid 90s, as grunge spiraled down a heroin drain and by 1999 was festering in computer NEET corners, detachment and voyeurism surging. Boy bands were being pushed on kids, instigating rebellion. Kids mousing online for gore, porn thumbs, bomb making. Parents weren't privy.
Columbine and Blair Witch Project bottled the sun/moon vibe of 1999. Mass murder via CCTV, www, camcorder, projected like found footage relics of our present, impossible to shake.
Even as a babby, I sensed Charles Manson and Zodiac were overblown: Boomer mythologizing. But Columbine was our Manson, 9/11 was our Pearl Harbor/JFK, Cobain/Lennon. Touchstones hammering our decline.
Columbine was perfectly packaged. Whereas all other skool shmups are botched rehearsals.