Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 4:00pm by Vince Neilstein
The Great Kat might’ve been bats**t crazy or it might’ve been an Andrew W.K.-style
put-on, but after watching the below clip filmed in 1994 (!) in which she
describes her new interactive CD-ROM (!) I’m convinced that she was absolutely
brilliant and way ahead of her time. Srsly: who else was doing this s**t in
1994? For those of you who are too young to remember CD-ROMs (oh gawd I feel
old), they were kinda like DVDs with graphical interfaces that included special
bonus content you couldn’t get anywhere else ; it was basically like a website
on a disc (this was before widespread Internet access and before broadband made
streaming video possible).
The money quote: “Within a couple of years everyone will have CD ROMs, everyone
will be online, everyone will have a website. As a matter of fact, I’m getting a
website. Do you know what a website is?” She adds, “This is what the future is.”
This was in 1994, people; no bands had websites yet, and there were certainly no
MySpace or Facebook pages. My family was still running a Mac SE at the time
connecting to AOL through a 28.8kbps modem… come to think of it, I don’t think
we even had a modem yet.
It’s kind of amazing how simultaneously obsessed with the music of the past and
locked into the technology of the future The Great Kat is in this clip. She’s so
sincere about her love of classical music and so cock-sure of the direction
technology will head in the 21st Century… was she onto something or what? Makes
me reconsider brushing off her remark about Testament as “mind-numbing,
drug-inducing garbage.”
-VN
Thanks: Shane Gillis
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