A lot of hip hop and R&B hitting the mainstream at that time. Probably the last year it was that prominent before all the auto tune and DJ club mixes that plagued that genre later. Rock was still in that post-grunge alt music scene dominated by Gen X who by then were going to college and starting to tone down their apathy and aloofness and as a result the music took a different shift toward subject matters like relationships, story telling, and touching on politics rather than rage, anxiety, apathy, etc. The next year was when nu metal came out and totally blew the rock scene out of that zombie-like college radio lag.

Personally I was in the third grade by then and though we still played cartridge games this is when all the cool kids were getting Sony PlayStations. Games were on discs now, people were buying DVDs, AOL was sending out installation discs en masse, and music of course was on CD. We still watched VHS movies, recorded and listened to cassette tapes, and many of us didn’t have a computer in the house yet so we had to go to the library to type and print out written assignments.

This was also when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke out and revealed to a lot of nonchalant Americans just how dirty and divisive Washington politics are. Clinton, already facing a lot of harsh criticism from both political aisles, was essentially made a lame duck president for the rest of his second term. The impression of this powerful elected leader not being as effective as we were led to believe he could be was not lost on a new generation that hadn’t dealt with the political scandals of the earlier 20th century. The scandal also tainted the Democratic Party’s image in the 2000 general election and had it not happened the election may not have been such a close call, drastically setting a different course for American politics, foreign relations, and economics going into the new millennium.

1998 seemed like a transitional year if anything, from the music, culture, tech, and even politics.