THE GREAT KAT WAS A GENIUS AHEAD OF HER TIME!

The Great Kat might’ve been batshit 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 shit 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