Ah, the early 2000s. A time of flashy excess. A time when monoculture still existed, and we were all soaked in it. A time when the gritty ironies of ‘90s Gen-Xers became candy-coated and magnified into multi-colored pastiches of bubblegum irony. This new flavor of irony was so sincerely manufactured, it turned a corner and became “real” again. We were having fun, and we knew we were having fun, and we winked loudly about it all along the way. All of these cultural impulses and more coalesced together in two 2000s-defining (for better and for worse) …