The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. It is not the thinking now. Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.
I have always liked Chuck Klosterman — reading one of his books feels like talking to my younger brother Kyler, who has a similarly episodic memory for pop cultural moments and an ironic tone that masks wise insights — and Klosterman’s latest, The Nineties:A Book, seems particularly written for me (and others who lived through that decade as adults). Klosterman himself notes that every generation thinks that they’re living through times of intense change, and that’s because it’s always true, but the changes that occurred in the period between the falling of the Berlin Wall and the falling of the Twin Towers, as the world moved from analog to digital, were particularly revolutionary (and maybe I only agree with that thesis because I was an adult during those years). We went from people who were tied to our house phones if we were expecting a call, answering every call in case it was important — people who published our addresses and phone numbers in books that were freely distributed — to becoming a people who took our phones along in our pockets, often ignoring calls even from people we know, and made it illegal to “dox” — to publicly publish someone’s address and phone number online. We went from watching fairly formulaic television — because it was the only thing on, and if you missed an episode, maybe you’d catch it in reruns — to “prestige television” like The Sopranos (which we could tape, then DVR, then stream and binge), but more viewers watched an average episode of Seinfeld than the finale of The Sopranos. The nineties were a time of nihilism and postmodernism and a desire not to be seen as trying too hard; the days of Nirvana and Friends and The Matrix; low speed chases and clear colas and domestic terrorism and both Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton staring into a television camera and insisting that they did not do that thing that they totally did. Klosterman says that people born after 1985 look back and say, “How could you have put up with all of that?”, and he replies, as do I, you really had to be there. Because I was there, every little bit of this resonated with me, but I could see how some might see it as pointless navel-gazing about a decade that was about nothing. As for me, I am happy that this book exists and that I got an early chance to read it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
(People born after WWII and before 1985) were forced to wrestle with an experience that reconstituted reality without changing anything about the physical world. These interlocked generations — Boomers and Xers — will be the only people who experienced this shift as it happened, with total recall of both the previous world and the world that came next. “If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet,” wrote Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence, “we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After.”
My reaction to just about everything in this book was a highly personal one, and while on goodreads I decided to not make this a navel-gazing public review about my own personal experience of the 90s, I don't have spoiler tags here, so that's what this will be. (*forewarned I don't expect this review to be interesting to anyone but future me*)
If I could change anything about this book, it would be to somehow shift the decade to cover 1985-1995 to better match my own experiences (and as Klosterman is five years younger than I am, perhaps the decade aligns perfectly for him as is.) I can accept that the following captures something true about me as a Generation Xer:
The generational disinterest in contradicting any allegation of apathy proves that the allegations are correct. Accusations of an overreliance on “irony” are met with ironic rebuttals. It’s like a court case where the plaintiff and the defendant are both trying to win by making identical arguments. The portrait is accepted as accurate because no one is particularly invested in arguing otherwise, and that will remain true for as long as the generation is remembered.
And the following is an eerily accurate assessment of how (and why) I left my university studies:
Allan Bloom published an unexpected bestseller titled The Closing of the American Mind, claiming that the modern university system had prioritized relativism over critical thinking, inadvertently leading to nihilism — but Bloom was attacked for being elitist, out of touch, clandestinely conservative, and not really a philosopher.
The nihilism I felt was very real, and this was shared even by my friends who ended up finishing university. As a group, we would go for coffee and write crowdsourced poetry and songs; all of them ironic and fatalistic. On a whim, we got together once to record some of our songs. Kevin had a synthesiser that he didn’t know how to play (when I later saw Ross on Friends sit down to a similar keyboard to “find his sound”, I totally lost it), but we would select a synth beat and Kevin would just kind of make up chords and moods to go along with them. We called ourselves Men in Comas and our feature song was called “Men in Comas (Get an Erection)” (because that was a hilarious thing that we heard could happen?), and the cover of our cassette tape was a reproduction of Marilyn Monroe on the autopsy table, which Kevin had discovered in some book at the library and had photocopied over and over in black and white until he got the “fuzziness” of the gender just right; this was our photoshop. We had a song called “Save Me a Cyanide Pill” (about committing suicide in the case of a nuclear war — which we assumed was coming — instead of living as a mutant in a hellscape), “The Orphanage Song” (about being too ugly to get adopted), and “The Train Bridge” (our country crossover, with half the lyrics in French, begging the high, rocking bridge to not fall down on us). I wish I could remember more of the songs (or that I still had my copy of the tape!), but that was the mood in the late 80s. We did not know if we would live out the century, and it made it feel like nothing mattered. I remember thinking when the first Gulf War started in 1991, “This is it.” (And not uncoincidentally because I had been reading Nostrodamus and some details lined up about Armageddon happening in the Middle East, and that when Russia and China intervene, it would all be over. [Something like that.] And it did frighten me.)
My husband Dave, on the other hand, only two years older than I am (born in 1965, so technically actually a Baby Boomer, even if I insist that he is not the same generation as my parents who were actually born right after WWII), identifies more with the 70s and unironically loves everything about that decade:
The seventies were beloved, but not as a historical period; the seventies were beloved as a collection of stuff, some of which was cherished precisely because it now seemed dumb.
Dave loves all that dumb stuff — the movies, the music, the television; the license plate on his ‘74 Dodge is 70S GUY — and I don’t know if that’s why the nihilism of my young adulthood seems to have skipped him; I couldn’t even get him worked up about the Gulf War at the time. (Hello world, hear the song that we're singin'. Come on, get happy!) Something about our different reactions to the times we were living through has lingered until today and the way that we embrace new technologies: He loves Spotify (but only to find familiar songs; he does not want an algorithm to guess what he’d like) and I prefer the human-touched randomness of FM radio; he won’t go anywhere without Google Maps (“Take this right, it’s two minutes faster”) but I would rather stick to my regular route and see what the two minute hold up is about; he will Google any little unknown/unremembered detail and I don’t mind not knowing every little thing (I will say that YouTube comes in handy when reading a book like this; I enjoyed rewatching videos like "Smells Like Teen Spirirt" and "Creep"; watching "Cop Killer" and "Fly Me Courageous" for the first time); and ever since the first time I saw a sitcom without a laugh track (maybe The Office?), I was sent along a postmodernist path that sees me now cringing at anything that is trying too hard to craft an “entertaining” experience for me — I feel totally done with Hollywood movies, popular fiction, live concerts with huge production values, and pretty much all scripted television. (By contrast, Dave can still laugh at Gilligan’s Island, thinks The Rolling Stones and Bob Seger put on amazing live shows as geriatrics, and can tear up at the most manipulated Hollywood death scene; his is a sincere heart.) I loved Friends when it first came out — I made Dave watch it with me because it was the first TV show I ever saw about people around our age — but by the time 1995 came around (the year that I would end my 90s decade on), we were married, had a mortgage, a dog, and a baby on the way. I remember I was pregnant and sitting at home when live footage of the Oklahoma City bombing interrupted whatever I was watching, and maybe it was the hormones, but that was pretty much the end of irony for me. All those dead kids in a government building daycare, my first child in my belly, and I finally felt like a full adult who had to believe that everything did matter. The OJ trial was going on at the same time, and while I might have previously been sucked into watching it as a shared cultural spectacle, I now found the idea totally distasteful; I no longer watched. I even stopped watching Friends long before it was over; I had grown up and the friends had not.
So, maybe as someone who was no longer going to allow myself to be sucked into the overfabricated entertainment machine, I’m not the right person to consider everything Klosterman had to say about movies from this era — that films like Reality Bites, Natural Born Killers, and American Beauty seemed perfect in their day but are now seen as problematic and trashy — and while I would agree that the home VCR and video rental stores absolutely transformed movie watching as a less restricted experience, they didn’t make me an auteur who internalised craft and form and who then proceeded to expertly critique what I was watching. I don’t even know if the following is true:
The mania surrounding DiCaprio in the wake of Titanic was astronomical, bordering on unsettling. His unprecedented ascendance was the product of two divergent phenomena: He was the last actor to achieve superstardom as a vestige of the monolithic Hollywood system and the first actor to become a megastar within the emerging paradigm of postmodern celebrity. He will always be the only person to have both of those experiences at the same time.
And while Klosterman writes a lot about sports in this book (so he must be a big sports nerd where I am not?), I absolutely don’t believe this to be true:
The late nineties will forever be defined as baseball’s Steroid Era, to the exclusion of all other events that transpired within that same window of time.
Okay, I really did like The Matrix — maybe because it didn’t actually feel like a big Hollywood movie despite mind-blowing special effects — and I agree with Klosterman that this is the defining film of the times:
The Matrix seemed like it was about computers. It was actually about TV. There are a handful of news events from the nineties that are now used as historical data points. The Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991. The chase of O. J. Simpson in the Ford Bronco in 1994. The shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. These events destroyed lives and altered the future, and they happened the way that they happened. Yet the collective experiences of all those events were real-time televised constructions, confidently broadcast with almost no understanding of what was actually happening or what was being seen. The false meaning of those data points was the product of three factors, instantaneously combined into a matrix of our own making: the images presented on the screen, the speculative interpretations of what those images meant, and the internal projection of the viewer. What is real? How do you define real? The Matrix resonated not because it was fantastical fiction, but because it was not.
These (and, I suppose, the Bush v Gore election and its endless vote recounts in late 2000) were the last culture-rattling events to be exclusively televised, with the horrific events of 9/11 being the first to receive immediate online dissection that now typifies the way that we are presented with the news. And, if anything, the world feels even less real and knowable today.
The past is a mental junkyard, filled with memories no one remembers. If someone glances at the Billboard singles chart from any random week of the nineties, they will always find a handful of songs that were extremely popular before being wholly erased from the historical record . That process makes sense: The Billboard song chart contains one hundred “hot” songs that change every week, so a music fan who dislikes Top 40 radio might not hear a noteworthy single even once. Movie theaters shuffle the decks every weekend. Sales for a high-profile novel might stall at ten thousand copies before the book goes out of print five years after it was published. Most popular entertainment is designed to be niche and disposable.
For this reason, if no other, I’m glad that The Nineties: A Book exists; it might have been a placeholder decade about nothing, but by its end, the world had changed forever and I am pleased that Klosterman has preserved and analysed the highlights. Worked for me.
