| Title | : | The Nineties |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0735217955 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780735217959 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 370 |
| Publication | : | First published February 8, 2022 |
| Awards | : | Goodreads Choice Award Humor (2022) |
It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.
Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.
In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.
The Nineties Reviews
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The nineties is a decade that seems so recent, and yet in so many ways it was a very different world. The last few years before the ubiquitousness of internet changed the way we think and process endless information overload; the last few years of landlines supremacy (“There are no statistics illustrating how rare it was for someone to ignore a ringing telephone in 1990. This is because such a question would never have been asked (or even pondered). To do so was unthinkable”). The time when a CD collection could you tell you a lot about a person. The time of less polarized politics and news that were just starting to transition to the reality-show feel they now have.
“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”
Gulf War, Bush/Clinton election, Nirvana, The Matrix, Titanic, O.J. Simpson’s trial, Columbine school shooting, Seinfeld, Friends, landlines, Oklahoma City bombing, CDs, Napster, Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Michael Jordan, Blockbuster, the nascent internet… the list goes on and on and on.
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I like to think of myself as a nineties kid, but really it wasn’t *my* decade as much as the noughties were as it’s only in the very end of it that I grew out of childhood and started having a semblance of rational thinking. In Chuck Klosterman’s view, the nineties belonged to Generation X — those kids of Baby Boomers and older siblings of Millenials who came of age during that decade, just like Klosterman had. And his perception of that time is highly subjective, of which he us fully aware, and which makes it feel personal, real and really lived.“And yet: The texture is what mattered. 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.”
It was only 20-30 years ago, but it’s interesting how views and attitudes have changed, and how different things used to be. The recent onslaught of social media, people becoming their own brand, and probably fueled by internet culture of perpetual vocal outrage about everything feels so standard and usual and normal that reading Klosterman’s summary of this youth of Gen-Xers is almost strange:“The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”
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“In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”
Klosterman manages to do a wonderful combination of personal and objective — or really as objective as one can be while looking at the past through the prism of the present. He ties all the disparate strands of the things that made the nineties what they were, at least in the US and for a very particular group of people — and it’s a job well done. Now, can we do the same for the noughties, please?
4.5 stars.“In the post-Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone now wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way that he did. In the same way the breakup of the Beatles was only half-jokingly seen as the end of the British Empire, the public ascension of Nevermind is where the nineties became a recognizable time period with immutable values.”
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Also posted on
my blog. -
“When writing about recent history, the inclination is to claim whatever we think about the past is secretly backward. ‘Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade,’ historian Bruce J. Schulman writes in his book The Seventies. ‘This impression could hardly be more wrong.’ In the opening sentence of The Fifties, journalist David Halberstam notes how the 1950s are inevitably recalled as a series of black-and-white photographs, in contrast to how the sixties were captured as moving images in living color. This, he argued, perpetuates the illusionary memory of the fifties being ‘slower, almost languid.’ There’s always a disconnect between the world we remember and the world that actually was. What’s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself. The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. The portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media. Its trajectory can be traced with accuracy. Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape, along with thousands upon thousands of trivial moments that meant nothing at all…”
- Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book
Whether you pick up Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties is going to depend on two things. First, how you feel generally about the decade-retrospective genre, long a staple of both books and documentaries. Second, how you feel specifically about the 1990s.
For me, this was a no-brainer, and I was almost predestined to love it.
Not only do I adore retrospectives as a rule, but the Nineties in particular are close to my heart. It was a decade in which I was young enough to have endless free time, but old enough to be able to participate in the culture at large, and remember doing it.
It was a heady period, and I tried it all on for size: listening to hip hop while wearing grunge’s flannel; sneaking into Pulp Fiction but also going to see Titanic four times; perfecting an ironic detachment, but doing so quite earnestly.
Reading The Nineties was like opening a yearbook. Almost every page unlocked a memory. But this is more than a nostalgia tour. Klosterman is a verbose and perceptive guide, and this book is the equivalent of sitting down for a beer with the smartest friend you know, and letting him deliver one hell of a monologue.
***
It's always hard to generalize any timespan, because it is experienced differently by everyone. There are a lot of variables at play. The way you felt about the Nineties – or any decade – depends on many things, including an interplay of race, gender, economic status, geographical location, and good old-fashioned luck. Klosterman understands this, and remarks upon it throughout.
That said, the Nineties were – broadly speaking – pretty decent. Sandwiched between the Cold War and the War on Terror, it was relatively prosperous, featured great music and movies, and provided a fair amount of spectacle without widespread catastrophic consequences. There was a war, but it never turned into a quagmire. There were threats, but they did not seem existential. A terrorist bomb went off in Oklahoma City, but this did not trigger a cascading series of foreign policy blunders. The prospect of nuclear war ebbed, democracy seemed victorious, and VHS tapes were becoming affordable (and were sometimes available at McDonalds).
For the most part, it was a good time to be a human being alive in America.
Whatever your perceptions of the Nineties, Klosterman has you covered, touching on the highs and lows, the dominant culture and the subcultures. He is smart enough to recognize the limitations of his survey, and to make that part of his investigation. Unlike VH1’s marvelous series I Love the 90s, this book is rather serious in its intent, though it is still a lot of fun.
***
In terms of structure, The Nineties is rather free-flowing. It is divided into twelve chapters, and each chapter is divided into a main component followed by a mini-essay.
This sounds methodical in theory. In practice, though, Klosterman is all over the place. The Nineties does not hew to a chronological narrative, or even a well-defined thematic approach. For example, there is a chapter devoted mostly to the grunge scene, but music in general is touched upon in many different sections, and is not confined in one place.
More than anything, there is a bit of stream of consciousness at play, as every observation Klosterman makes spurs another course of inquiry. Sometimes he’ll start at one point, and slowly drift away, without ever coming full circle. Mostly, I enjoyed myself too much to even notice the meandering course Klosterman often took.
Klosterman’s mosaic-like presentation works because all the little bits and pieces are uniquely captivating. If you are looking for a grand summation, though, The Nineties does not provide it. There is never a concerted attempt to pull all the strands together and issue a decree as to “what the decade meant.”
***
The coverage is vast, and encompasses both the highbrow and the low. In one chapter, for instance, Klosterman takes on both neoliberalism and the inexplicable success of Pauly Shore.
A short list of the topics touched upon here includes the 1992 election (with an emphasis on the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot); the 1994 Major League Baseball strike (which also delves into basketball superstar Michael Jordan’s surreal attempt at a professional baseball career); NBC’s “Must See TV” Thursday night programming block; and the rise of AOL, including a reminder that the corrosive toxicity of social media would not be injected into our bloodstreams until the 2000s.
The Nineties is not interested in reciting the ins-and-outs of these events – though enough information is provided for context – but in discussing how they felt at the time, and how they were remembered later. Klosterman has insightful things to say about the 1991 Gulf War, the media coverage of the Columbine massacre, and the 2000 election recount. To give but one example, there is an enlightening examination of the “Y2K scare,” referring to potential technological glitches when a computer’s calendar flipped from ’99 to ‘00. Today, Y2K is often held up as an example of false panic, a media-derived catastrophe that never occurred. Of course, one of the reasons it never occurred was because the world went to great lengths to fix it.
***
One of the things that I appreciated about Klosterman’s effort is that it is quirky without being intentionally esoteric. He does not skip the big events – such as OJ Simpson’s murder trial – simply because they are so pervasive. At the same time, he follows lesser-known paths, giving a shoutout to the idiosyncratic radio show Coast to Coast A.M., and devoting a lengthy passage to the travails of Biosphere 2.
In the end, what you get out of The Nineties will be commensurate to what you literally got out of the Nineties. It just so happened that almost everything Klosterman wrote felt directed at me personally. This will obviously not hold true for everyone.
***
Seconds and hours, months and years, decades and centuries. These are all constructs we employ to artificially order the ceaseless flow of time. Nothing ever makes sense except when we utilize hindsight to impose meaning on randomness.
From the vantage point of the 2020s, after color-coded threat levels, endless wars, the Great Recession, and a worldwide pandemic, the 1990s feels like an island of sanity and security. There was darkness to be sure, but watching OJ try to escape in his white Ford Bronco on live television was a universe apart from watching thousands of Americans break into the United States Capitol in an attempt to end democracy. People still believed in alternate facts, but they were not connected together in a worldwide feedback loop. The stakes were high, but never this high.
The Nineties were not actually a break from history, but when you glance over your shoulder, it’s easy to pretend, and to want to go back. -
I have a hunch you already know if you have any interest in reading Chuck Klosterman’s latest topical deep dive, but here’s a handy checklist just in case you’re not sure The Nineties is for you:
- Did you have the phone on its cover?
- Do you enjoy books that might be assigned in college courses like Media Studies or History of the Twentieth Century?
That’s it. That’s the entire list. If you didn’t answer a resounding yes to either one of those questions, keep browsing. Since I was a yes for both, 4 stars.
(For what it’s worth, this dude dove back into the ‘90s HARD. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall as his household became a time machine back to that era - nothing by reruns of Seinfeld and 90210 on TV, Pearl Jam on the CD player, Zima in the fridge, and copies of print newspapers about Ross Perot strewn across the kitchen table.)
Blog:
https://www.confettibookshelf.com/ -
OMG I HAD THAT PHONE
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Update 2/8/22: Reposting my review to celebrate that today is publication day!
The texture is what mattered. 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.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press for sending me an ARC of The Nineties in exchange for an honest review.
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.
The Goodreads description does as good a job as one could do to summarize what Chuck Klosterman does in The Nineties. It is a vast, sprawling work, jumping from subject to subject and linking ideas that at first seem wholly unconnected. As with any Klosterman book, there are lots of music, tv, and pop culture references, and it’s very well written with funny, quotable lines throughout.
How much you enjoy The Nineties may well depend on whether you lived through that decade as an adult or not, whether you like me and Mr. Klosterman are a member of the actual greatest generation, Generation X. There were so many things discussed here that I hadn’t thought about in at least 20 years. 2 Live Crew, Ice-T’s song Cop Killer, and the absurd panic about such music. The bizarre “clear craze” fad of clear drinks like Zima and Crystal Pepsi. Biosphere 2 and the zenith of New Age dogma in American life. Dolly the cloned sheep.But its more illuminating feature is something that often happens with popular history: An attempt at analyzing the distant past ends up being more astute about the living present.
Mr. Klosterman makes this observation while doing the exact same thing, placing topics and events from the Nineties that we still recall into a contemporary context. The beginning of the internet in everyday life. How online music sharing completely changed the music industry. How Fox Mulder and the X-Files normalized conspiracy theories. How the televising of events like the Clarence Thomas Confirmation hearings, the OJ Bronco chase and trial, and Columbine changed how we think about what is real (“Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show”). And how the 2000 Election “was the end of small differences. Moving forward, all differences would be colossal and ideological.”
Does The Nineties fully make sense of that decade before 9/11? Probably not, though that’s probably an impossible goal. And while he addresses his own viewpoint head-on, in the end this book comes from a mainstream, white, middle-class experience of 1990s America. If you were Black, if you were gay, I doubt you’d agree with Mr. Klosterman that life in the Nineties was “ecstatically complacent,” even though I—a fellow straight, white, middle-class man who was in his twenties during that decade—know exactly what he means. But as an answer to how America got to where we are now, the signposts along the way that warned what we were slipping towards, The Nineties is an excellent, and entertaining, examination. Recommended. -
This is EXCELLENT. I loved the Chuck Klosterman of my twenties, but I ADORE the version of him in my forties. As someone born in 1980, I'm of that weird period/microgeneration of people who don't identify as Gen Xers or Millennials, but this book that covers my adolescence and teenage years completely spoke to me on an almost molecular level. I sent a dozen screen shots of passages to my friends, and I devoured this book in one long lazy day. I've often said that Chuck Klosterman is one of the few people who I believe speak in coherent paragraphs, but when you give him an actual page to formulate connections and thesis statements about the intersections of pop culture, politics, race relations, and terrorism (both domestic and foreign), you're going to have your mind blown. It's like this book was written FOR me.
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I can no longer remember why I loved Chuck Klosterman's writing. I don't know if he got too smart, or I got too dumb...or vice versa? But I found this book impenetrably weird and genuinely don't understand what points he was trying to make about, well, anything.
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I think I was expecting more of, well, a fun nostalgia trip through the Nineties supported by witty modern prose. Instead, this is painfully boring and meandering. Major events through music, politics, movies, and the news are covered, but there is no real flow to the "story" progression. I've been interested in reading Klosterman for awhile now, but I think I'm going to walk that urge back. As for the Nineties, maybe they're best covered on VH1.
ARC provided by NetGalley -
Listen, assigning a grade to a Chuck Klosterman book is kind of ridiculous. Such scores are supposed to signal to other people the value you’ve placed on a book and whether they should read it. But with Klosterman in particular, each reader’s relationship to his writing seems distinctively unique. A five-star rating is going to mean next-to-nothing to an ardent detractor, while his biggest cheerleaders would write off a one-star rating as the opinion of a person who just “doesn’t get it.” Neither is wrong; it's just that subjectivity and confirmation bias seem to have an even more outsized significance with his work.
So for you to place any weight on what I think of any given Klosterman book, you should know exactly where I’m coming from. I started reading him shortly after the release of Fargo Rock City and thought both it and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs were fantastic. Ditto Killing Yourself to Live. However, over the past 17 years, my enthusiasm for each new project has progressively waned, and the guy who I once would have loved to have a beer with slowly started feeling like the insufferable nag at the bar who thought he was smarter than you and gleefully tried to prove it until last call. Moreover, his writing started to feel like real empty calorie content — pretty fun to read, but without any lasting impression. More and more, I would finish one of his essays and struggle to remember how it began or what the hell his point was. In other words, I’ve found myself really torn but have continued to read each new book, looking for the spark I once felt while reading him dissect Saved by the Bell like it was To Kill a Mockingbird.
So how does someone like me feel about Chuck’s new offering, The Nineties? It’s fine. The distinct impression I’m left with is that Klosterman is officially embarrassed or bored with pop culture criticism, because his more overt forays into the trends and entertainment of the 90s read like either stereo instructions or the result of a thesaurus coming to life and dry humping his keyboard for hours on end. The chapters on Generation X and the internet are so laborious as to be unpleasant. At one point, Klosterman describes reading an essay from the 1980s on the evolution of culture, describing one passage as “an unwieldy sentence to grasp.” I could only sadly nod my head, ironically knowing exactly how he felt.
On the other hand, there is certainly content in The Nineties that is a joy to read. Interestingly, his chapters on the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton are probably the most vibrant and engaging, making me think that we’d all be better off if he completely dropped the pop pretense and gave us a tome on the current state of democracy or the historical importance of James K. Polk. Occasionally, he seems to recapture his love of the inane, like his breakdown of the short-lived Zima/Crystal Pepsi revolution.
After I decided upon my rating for The Nineties (a 2 out of 5), I glanced at what other readers had thought of the book and indeed found responses across the board, including many that raved of its brilliance. There is every conceivable chance that you will be blown away by The Nineties, too. If, however, you are like me, and have been teetering back and forth for the better part of two decades on how you feel about Klosterman’s continued output, The Nineties will like exactly more of the same.
Thanks to Net Galley and Penguin Press for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. -
The Nineties is a collection of twelve essays, ostensibly about the cultural and political moments that defined the decade, but also a work that serves as Klosterman's playground for musings about generational framings, how culture tethers to public consciousness, and how our modern understanding of the 90s formed over time.
As a child of the nineties, there is a certain nostalgic joy that is inherent with a tour of this time period. Like any decade you grow up in, it has the illusion of a simpler time, childhood romanticism smoothing rough edges. In some ways, however, it was simpler. Pre 9/11, my dad would take me to the airport to watch planes take off and land--no tickets necessary, no intensive security apparatus to be found.
Klosterman is sharp at setting up cultural landmarks with their proper context and how audiences digested them. His expertise lends itself better to music and movies than sports, where the analysis is threadbare.
In one sense, Klosterman is defining the hegemonic cultural moments, themes, and shifts of the decade. He does this, in part, by asserting his own understanding of the 90s, reconstituting his narrative threadwork with the advantage of historical perspective, cultural staying power, and Klosterman's own pop culture expertise. He often frames each chapter with a quote about memory, and he is clearly intrigued by how historical narratives coalesce, break apart, and reform.
He is largely successful and the book is a fun read. There are times, however, when I found his analysis to be unpersuasive. During a short section about Mike Tyson biting the ear of Evander Holyfield, Klosterman asserts that this represented "the past decoupling from the present." If this confident claim was at the end of a long, comprehensive section, I might buy it. Instead, it is a slapdash philosophical claim tacked onto an anecdote, an odd attempt to elevate a stoner thought into cultural analysis.
At one point, Klosterman states, "The future can't be the present until the present is the past." This is an inane, self-parody way of stating: most of us experience time in a linear manner. If the best teachers can take complex ideas and make them understandable, then taking a simple idea and making it complex is a particularly perverse skill of the failed academic. Klosterman falls into this trap often, his obfuscation no substitute for cleverness. -
Chuck klosterman’s main thesis is that things were not then exactly as you see them now. Fine. Ok. But they also weren’t exactly as he saw them either. The 90s, according to this book, we’re just about the punk bands and movies CK loved and hated. I had a very different experience with the 90s—I mean he completely leaves out cultural phenomenal like hip hop, R&B, and Oprah??? He spends way more time talking about Nirvana than any of the other iconic musicians of the era. But that’s fine and even forgivable. I don’t care that he highlights these things—it’s just that he has nothing to say about them that is new and interesting. His only message is a big “well, actually” to how people talk about these things now, but most of the time, his big “well actually” is super obvious. I was with him halfway thru and nodding and remembering with some minor annoyances at his smug tone but then the annoyance overshadowed the interest and the rest of the book just got on my nerves.
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I was a child of the 1990s and reading this book was a nostalgic trip down memory lane. I was too young to grasp many events as they occurred — the O.J. Simpson trial and Bill Clinton’s presidency, to name a few — but others, like Michael Jordan’s utter dominance in the sports world and waiting for the connection to “get on” the internet were more familiar. Other fun references in The Nineties include Seinfeld, landline phones, Titanic, the (widely agreed upon as irrational) fear surrounding Y2K, and Napster.
I do not miss the painful noise of a dial up internet connection or the days of TV, pre-DVR, however, there were some good things too — I’m certainly a fan of technology but think fondly of how simple life seemed then, looking back now. People had choices but weren’t bombarded by them or by endless content in every direction, in all aspects of life.
I must also share that my sister and I had a phone very similar to the one on this book cover, and had to sell an inordinate amount of gift wrap in our school fundraiser to earn the phone as a prize — Shoutout to my parents who bought out what we still needed, after we hit up our neighbors for their orders! ;)
A few parts felt a little dry or meandering, but overall, The Nineties was an interesting and entertaining read — 3.5 stars -
Up at the top of my Klosterman books that I love. Have so much to say about this and will very likely reread at some point later this year. Favorite of the year so far by quite a margin. 5. Review coming to tiktok soon. Thank you Penguin Press for my review copy.
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“It was a complicated time to like things.”
My husband and I are 1983 and 1984 babies, respectively. That makes us a bit young to be Gen X and a bit old to be full millennials; I think that officially we are Xennials (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials), but I have personally embraced the “geriatric millennial” label; I like the way it sounds. We are both just old enough for the 90s to have been hugely impactful on us from a multitude of angles, and have recently both fallen head-first into a nostalgia pit. For starters, we still live under the delusion that the 90s were twenty years ago and we need to sit down when we realize that it’s actually not the case at all and that Nirvana is now sorta, kinda classic rock. We’ve dusted off records we used to listen to in high school (including the bad ones that we listen to just to laugh ourselves silly), re-watched some old movies we dimly remembered enjoying a long time ago (“Wayne’s World”, baby!), and no one is happier than I am about the baggy ripped jeans being back in style (skinny jeans can burn in hell). Oh, and I bought a black and red striped sweater last winter only to realize it was a reproduction of one famously worn by Kurt Cobain… I winced and considered getting rid of it (insert rant about commodification of countercultural style here), but it’s really comfy… and it goes well with the ripped jeans…
So it goes without saying that when Chuck Klosterman’s book appeared on my radar, I made a beeline for it. Jason read it before I could get to it, spent the whole time laughing and groaning, and turned the last page, looked at me and said: “This… explains a lot…” Color me intrigued. There are certainly traits of my personality that have often made me feel like a relic of the fabled 90s, and I wanted to find out if Mr. Klosterman could help me understand where that stuff came from. While I have definitely evolved and grown, some mental habits born from that decade’s influence are not going away! I am still vaguely weirded out by people who are openly ambitious and relentlessly seek professional success at the expense of other parts of their lives, or who require external validation to pursue things that interest them. I still buy full albums and refuse to stream music because I am weary of how the music industry treats musicians. Nothing feels more laughable to me than the concept of worrying about my personal brand. I will wear my Doc Martens with dresses until the day I die. You know, shit like that.
The shift in perspective is one of the aspects of this book that fascinated me the most: some events from that decade would not really unfold the same should they take place today. A shining example is the movie “Reality Bites”, which I re-watched a few months back. 1) Janeane Garofalo was always my model of cool, and she remains so today (this is, after all, the woman who said “If you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent on you to not fit in”). 2) I loved Ethan Hawke’s character when I was young because he was a musician and he read philosophy (and I put up with a ton of terrible boyfriends because, as Klosterman explains, it was considered “better to be an authentic jerk than a likable sellout”) and I hated Ben Stiller’s character because he was a suit; now I loathe both of them because they both think they know what’s best for Winona Ryder’s character without ever actually asking her what she wants. Another example that struck home is our relationship to television: I remember being so proud of not owning a television (until I moved in with a boyfriend who had one, which admittedly made watching shows and movies a lot easier), which sounds a tad crazy now, but the point of pride of not owning a television meant something, somehow (“It was a sign of pretention, but also code for brainpower and maturity – a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time”… Busted…). And now, I have some tattoos that are direct references to TV shows, which would have been seen as insane and probably pathetic at the time. The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is something that would definitely not go down the way it did back then if it happened now, in a post #metoo world; just thinking about it now makes me want to shower with bleach.
The section on the internet, and how it has evolved from this anarcho-utopian dream into the democracy-eroding nightmare we now know was also fascinating. According to Klosterman, the generations that lived the transition from landline to cell phones, from pre-Internet to omnipresent Internet, have a unique perspective on where those technologies have taken us, due to their knowing both the before and the after; I’ve definitely had those moments of being vaguely flabbergasted by the way younger millennials deal with social media while being unable to imagine going back to banking without my stupid phone. I also felt completely seen/exposed, reading the section about the way people gave meaning to their area codes, as a symbol of belonging to a particular place (and now, a particular time, too!), as I have often (not really) joked about getting a 514 tattoo if I end up having to move outside of Montreal.
Of course, Klosterman discusses the notion of selling out as the nineties-est aspect of the nineties, and he is not blind to its hypocrisy – and ubiquitousness. I adored the snippets about Eddie Vedder managing to be grateful to people who say Pearl Jam is their favorite band whilst claiming that his band is the most overrated thing out there all in the same breath. I caught myself thinking that his attitude is actually very healthy, and that it probably helped keep him and his bandmates sane and humble – they are the grunge band with the longest longevity of all of their peers, and probably the only band to break out in that era that didn’t lose a member to drugs or suicide. That said, I still occasionally ask myself, with a whisper of existential dread, whether or not I am a sellout for having, you know, a somewhat corporate job and buying stuff on Amazon when I am short on time or options. Sigh.
I was excited that he mentions Kevin Smith; though “Clerks” is not my favorite movie of his, it was interesting to consider that films like his could not have been made without the basic concept of the video rental industry. More space is given to how Tarantino’s work is a product of that industry as well, no doubt because he is vastly more popular with the mainstream (no hard feelings against Tarantino: I love his work too but one of Smith’s early movies happens to have a deep, personal meaning to me, and he will always be special as a result). He made me want to re-watch “Pulp Fiction”, it’s been ages.
Reading this book felt like being validated and called out simultaneously, so it was whiplash from one page to the next, and I admit I kind of loved it. I love how insightful Klosterman is, his sense of humor had me cackling maniacally all the time – and sure, he can come across as a bit pedantic, but I can’t say it bothered me at all. He lost me when he discussed professional sports, because I have never cared about those, but I really loved revisiting an era I wish I remembered better through his observations. -
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, 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 as I’ve decided to not make this a navel-gazing public review about my own personal experience of the 90s, I’m just going to put a bunch of quotes and notes behind spoiler tags for my own recollection.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. -
I am GenX. I was in my teens and early twenties during the nineties. I still love Nirvana and Guns n Roses. I remember Blockbuster fondly. I even had the phone on the cover of this book on my desk while I did my homework and wrote my term papers. And speaking of term papers, that is exactly what this book reads like… the author had to pick a decade and write a term paper on it. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t really enjoy most of it. It was well-written and well-researched, but so dry. I loved the idea of this book, but The Nineties turned out to be far more dull than the ‘90s ever were. If you’re interested in recent history definitely pick this up -- just be warned it’s not really a warm fuzzy romp through pop culture.
I'm grateful to NetGalley and Penguin Group/Penguin Press for the opportunity to read and review The Nineties. -
I was around for the 90s, but I wasn't really there. By way of illustration here are three 90s events and where I was at the time:
-The OJ Simpson verdict found me on the playground playing Butts Up. My primary feeling was relief; now they'd quit wheeling the TV into class for boring courtroom footage.
-The Clinton BJ scandal broke in my middle school homeroom via Channel One News. Far from any concern of political blowback, I wondered why any grownup would opt for a blowjob— couldn't they just do real sex? Wouldn't that be like way better?
-The 2000 US Presidential Election* was nothing more than an interruption of my evening Simpsons reruns.
There was other stuff. When the OKC bombing happened my principal announced a moment of silence over the PA system. It was all like that for me, just a bit too young to grok what anything meant outside of changes to my insular daily routine. I don't recall having a genuine political realization until a college debate watch party in 2004. I don't recall caring about anything until it became evident that I would have to.
4 stars. Chuck transforms any guilt I might feel over my petty self-absorption into a badge of honor.
______
*Chuck says this can be on my list because the 90s ended on September 11, 2001. Chuck's always saying stuff like that. -
This book started rough for me. Chuck Klosterman spoke of the nineties being easy times and right then I knew exactly what the perspective was going to be- a telling of the decade from an exclusively white American middle-class lense. After all the nineties began with off the charts levels of violence in many of our cities as the Crack Epidemic was still raging and gang-banging was at an all time high (and responding to this mass incarceration bills were passed). This climate gave birth to classic films of the era such as Boys in The Hood and Menace II Society. The nineties certainly weren't carefree if you were living in Compton or North St. Louis. Nor were they easy if you were in Rwanda or Bosnia facing genocide or a woman in Afghanistan living under Taliban rule. So, point taken, this book is about a white American middle-class look at the decade, and it was fun at times.
Like a lot of white dudes Klosterman has a fixation on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Regarding Cobain I'll share this- when he died it was announced on TV and I looked at a friend and asked "who the f*%# is Curt Kobain?". I was born in 1974 and I'm part of "Gen X", a term I've always hated, and I didn't have any friends who listened to Nirvana. In fact I couldn't name one grunge song from any band so a lot of this obsessing over Cobain and Radiohead was lost on me. I just remember thinking the grunge movement was ridiculous at the time and asking why these rich suburban white kids are dressing like my grandpa and trying to look like disheveled construction workers when they haven't done a day of hard work in their lives?
Tupac and Biggie got shortchanged as did almost everything Black. No Million Man March, no discussion of the popularity of Louis Farrakhan during that decade, no talk of the popularity of the Malcolm X biopic from Spike Lee, no Martin, no A Different World, no Def Comedy Jam. The killing of Tupac, and Biggie the following year, were huge cultural events and the pain was felt globally.
The generation is presented by Klosterman as one of slackers not concerned about traditional metrics of success or the opinions of others. I get that opinion is widely shared; but I sure remember an awful lot of kids my age going to college and getting degrees, beginning blue-collar careers, joining the military, and finding paths to entrepreneurship.
Two things Klosterman brings up are important. We're the last generation that grew-up before the internet. We didn't have cellphones until well into adulthood. So we have knowledge of a previous way of living: sitting by phones and waiting on calls, finding numbers in the yellow pages, arguing for hours about things Siri can give you the answer to in seconds now, and more. Klosterman points out that Napster was one of the first disruptive technologies as it changed the music industry. He mentions Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair. I never listened to Phair, but had I known she was singing songs about giving blow jobs, as I learned in this book, I may have become a fan.
Klosterman does a pretty good job illustrating how huge Michael Jordan was and not just on the basketball court. Everyone in the nineties loved Jordan,and as with Oprah Winfrey, there was some discussion he may run for president. Something Klosterman doesn't mention is Jordan was even interviewed on Meet the Press by Tim Russert. In a similar manner Klosterman notes how, while America couldn't get enough of him, the nineties were a horrifically bad decade for Mike Tyson. As a St Louis Cardinals baseball fan I thoroughly enjoyed the home run race between Marc Mcguire and Sammy Sosa. Did we all know they were juiced? Did we all know baseball was falling from its status as our favorite pastime? I think so. Juiced up home run hitters are like breast implants. People say they only want the real thing while enjoying the fake.
"It was difficult for crazy people to meet " is an excellent line. The nineties, and the internet, was really the beginning of the polarized lunacy we see today, simply because prior to technological advances it was difficult for conspiracy nuts and extremists to meet and talk. Now, when half of America has their own podcast, not so much.
The cultural impact of Seinfeld was discussed and he did a good job with this. The show was big in the culture and impossible to replicate as no one else possessed the comedic genius of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. It's important to note that Seinfeld was widely popular, even outside of white audiences, unlike Friends which was exclusively popular among white viewers .
There were several films mentioned in this book I've either never seen or heard of; but for younger people I can assure you hitting up Blockbuster or Hollywood video and looking for a movie was a real treat. However, I'll unashamedly mention I loved both Titanic and Pulp Fiction, but hated the Matrix.
Near the end of the book Klosterman discusses two of the difficult men of the decade: Bill Clinton and OJ Simpson and then mentions a show about difficult men that began in the decade (The Sopranos).
Of course with both men time has changed views. Bill Clinton appeared to be a cool and hip president, the first Black president as coined by Toni Morrison, and was widely popular, the economy was good, and a sense of optimism existed. His sex scandal with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was also viewed skeptically. Many people, including myself, looked at the affair as much ado about nothing, and just the result of a partisan Republican witch hunt and sexually up-tight and puritanical conservatives. In hindsight the predatory sexual behaviors of Clinton are unacceptable, he certainly wasn't the first Black president, and his neoliberal policies, trade deals, and politics had a long term damaging effect on working Americans.
Regarding OJ, Klosterman does a good job of explaining why the event was huge in the culture. OJ had been a huge crossover star and his chase, arrest, and trial were not only widely televised they were also inescapable as everyone was talking about. The racial division was real, and a majority of Black Americans thought OJ didn't do it while most White Americans think he did, but as Klosterman points out that has faded with time and the majority of Black Americans now think OJ was guilty.
The book closes out with the contested 2000 presidential election ( who can forget the hanging chads in Florida?) and 9-11 because, as Klosterman correctly notes, decades don't really start and end within an exact order. He argues that 2000 was really the beginning of the scorched Earth politics we see today and that 9-11 kinda formally ended the decade. I would argue that Klosterman could've made a time line from the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas to the Oklahoma City bombing to 9-11 showing how each uniquely impacted the culture. Prior to 9-11 most Americans paid very little attention to the Middle East and the defining moments with regards to the region, from an American perspective, was the relatively smooth first Gulf War and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking the hand of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. The American public seemingly checked out after the assassination of Rabin by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir, the beginning of the "Al Aqsa Intifada", the unpopularity of American-backed autocrats, and the spread of AQ in the region prior to 9-11. This helps explain how the Bush Administration could sell their bumbling and disastrous reaction to the American public. They were busy watching Friends and obsessing over Kurt Cobain.
What else did Klosterman miss? A lot. As I previously stated this is a very white middle-class look at the nineties. Klosterman misses most things that were important to Black America in the decade, but he does mention several things that were important. Latinos and Asians made basically no appearance in this book and this includes huge cultural events such as the murder of the famous Mexican-American singer Selena.
Overall this was a fairly enjoyable read. I was young in the nineties and remember all of these things and most importantly it made me remember the people I was with at the time- many who are no longer here. -
First, a dial tone, followed by eleven rapid beeps from an invisible push-button telephone. This was followed by three or four high-pitched electronic whistles, collapsing into a longer whistle resembling the flatlining of a dying patient hooked to an EKG machine (this was the sound of the phone line’s echo suppression being disabled). There were a few more beeps absorbed into a wall of white noise, and then the white noise abruptly doubled, meaning the receiving modem was now interacting with the calling modem. There was an instant where it sounded like something inside the computer had broken, spontaneously repaired by the digital interplay of two probing modulators, similar in pitch to a metal detector passing over a pocket watch. This was bookended by another fleeting second of white noise, and then . . . silence. The wall had been breached. The floodgates were open. And then, depending on who you were and the year in which you were living, there was a high likelihood the next sound was a one-word welcome from Elwood Edwards, a voice actor living in Orrville, Ohio. His affable greeting would be followed by a grammatically incorrect phrase: “You’ve got mail.”
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Full disclosure: I won a free ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway.
As the title would suggest, this is a look back at the 1990s, mostly with regard to what was happening in the USA at the time. I don't think I can summarize the book better than this paragraph from the back cover of the ARC (it will likely end up on the front jacket flap when the hardcover is released. ):
"It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The 1990s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. "
If it was part of the culture during the 90's, it's in here: Nirvana, Reality Bites, American Beauty, Pulp Fiction, Seinfeld, Friends, Columbine, Mike Tyson, Tiger Woods, the Clintons, Dolly, Biosphere 2, Garth Brooks, Clarence Thomas … Klosterman doesn't just drop names, though. He talks about why the person and/or event seemed so significant at the time, and whether that significance has carried through to the present day or not.
Although I lived my young adulthood during the 90's, I hadn't properly realized how much change went on during that time and since then. Although some of my reading experience with this book is tinged with nostalgia, I also welcomed the chance to reassess things that I'd previously taken for granted. Klosterman makes a persuasive case, for instance, for our current political divide having some of its roots in the 2000 presidential election--specifically the need to differentiate between two candidates who were, at the time, perceived as quite similar.
Definitely an engaging book, though I'm not sure whether it would seem so for someone too young to have memories of the time. Recommended! -
Welcome back to the nineties. (Again.) We certainly seem to be making a lot of trips back there these days. With that, we know we are going through a moment of cultural nostalgia, if we are not fully in the throes of a culture of nostalgia.
In any case, with this entry into the burgeoning literature, Chuck Klosterman weaves his recollections and considerations into the expanding nostalgic collective consciousness. This is unapologetically a work of a member of Generation X, who knows others have become more ambivalent about the use, misuse, and overuse of generations as a way to group and think about American society. If this foray is not the deepest or most penetrating, it is certainly one of the most entertaining and enjoyable frolics down this increasingly traveled memory lane.
It's a little ironic that these remembrances take as their subject a period that for those going through it considered it a time of cultural amnesia. What we get delivered back to us, through the use of memory, is the remembered textured of the nineties in some of their cultural, social, political, and generational glory, infamy, and grittiness. We are reminded that as we lived it, it was a period of great pathos and microconcerns, little of which we recognized at the time. Although these essays were in search of lost time, to their credit, they do not get lost back there. Rather, they strive to recapture the past for us, in our present act of memory, to cast a light on how we lived then, how we have changed now, what was lost, and what was gained.
In that light, the fading and the eclipse of the Generation X ethos is one of the desired takeaways about what was lost in the passage of the nineties to the 2000s. Did it work? Do we miss it? Well, they have aged, and time has gone marching on. While that may be slippery and evasive, there may be no more there, there. And where it is still around it has changed with the passage of time. In that sense, the work may be wrapped up and snared in the traps of the nostalgia that it was trying to capture. Such are the wiles of the nostalgic moment.
Regardless, in the process of reaching back to the time that is gone, a little piece of the reader may get swept up and left-back in the nostalgia, which is delivered up to the here and now. Largely, these are the pleasures to be taken in the text, mostly in the place of lasting edification, and they are fleeting as is the nature of nostalgia, reminiscences, and cultural products produced for our enjoyment in the present. In that sense, the work is very contemporary. Still, the digestion may leave a flavor or taste: depending on the reader it may be enjoyed like a cool refreshing Clearly Canadian or leave a saccharine aftertaste like a Clear Tab. -
I didn't make it out of the Introduction of this book, as Klosterman's tone of dead earnest seriousness, as if something called 'the 90's' actually existed rather than just being a bunch of peoples' opinions, was a total turnoff for me.
My own sourpuss self should not dissuade others who are interested in this sort of thing read it, though. -
Instead of being a book with nostalgic and fun history (though still mentioning and tackling certain tragedies and serious topics), as I had expected, this book felt more like a diatribe by a megalomaniac who couldn't get over his own intellectualism. He would constantly portray his opinions as accepted facts and showcase an arrogance that left me rolling my eyes and reading the book just to be done with it. He also left out a lot of important cultural moments, bands, shows, and movies. I had high hopes for this book and was excited to read it. But I found myself more annoyed or bored as I trudged through its pages.
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I’m still reading this book, but for the purposes of this review I’m done. I’m past halfway, and I’ve been skipping all the parts about sports and most of the parts about television. I can only take small doses of Chuck Klosterman mansplaining the 90s to me. I lived through the 90s and while I agree with some of what Klosterman talks about in terms of the ‘vibe’ of the decade, the fact is he’s viewing through the same filtered lenses I have as a white male Gen Xer in America. Sure, he’s a good writer and yes, he’s relatively perceptive when it comes to American popular culture critique. He owns his biases, at least, but they do inform his writing and so I often find my interest lagging when I encounter sections riddled with statements that I find self-evident. That said, I wasn’t tuned into much of what passed through the American mainstream in the 90s due to my lifestyle at the time, and so occasionally what Klosterman writes about is news to me. Also he sometimes makes me laugh. Because of this I am planning to finish the book, though not likely without skipping more sections.
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I was really looking forward to this one. That cover is amazing! However, it really doesn't capture the tone or vibe of the book.
On the surface, this a fine look at some of the "big" events of the 90s: presidential elections, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the OJ trial, the rise of the internet, Oprah's dominance, and Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination. It's just a shame that Klosterman couldn't get out his Gen X white man head in order to see beyond his own experience. He makes a point to mention (and apologize?) that in his quest to present mainstream culture, he's giving Tupac the short shrift in order to spend the page count discussing the overanalyzed Nirvana. I might not be a writer, but I'm pretty sure if he wanted to write the chapter on Tupac instead of Nirvana, as the author of the book, he could have decided to do so!
Klosterman can't fathom that the extremely talented Oscar-nominated Kate Winslet was a major reason for the success of the wildly popular Titanic because, as he states, "it is, however, still possible to imagine Titanic's trajectory with someone else as the lead actress. It's not possible to imagine such a trajectory without the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio." (236)
In one of the chapters focusing on politics, he makes a special point to dig at Elizabeth Warren for derailing her campaign with " her unwillingness to identify as a socialist," and ignores the fact that her being a woman had any part in her not receiving the nomination. I wouldn't be surprised if after reading this you asked yourself why it's even included, since it's not even a 90s reference! While he has time for that snipet, Klosterman ignores other events that weren't personally relevant to him.
I'm not the same age as him and my 90s looked wildly different than the one he portrays in this book. I don't expect him to paint my picture, but I would have liked him to do a little more digging in order to present a more inclusive picture. Overall, this is a very basic portrait of the decade devoid of original insight and rehashing many points that have previously been made, so unless you want to read about how Quentin Tarantino is God's gift to cinema or literature wouldn't exist without Infinite Jest, I would skip this one. -
This was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it. Klosterman takes us on a trip through the 90s that is less about nostalgia and more about the meaning of the 90s, and how memory and feeling work.
But there is still a ton of nostalgia - from Garth Brooks to Seinfeld to the Bulls to Ross Perot. There were several things I knew a lot about because it’s 90’s stuff I remember fondly (Liz Phair, Art Bell) and a few things I absolutely did not know anything about (We interfered in the 1996 Russian elections?!? Coke made Tab Clear nasty on purpose to destroy Crystal Pepsi?!?).
I don’t always agree with Klosterman on his takes, but that’s not the point. The takes are all really interesting. A couple of really good ones:
- Country music blew up in the nineties because rock music went into a “it’s not cool to entertain the masses era” which left a void for country music - becoming more and more like popular music - to fill.
- Election night 2000 doesn’t seem like as big a national change event as 9/11, but Klosterman makes the case that the election was bigger because it was the beginning of “absolutist, binary thinking” in the country. -
This book is awesome, I don't really need to tell you which decade it's about or avoid spoilers because, well, human history is mostly a spoiler.
So the most useful thing is to talk about what makes this book unique, because it is unique among books that try to talk about a period in history. And I mean unique in a good way, not the way that, like, my mom cutting up my Ghostbusters t-shirt to make cleaning rags when I was a kid, was a "unique" way of getting cleaning rags.
I'm going to address the uniqueness of the book. Because I listened to a podcast where two dum-dums discussed this book, and they were both like, "I don't understand why this needs to exist." To which I said, "I don't know why this shitty podcast needs to exist!" out loud to my phone.
Then I realized that was dumb and tried to rate the show somewhere, like on iTunes or whatever, and then it was an Apple ID thing and they were going to send me a code, and you know what? Not worth it.
But if that's your podcast and you're reading this somehow: No, YOU suck!
The biggest difference between this book and others like it is that Chuck Klosterman is not examining the 90's in a way where he's trying to say, See, in these ways, the 90's was not as it appeared at the time. And thank fuck. I'm all set on those.
It seems like some people wanted this book to be a We The People with better prose and maybe a section about clear colas, something that was a written-out timeline of an entire decade, blow-by-blow, and from a variety of perspectives, all handled even-handedly.
Which is monumentally stupid because nobody ACTUALLY wants to read We The People. It's boring, it sucks, and the only saving grace is that the questions at the end of the chapters are in the order the answers appear in the chapter, so at least you can do your homework with SOME speed.
I think what a lot of book critics really want is to be able to point out the things the book doesn't cover and say, "See, this book doesn't represent the experiences of People X, therefore it's not comprehensive." Then I've proven I'm smarter than Chuck Klosterman, boom, roasted.
Some reviewers seem to be missing the overall arc of the book, probably because they skimmed it, read only parts, or didn't actually read it at all. Which is too bad because the larger narratives are the best part, and also because what's the point of a book podcast where you talk about books you haven't read? Any idiot could do that. Que up the first episode of Page-By-Page Infinite Jest: A Pete Podcast where I discuss, page-by-page, what I THINK happens in Infinite Jest.
I think the larger narrative of The 90's is something like:
The natural tendency is to remember a time from the past through the lens of your current self as opposed to remembering it as you really perceived it at the time. Remembering it accurately and with the feelings you had at the time is almost impossible.
We all do this, and I'll prove it:
Think about something you did in the past that was SUPER embarrassing, but at the time you did it, you didn't feel exactly the same way.
Mine? Oh, too many to choose from...
Okay, one time I walked in goose shit and tracked it into my friend's mom's house. I didn't walk in goose shit on purpose, by the way. When the geese stop in town, they just shit everywhere. It's madness. Is this necessary info? I don't want people to picture me rolling around in goose shit like a dog, but maybe everyone knows what I'm talking about?
Anyway, his mom was super pissed and made me clean it up, and at the time I was embarrassed and sort of mad she didn't help me clean it up and sort of ashamed because I was scolded so hard, and now, in the present, I don't know why I wasn't just like, "You know what, you're right, I did it, it was an honest mistake, I'm gonna clean it up." But that's because now I'm an adult man with carpets of my own, and I get it, and I'm not capable of understanding someone in a way I wasn't capable when I was 14, and I'm also accustomed to sticking up for myself on the level of saying, "I did something wrong, I'm going to try and make it right, and further shaming about it isn't necessary."
I think Klosterman's premise in The 90's is that it's impossible for me to remember this incident as I felt it at the time because there really isn't a way to access memory without it filtering through your present self. And it's a damn interesting premise, and I agree.
If there's a wide cultural example I can think of, it's the phenomenon where adults don't know what it's like to be a teenager (this is usually shouted AT adults who are in the middle of attempting to understand a teenager, or possibly reprimanding them for bringing bird feces into the house). And in some ways, those teenagers who run up the stairs and slam a door and listen to their music because Aaron Lewis is the only one who understands my pain--they're right, we adults don't understand. Because the only access we have to our teenage selves is our memory, and that memory is filtered through our current selves.
It's not the memory of what it's like to be a teenager. It's the memory of what it's like to remember to be what it's like to be a teenager.
I guess the other highlight is that, for me, this book does profile a decade that is the last of its kind. It's the last decade when people didn't have internet at home, it's the last decade where politics were seen as a low-stakes game, the last decade where there could be anything described as a monoculture, and maybe most importantly, the last decade where it was legitimate for a person to really not have much of a stance on something.
This is the Monday after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, and EVERYONE has a take. Violence is not okay, it's okay to get slapped sometimes, Jada didn't deserve it, Jada is mean, all kinds of shit.
In the 2020's, it's meaningful to NOT express any opinion on something whatsoever. If you do not express an opinion, one will be assigned to you based on your failure to let everyone know how you feel. If you don't condemn person A, you're supporting them. If you don't condone person B, you're condemning them.
And damn, I do miss a little bit of the 90's when most of us could just say: a celebrity slapped another celebrity on a television program I do not care about, I didn't watch the event, and no, I don't really have an opinion on it.
And yes, I'm pretty sure everyone will be just fine without me weighing in. -
This is my third recent nonfiction read that discusses how history can not be explored or understood as history until enough time has passed that we're no longer "living through" that history. See
Music Is History and
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. It likewise dovetails nicely into the work of podcasts like "History of the 90s" and "You're Wrong About."
Klosterman's book is an exploration of the actual history of the 1990s through politics and pop culture. It's fascinating how he takes disparate stories and weaves the narrative together, with plenty of "why was the media obsessed with Michael Jordan's baseball career that meant nothing, really?"
If this kind of history is your jam, you'll like it. If you're looking for an answer or a thread that unifies the 90s or Gen X, it's there AND not there, for purposeful reasons. I'll be curious what's said about the '00s when that can be seen as history, especially as Klosterman doesn't touch on Millennials much, particularly those Xenniels like myself, who really do straddle the bizarre worlds of "online all the time" and "was never online."
Also: I had that phone and it was my favorite thing. -
Oof. The book is vapid and the author preoccupied with the unbearable burden of being a Gen-Xer forced to relinquish the luxury of having no opinions or caring about anything in particular. Despite being about a decade in which the world seismically changed — the USSR fell, neoliberalism was unshackled, globalization began in earnest — this book is aggressively apolitical, weaving in and out of isolated cultural ephemera without providing a context, meaning or unifying framework for understanding. He is very fond of immediately negating any claim that contains something remotely resembling a worldview. But after all, there is no creature more ideological than the one who claims to have no ideology, and Klosterman clearly deals in an inane brand of liberalism that seeks to obscure the machinations of power by presenting life as a series of largely unrelated phenomena that we simply can’t understand well enough to deduce anything meaningful about. Maybe it’s intended as irony — ha ha — that a Gen Xer wrote a book in a fashion that showcases all the worst traits associated with Gen X, but it certainly doesn’t make for a worthwhile read.
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Man...what the hell is this? Chuck Klosterman wrote a book ostensibly investigating the cultural roots and lasting impacts of the 1990s, but it's just hundreds of pages of him remembering stuff, throwing theories at the wall to see if he's got anything. And for the most part, he doesn't! Just discussing how Alanis Morissette was popular, then shifting into a half-hearted political analysis of what Ross Perot's popularity meant about national sentiments - it's all too much. Like you got trapped in the corner of a house party with a stoned white guy who won't shut up about how he's certain about anything and everything.
