I grew up in the 90s. From 1992 to 1996, I was a high schooler, and from 1996 to 2000, I was drinking my way through college. Because those were my formative years, that decade is forever imprinted upon my soul. Grunge will always be my music. I still remember the first time that I saw Pearl Jam’s Alive music video. It was a seismic shift in my life. Prior to that moment, I loved 80s Hair Bands, like Motley Crüe and Poison. But as I watched the black and white video, I felt a change. Music went from being a slick, playful entertainment to painful, serious art. (Yes, I didn’t yet understand that Pearl Jam was just as much corporate music as the Hair Bands.) Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, etc. made me want to move to Seattle and live a wilder life than my boring Midwest self. (I didn’t.) This shift towards ‘Alternative Rock’ was the first time I remember being inspired to write. I produced bad poetry that in my mind were song lyrics. My parents began renting movies as a weekend treat. We gathered on Thursday evenings for Must See TV. In college, I had to watch Friends, which I knew was a mediocre comedy and yet couldn’t stop watching. When I look back on the 90s, my memories are, of course, imperfect and hazy with nostalgia. Prior to marrying Sue and becoming a father, the 90s were the best time of my life. So much happened that I don’t remember despite the fact that I’ll always think the 90s were just 10 years ago. When reading The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman, I got a mixture of feelings of both recognition and yet alienation. It was like coming home after a long absence to find that you don’t recognize half the decorations in your house. This may seem like a criticism, but it’s not. Klosterman’s account of the 90s took familiar events and made me consider them with a fresh perspective. He both set the 90s as a unique decade while demonstrating it as a consequence of the history that precedes it. The Nineties works as a fantastic introduction and critique of the decade that formed me.
Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.
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TL;DR
If you’re also a child of the 90s, Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties will remind you of a simpler time where trying too hard was the worst thing you could do. Highly recommended.
From the Publisher
From the New York Times bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.
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 90’s 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.
Review: The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
The Nineties looks back at the United States of the 1990s. It’s a time that sticks in most people minds as the birth of grunge, as a time that elevated slackers, and the society that gave us Bill Clinton. Klosterman goes back to remind the reader of all the weird things that happened that have been overshadowed by 9/11. Klosterman, as he is wont to do, covers a lot of ground in this book. From Ross Perot to Nirvana to the O.J. Simpson trial, The Nineties shows the breadth of the decade. Klosterman’s insightful critiques portrays a decade where the U.S. looked inward. The biggest problem was not having a feeling of detachment. Coming off winning the Cold War, the status quo of the U.S. felt inevitable and immutable. Klosterman makes the argument that the changes this decade actually radically altered U.S. society. This was a time and a generation stuck between landlines and cellphones, between no internet and constant connection. Music, television, and art looked to the 70s as a role model for ironic detachment. Politics hadn’t yet infected every aspect of life; in fact, Klosterman reminds the reader that in the 2000 election, Bush and Gore were seen as basically the same person up until Florida boofed the election. The Nineties is a glorious book displaying the complexity lying underneath a simpler time in U.S. history.
The Nineties is a collection of essays critiquing popular culture and U.S. society at large. It uses the recent history of the 90s to show how that decade set society up for changes that followed. There is so much good material here to dig into. I could write essays reacting to nearly all the essays in this book. From the internet to art to politics to Michael Jordan’s ill fated baseball career, Klosterman interrogates the trends, causes, and reactions that made the 90s the slacker decade.
Structure
In the ARC that I received, there are twelve major essays and eleven shorter pieces. Each is a standalone bit of writing with the thread of the 90s theme threaded through. The longer essays are, of course, meatier, denser, and have more nuanced arguments built into them. The shorter pieces were quite interesting and acted as a palate cleanser for me. I found this to be an excellent method to pace through the book. Usually, in books that are collections of essays like this, long essays placed back to back make the book feel slow. The shorter articles between longer essays change up the expected rhythm of a book like this. I appreciated it, and it’s impressive that Klosterman can change gears so effectively. For me, having a meaningful essay in so few words is very difficult, and here, Klosterman writes engagingly in both short and long form.
Television
Klosterman dedicates a few essays to the changing habit of television consumption during the 90s. These essays really had me thinking about that time, and he’s got a point. I remember in the 80s, we watched the Cosby Show and Cheers on Thursday nights. But it wasn’t until the 90s that Thursday nights became an event. Seinfeld, Friends, and ER extended beyond simply being shows to entertain. They became ways of grouping ourselves. Not only did we have a standing appointment to watch these shows together, we talked about them between classes; we made sure not to miss an episode. Television shows took on an importance that they hadn’t possessed before. And not watching television took on a counter-culture importance instead of being elitist.
I remember discussing different shows with different people. For example, the people who enjoyed In Living Color thought Friends was mediocre comedy. (They were correct.) And the people who watched Friends with me could care less about Fraiser. I don’t know if this was universal or not. The point is that television took on a larger cultural role than it had in the 80s. Klosterman shows how this led into how television has become equivalent or better to films in our streaming culture.
In the 90s, another trend began in television that opened up longer form stories. Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were shows designed around season long story arcs. Instead of the show focusing on episodic content, these shows told larger stories. While other shows had story arcs that lasted more than one episode (think Friends‘s will they/won’t they with Ross and Rachel), these arcs weren’t the point of the show or even of the season. Buffy’s structure was each season had a ‘big Bad’ that the gang ended up fighting against until the season finale. Babylon 5 was written with a five season arc in mind. This type of story telling would become the norm, especially as streaming services took off and began producing their own content. Klosterman got me thinking about these shows, and his essays helped me place them as seeds of a larger (and in my opinion a better) trend. Isn’t that what good essays should do? I think so. I love when an essay inspires me to take its premise and apply it beyond the boundaries of the author’s writing.
Film
Klosterman writes about the proliferation of movies that came about during the 90s as VCRs became affordable and video rental businesses popped up. This essay was particularly excellent. The ability to access any movie I could think of changed my younger self. Instead of going to the theatre, we went down the street and had the movie for a couple days. Rewatching movies that I loved became a habit for me. But, as Klosterman states, video stores biggest impact was that the selection of movies available to my small town exploded. Instead of just the big production movies, it was possible to see independent films or weird things, like Faces of Death or the UFC videos. With the opening of video rental stores, we had access to a broader range of art than ever before.
Klosterman’s analysis of video store bros is also spot on here. I can think of different people that I’ve met in my life that fall into this category. And one of the connecting factors was that they worked in rental stores. I particularly like Klosterman’s discussion of how rental stores produced directors like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. This essay is worth the price fo the book itself.
The Internet
With respect to the internet, the 90s was a sandwich generation stuck between no and constant connection. Such a dramatic shift in life can only be understood by those who went through it. I imagine its similar to how the generation raised with the proliferation of the Model T felt. Prior to that, carriages, horses, and trains dominated travel. With the Model T, automobile ownership exploded, and society has never looked back. During the 90s information was becoming accessible to anyone. During my senior year of high school, the English teacher assigned a research paper to meet requirements to graduate. It was such a serious project that the class took a field trip to the local college library to conduct research. That’s right, we loaded up in a bus and got our first experience of college. We had to work with librarians and the card catalog to find out things that are right at hand now. Today, students in the same class at that high school use Google to do research.
Of course, the proliferation of information has cheapened and, almost, destroyed the word research. Too many people seriously believe that watching a YouTube video is conducting research. (It’s not.) Being flooded with information has destroyed our ability to evaluate said information and sources. I miss the days when research universally meant reading books, magazines, and/or journals.
Klosterman also points out that privacy has in a way become reversed. We used to put our names, phone numbers, and addresses in a giant book that everyone had. The phonebook was necessary, and all your information was right there. Now, putting that information into the world is considered a transgression of privacy that didn’t exist in the 90s. Klosterman’s discussion is fascinating and enlightening.
Politics
I miss the politics of the 90s. It had not infected every aspect of life. It was common to be friends with someone who disagreed with your politics. But, as nostalgia is wont to do, I looked back at this time with rose-colored glasses. Politics in the 90s was weird. Ross Perot incorrectly received blame for George H.W. Bush’s loss, and Ralph Nader didn’t get enough blame for George W. Bush’s win. Klosterman’s analysis of the politics of this time is excellent, and as political scientists are reexamining Clinton’s legacy in restructuring the Democratic party, Klosterman offers insight into the political scene of that decade. The analysis of why Clinton resonated with voters while H.W. Bush and Bob Dole didn’t is excellent. It’s not the analysis of a political scientist but a social critic, which makes it a kind of meta-commentary. Clinton appealed more on a social level than either of his opponents.
Conclusion
Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties made this child of the 90s very happy. It felt like returning to a simpler time while seeing it through different eyes. This book won me over as a Klosterman fan. I plan to check out his previous work, and I suggest you check out this book.
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman is available from Penguin Press on February 8st, 2022.
© PrimmLife.com 2022