The Nineties
Ratings43
Average rating3.6
15
Ratings43
Average rating3.6
An instant New York Times bestseller! From the 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
It's a bit weird looking back on a decade that you lived through and one that doesn't feel that long ago. Klosterman has organized this book as a series of funny, intelligent and entertaining essays focused on different events, pop culture, and phenomena of the time. One of the press reviews called it “irreverent” and I agree.
Reading the book, I realize how much has changed. The internet was fun but not vital, you had to be at home to get a phone call, and we shared a lot more pop culture experiences back then, for good or for ill, such as Seinfeld, Titanic, Nirvana etc. With social media, we might assume we are connected but everything is broken up into little bits of specialized interest. You also had a higher degree of individuality.
“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.”
I enjoyed being reminded of things I hadn't thought of in years. Clarence Thomas, Ross Perot and the 1992 presidential campaign, and the entire millennium changeover scare.
Born the same year as I was, Klosterman had a chapter (Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less) devoted to our generation, generation X, who were the young people during the 90s. We would have been the ones influencing and experiencing the 90s the most at the time but it's hard to notice something when you are in the midst of it.
If there is any weakness in the book it's that I wish he'd been able to go into more of the literature/fiction writing of the time. He mentions a couple of books, neither of which I think were a big deal.
Really good (though very US-centric) trip down the memory lane.
Some of this was excellent. Some of it was tiring. I used to rank Klosterman as one of my favorite authors, but now I just find him exhausting. It must be SO HARD to be SO COOL.
The difference between Klosterman and, say, Malcolm Gladwell, is that Gladwell surprises me with the things he links and the craftiness with which he does so. Klosterman just bludgeons readers over the head with his own opinions and oftentimes the chapters just feel like disjointed rants.
A great examination of all parts of a decade that most people view as uneventful or ineffectual.
