“The Nineties” by Chuck Klosterman (2022)
Klosterman has been around for a while, and you might best remember him from the fresh, but now-defunct Grantland website. For some reason I thought he worked for Rolling Stone, but it looks like Esquire and GQ were more his thing. Anyway, I read a “Briefly Noted” bit about this book in The New Yorker and bought the book because I’m solidly a Gen X-er, for whatever that means, and thought this would be a nice addition to my bookshelves. As his main strength, Klosterman does highlight the trivialities of pigeonholing any group of people under generational branding, and his sense of humor is quite nice, letting us know decades don’t magically transform on 01 JAN, which the Y2K chimera illustrates perfectly. He also reinforces how memories get twisted over time and accurately reconstructing the past isn’t as whimsical as one might want two decades after the experiences, and halcyon glasses are always greasy. Semantic memory and emotional memory are physiologically connected. History is important however. I would even say it’s crucial to learn and connect the dots on how we’ve gotten to where we have, as women’s autonomy, basic human rights, and the ability to make choices are rolled back to the 19th Century by Christo-fascist hypocrites. Look out, LGBTQ+ folks, you’ll be next in their crosshairs.
The Nineties is better as an eBook. It’s more of an encyclopedia of events with some personal insights tossed in. Wikipedia is good enough for most of these topics. Some subjects get more time spent on them while others are simple blips. Clear beverages (Zima and its ilk) have more pages than the US’s influence on Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection. I skipped over subjects I didn’t care about back then, and still don’t, such as baseball and football and pop music. Klosterman doesn’t dig into the Grunge Gold Rush, which was singularly propelled by MTV, but he does show how the music industry switched gears and “alternative” music was the dominant “pop” within two-to-three years. There were only a handful of bands that actually qualified as grunge-sounding, but capitalism is what it is. The physical analog world was limiting, but he offers acumen that is nostalgically cool: “Browsing through one’s album collection was a low-level Rorschach test. Limitations and scarcity made subjective distinctions meaningful” (p. 186). Then Napster came along and the music industry was forced to change. Now only the pop stars rake in huge profits through streaming, while everyone else makes peanuts.
The rise of the Internet is of course a fascinating topic and it’s easy to remember its beginning (for the most of us) as a simple, exploratory, innocent space, not the completely commodified and surveillance-filled cesspool that it is now. The dynamic changes to TV watching during the 90s, and how “the news” morphed poisonously, is also very important to analyze. I honestly miss the days when a show was on when it was on, or you programmed your VCR to record it; if you missed it, you got over it because there were other things in life far more important. Was Seinfeld really that important back then? (And, I never watched a single episode of f-ing Friends.) Now we’re addicted to screens everywhere, anything is almost always a few clicks away, and the tech manufacturers and media outlets and content-creators and governments know this intimately. While Blockbuster Video brought new horizons to every small town in the early 90s, streaming services and media outlets have now bastardized that dynamic into nothingness. Bathe in the glow of your palantír and enjoy.
Klosterman doesn’t mention Bosnia or Rwanda for whatever reasons. Metal music is and always will be outsider art, but at least Body Count gets a few pages for Copkiller, back when Neo-Cons still tried to ban music (now they’re just focused on books, how history is taught, and public libraries). Columbine and the 2000 election have a trove of books written about them, but Klosterman’s summaries offer a nice springboard to a deeper dive, if one is inclined to take the plunge. (Yes, us Ralph Nader voters—in Florida—might have lead to Bush II, but the politicized Supreme Court drove the last nail in, and that should be the focus of our ire.)
Memory is a terribly faulty thing. No group of people will share the same experiences from the same perspectives. An accurate retelling of events can help more people lock onto facts and hopefully break their cognitive dissonance, willful ignorance, and confirmation biases that are consistently force-fed by disinformation and propaganda machines. When Klosterman briefly mentions Art Bell’s late-night AM radio show for wingnuts, we know now the almighty Internet has allowed that show to be everywhere, always, spreading like the disease it is. In a way, such things started in the 90s, and most all of us were completely unaware. No one can get away claiming ignorance any more.
And, as the Fates would have it, The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/166758/america-1989-2001-foreign-policy-lost-weekend) shares reflections on how the 1990s were squandered in so many ways.
