The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
The Berlin Wall came down and the Twin Towers came down; it was a long time ago, but not as long as it seems. Ross Perot is said to have won one presidential election between those two, while Ralph Nader could have won the other. Initially, a phone book had practically all names and addresses, and since you couldn’t tell who was calling, everyone answered their landlines. By the time it was all over, disclosing someone’s address was a kind of emotional abuse, and nobody answered their brand-new cell phone if they didn’t recognize the caller. The human condition underwent a change in the 1990s that we are still trying to comprehend. Chuck Klosterman is thankfully more than capable of doing the job.
The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman
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Beyond one-off events like “Cop Killer,” “Titanic,” and “Zima,” there were fundamental changes in how society was viewed, including the growth of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical idea that overdoing it is never more embarrassing. Without a machine that could recall everything, pop culture accelerated, creating an odd comfort in never being sure of anything. More people tuned into any random Seinfeld show on a 90s Thursday night than the Game of Thrones season finale. However, no one considered that significant; if you missed it, you simply missed it. Whether you found a place in it or used it to define yourself, it was the last period that adhered to the notion of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all started to fracture.
Chuck Klosterman finds a place in every aspect of The Nineties, including the yin and yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, and the changes in race, wealth, and sexuality. A statement like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany” would likely make sense in no other novel ever written. Future historians may well refer to this time era as Klostermanian as a result of Chuck Klosterman’s multifaceted masterpiece and brilliant synthesis.
The primary tenet of Mr Klosterman’s book The Nineties appears to be that how we think about things now differs from how we thought about them in the past. It is troubling how frequently we seem to ignore this apparent fact, which could be applied to any decade. He is able to repeatedly make this point while reminding us of events at the close of the previous millennium for those of us who have vivid memories of the era in question. He can readily do this thanks to technology, for example. We no longer remember how anxious we were and how much work was put into making sure the Y2K bug was rectified because it never materialized.
We overlook how uncommon cell phones and the internet were, and what that entailed. We were unaware of the influence the VCR explosion of the 1980s would have on the films produced in the 1990s.
The analysis of societal changes is more in-depth. Remember when Monica Lewinsky was despised and Bill Clinton was the most popular president ever following his acquittal (nearing 80% support rating)? Today, Clinton is largely despised and disregarded, while Monica Lewinsky has rebuilt her image. The society changed, but the people and the events remained the same. In Florida, the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was basically a tie because of how similar most people believed the two candidates to be before 9/11. Now, That race seems to have major implications.
