The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

As a society, we’ve elected to ignore that many people of the nineties—many modern people, many of whom are still very much alive—were exceedingly comfortable not knowing anything for certain. Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.

If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

Yet one accolade can be applied with conviction: Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.

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.

The concept of “selling out”—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.

Prozac Nation was published when Wurtzel was twenty-seven, and it defined the philosophical difference between memoir and autobiography. It was the story of Wurtzel’s clinical depression, but the veracity of the narrative mattered less than the way the author’s illness shaped her own discernment of what was actually happening. It was indulgent and self-absorbed, although according to an epilogue Wurtzel added to the paperback, that was intentional.

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.

Nevermind becomes the most commercially successful punk album ever made, in large part because it doesn’t sound like punk music (yet still is). It’s the ideal mainstream version of counterculture ideology.

It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.

The social and political failure of Vietnam had taught the U.S. military that the public conception of warfare was almost as important as the warfare itself.

Irony was the one quality Alanis Morissette would come to understand more deeply than almost any artist of her generation. She was successful because of her honesty, but anyone that successful had to be lying.

The concept of buying a new phone every other year[*] would have seemed as crazy as installing a new toilet every other Thanksgiving.

The incomprehensible scope of the internet produced entirely new genres of invisible anxiety.

What society classifies as “credible” is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.

What is the purpose of art if not to connect with the deepest part of other people, and isn’t the whole notion of classifying something as “so bad that it’s good” just a way of avoiding the beautiful incongruity of thoughts and feelings?

trying to be sincere on purpose is like trying to be spontaneous on command—it

The problem was that The Phantom Menace forced people to realize they’d been betrayed by the falseness of their own constructed memories.

the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.

Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

Something is not “surreal” just because it’s weird or unexpected. Surreal means “beyond the real,” so it can’t describe anything that exists in reality.

It’s a perpetual divergence that’s rarely addressed directly but informs every worldview: Should people be more (or less) sensitive? Should people be less (or more) preoccupied with their own sense of self, and should rationality matter more (or less) than passion and moral conviction?

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself.

People inject their current worldviews into whatever they imagine to be the previous version of themselves.

Whenever the world rapidly and dramatically changes, the gut response is that society must be disintegrating. There’s a long-standing belief that national trauma shatters the existing status quo and splinters the interconnectivity that creates a phantasm of security.