The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

the present-tense status of culture exists in a constant state of crisis, with the tenor of the crisis shaped by whatever people assume to be the cause. The assumption in the nineties was commercialism. The assumption this morning is capitalism. Philosophically, it’s a meaningful disconnect. Yet both positions do share one common enemy: the psychological dominance of mass success.

Mass popularity is a zero-sum game that will always confirm whatever is offered as the explanation, so any espoused theory behind why certain things got huge is not that illuminating. But what’s revelatory are the values that hugeness expressed, on purpose or by chance. Those values illustrate what the mass culture wanted, and those values represent what the counterculture wanted to reject.