The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The trajectory of twentieth-century rock was a continual progression away from simplicity. It was pioneered in the 1950s as unruly, unserious entertainment for teenagers. It matured and peaked in the 1960s, mirroring both the rise of the counterculture and the social maturation of its audience. During the seventies, rock became a big-money business and spawned the identifiable caricature of the Rock Star; in the eighties, that business model was incorporated and the caricature became perfunctory. Throughout the form’s existence, there were always truculent artists who positioned themselves against whatever was considered most obviously popular (Lou Reed thought the Beatles were “garbage,” the Clash said Led Zeppelin made them want to puke, etc.). Nirvana adopted and internalized that perspective. They believed (or at least expressed the belief) that the hunger for mass fame—and particularly what an artist was required to do in order to satiate that hunger—was moronic and humiliating. Yet circumstance forced them to bemoan this experience at the same time they experienced it.

In the 1993 pilot episode of the cop show NYPD Blue, a character refers to another as “a pissy little bitch.” Nothing like that had ever been said on prime-time network television. But, like all fabricated freedoms, the new parameters were immediately reconfigured into a prison.

The more intellectual version of this entrapment was experienced by Camille Paglia, a brilliant polemicist who became an academic celebrity upon the publication of her 1990 book Sexual Personae, only to spend the next twenty-five years facing constant criticism for championing an incendiary version of feminism that often appealed to men more than women.

The full spectrum of social and psychological consequences that accompanied the advent of the internet is too profound to explain or understand (then, now, or ever). It exponentially expanded the parameters of external existence while decreasing the material size of interior existence. It allowed any person to simultaneously possess two competing identities—one actual and one virtual. It altered the value of concepts whose value had once been stable and self-evident (solitude, distance, memory, knowledge). Most critically, it recontextualized every fragment of data that moved through its sphere, which eventually encompassed all data available.

It sometimes doesn’t seem possible that the postal service and landline telephones were enough to perpetuate society. But they were, and there was no sense whatsoever that communication was not happening fast enough. In 1990, a ten-minute phone call from Chicago to Los Angeles cost $1.58 during evening hours and slightly more during the afternoon. While it was always possible to disagree over whether this long-distance rate was reasonable or expensive, no one assumed phone calls should be free. The limitations of time and space were ingrained, as was the concept of a telephone’s calcifying geography in nonnegotiable terms.

There was, philosophically, a surfer-like mentality to using the early internet, where the experiential key was surrendering the desire for order and embracing the avalanche of information. Ten minutes on AltaVista could easily turn into three hours. Time disappeared. It was a shapeless process that attracted shapeless thinkers.

What he’s describing is a process familiar to most modern people: the sensation that the mediated version of an event will overwrite one’s own personal memory of the same experience, forcing the individual to reinterpret the way that memory sits within their own mind. The internet abbreviated this equation by eliminating the need for a mind. The software does the remembering, relentlessly and inflexibly, for you and for everybody else. The words and images never dissolve (the link might break, but the data is still cached).

“the enterprise for developing potentiality,”

His career is both a contradiction of what is assumed about modern stardom and a living example of how many of those assumptions are created by a media complex that willfully misunderstands what consumers actually want. Which, in all probability, is the easiest way to comprehend why Titanic was the most successful movie of the century.

But most adults in the country did not fully believe her (or they did, but didn’t care). Was that sexism? Yes. Was it an early example of that perplexing nineties paradox where institutions were viewed cynically while institutional figures were believed? Probably. But it was also the power of television to shape rationality through irrational means. Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show. Forty years of network programming had trained people to associate the performance of emotion with the essentialism of truth, and Thomas had been much more emotional than Hill. He seemed angry, sad, confused, and uncompromising. She just made a good argument, which—on television—is never enough.

The process of revisionism is constant. It happens so regularly that it often seems like the only reason to appraise any present-tense cultural artifact is to help future critics explain why the original appraisers were wrong.

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. What happened to North America after the eleventh of September was the inverse of that. Society did not, in any way, disintegrate. Instead, it was irrevocably jammed together. Every conversation became the same conversation. Ideological differences were inflamed, but not because of intellectual separation. It was the narcissism of small differences, amplified into differences that were no longer small. The phantasm that got shattered was the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others.

There was some overlap in coverage—a shooting in Sacramento, a suicide bomber in Israel, the previous afternoon’s slate of NFL games—but nothing close to a unifying fixation everyone was discussing at the same time. 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.

Writing a 1985 cover story for TV Guide (!), Joyce Carol Oates (!!) mentioned how Hill Street Blues was one of the only programs watched by her colleagues at Princeton (!!!) and that it was an exception to the baseline rule of television, which was that TV was “entertaining, often highly diverting, but not intellectually or emotionally stimulating.”