The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The first national attempts at describing who these new people allegedly were came from the same places that had clumsily defined Baby Boomers in the sixties. Time took a stab in July of 1990. The magazine’s cover was an image of five people staring in random directions, unified by the word “twentysomething.” The headline for the story itself was “Proceeding with Caution.” It was published before the term “Generation X” was popularized,[*] with one source dismissively labeling the demographic as the New Petulants:

The description is most noteworthy for its striking similarity to how Millennials would come to be categorized[*] around 2010

Through most of the seventies, the film industry had been a director’s medium; in the eighties, it became a producer’s medium, spawning a bland recipe for the manufacture of movies with predictably bankable properties.

Larry King Live, a prime-time CNN talk show that skirted the line between news and entertainment. The program’s host was Larry King, an interviewer whose peculiar superpower was knowing next to nothing about the person he happened to be interviewing.

“Democrats must now come face to face with reality: too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security.”

“There are decades when nothing happens,” Vladimir Lenin allegedly claimed, “and there are weeks when decades happen.”

Smashing Pumpkins released a single titled “1979” in January of 1996. It was a gorgeous song with a wistful ambiance, but it wasn’t particularly reminiscent of music from the late seventies, nor did it lyrically evoke anything identifiable from that particular year. It was just called “1979.” That was enough.

When you made a TV show about the seventies, you could just call it That ’70s Show. Was that title clever, or was that title lazy? It was impossible to know. But it was clear that the show would refer to things from the seventies, sometimes as a joke and sometimes as a heartfelt expression of joy. So did that make it satire? Was it a tribute? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe it didn’t matter. Whatever. Who cares? Just get on with it. Just look at the pants.

It altered the value of concepts whose value had once been stable and self-evident (solitude, distance, memory, knowledge).

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it.

It inverted the definition of what it meant to be a smart person: It was now possible to know a little bit about everything without remembering anything. In the coming years, soft scientists would give this phenomenon a name—“the Google Effect,” sometimes called “digital amnesia.”

There are many reasons not to drink Pepsi, but “It’s too dark” has never been among them.