The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else.

It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

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.

the vacuous center of Gen X culture was a knee-jerk distaste for Boomer ideology and a fear of invisible market forces that infiltrated everything.

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.

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.

Yup

In 1992, the U.S. was evolving in a manner that was both conformist and unpredictable, and 19 percent of its citizens weren’t happy about that. They wanted an alternative, which was the only thing you were supposed to want, even if it was packaged as a strange little man from Texas.

Here was a gangly, ultra-confident person who spoke so fast it seemed as if he was trying to answer questions that had not yet been asked.

My opinion is everything. You can all disagree with me. I don’t care.”

Bowl games were, and still are, something of a financial boondoggle: Bowl organizers pay participating colleges for playing, and that money is distributed among all the teams from that program’s conference (thereby incentivizing the various conferences to keep their bowl relationships intact). The rest of the revenue stays with local bowl executives, and the games themselves are inexplicably classified as tax-exempt nonprofits.

The majority of internet content is an incomplete reproduction of something that already exists elsewhere, delivered in a capricious sequence self-directed by the user. Every message or image is preceded and followed by a different message or image with which it has no natural relationship, except to modify the meaning of whatever is currently being experienced. It is literally a context of no context, thus negating the very notion of contextual meaning.

Teare had opened Cyberia, one of the UK’s earliest internet cafés.

Not the worst name ever

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.

Art is intrinsically good, but attempts to make it palatable to those who don’t understand art make it bad. It’s cool to wear flannel, but not if someone is convinced to wear flannel as a way to be cool.

Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show.

There was an eye-roll quality to much of this publicity, not unlike his 1992 appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show, where Clinton wore sunglasses and played the saxophone. There was a desire to portray it as pandering and unserious. The results, however, were almost always good for Clinton. Unlike most politicians of his era, he did not appear to be fighting popular culture. He appeared to simply view it as the culture that was popular, and he’d engage with it on its own terms.

Relative to the rest of the twentieth century, the nineties were a good time to be president, and he was a good president for good times.

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.