The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What’s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.

It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome.

In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.

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.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs (some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).

And at the end of the book, there was this coda that postulated an ‘X’ class. I actually wrote Fussell a fan letter. Never heard back from him. But everything he said about getting off the class roller coaster felt like the way I thought about the concept of Generation X.”

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke labeled himself “a creep.” Beck’s breakthrough single insisted he was “a loser.” Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins sang that he was “a zero.” By 1994, self-flagellation had become a kind of philosophical fashion. It was often a pose, and there was a certain goofiness to megastars lecturing fans about how much they hated themselves.

Nevermind transformed the totality of American pop culture, and that transformation initiated rock’s recession from the center of society.

He’d made an optical mistake at the ’88 Republican convention, pointing into the camera and saying, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Two years later, taxes went up and the promise became an albatross. But here again—that tax increase happened when his popularity was still formidable, and over half the country hadn’t believed that pledge on the day he made it.

There’s a belief in America that a third-party candidate can’t become president, and Perot is both the refutation and the proof. On one hand, he was an independent iconoclast who used his own money to pull 20 million votes from both liberals and conservatives. He proved it was possible. On the other hand, he had unlimited financial resources and massive media support, yet still couldn’t win a single electoral vote. He proved it was impossible.

The skyscrapers were clearly too stable to destroy. Did these terrorists really believe they could knock down two of the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere? It was an inconceivable fantasy. They were amateurs.

It was an acceptable thing not to know. But the age of not knowing things was ending.

And then, depending on who you were and the year in which you were living, there was a high likelihood the next sound was a one-word welcome from Elwood Edwards, a voice actor living in Orrville, Ohio. His affable greeting would be followed by a grammatically incorrect phrase: “You’ve got mail.”

Craig Newmark started a tiny website called Craigslist, an alternative to classified advertising that would go on to inadvertently annihilate the American newspaper industry.

Originally called “BackRub,” the search engine was renamed “Google” after the accidental misspelling of the mathematical term “googol” (the number 1 followed by 100 zeros).

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.”

In The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” the man replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” For almost a century, this insight has been referenced so often that it has become its own kind of cliché, in part because it applies to almost everything.

“I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway,” sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. “Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?”

He was dubbed “the UNAbomber” due to the institutions he initially targeted (the letters “UN” stood for “universities” and the letter “A” stood for “airlines”).

The pervasiveness of the industrial system, so inescapable that it’s unquestioned, pushes people toward artificial goals and irrational pursuits. It robs individuals of the ability to think and feel autonomously, convincing them to willfully adopt whatever irrational rules society claims to require.

His hobbies were reading classic books in their original language and constructing homemade bombs from wood and metal, most of which were mailed to college professors he’d never met.

In light of how the world has evolved, it’s hard to think about Kaczynski without thinking about the internet, even though the word “internet” appears only once in the thirty-five-thousand-word text of “Industrial Society and Its Future” (and only in passing).

The only reason he was captured was that his younger brother, David Kaczynski, read “Industrial Society and Its Future” and recognized glimpses of his estranged sibling’s personality. Some of the thoughts and phrases were reminiscent of handwritten letters Ted had sent David in the past. The only reason David read “Industrial Society and Its Future” was that his wife forced him to do so.

The primacy of Bell’s presence was a product of the period: While it was easy to be crazy in the early nineties, it was difficult for like-minded crazy people to organize. In the pre-internet age, holding conspiratorial beliefs usually meant holding those beliefs in isolation—you read discredited books, you wrote letters to fringe magazines, and you listened to Coast to Coast AM alone in the garage.

Oliver Stone released the film JFK in 1991, it trafficked in a conspiracy a majority of Americans accepted—that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had involved more than one gunman. But JFK was still ridiculed in most serious publications, sometimes before the movie was even released. Stone was marginalized as a loon for promoting a possibility most people already believed.[*]

In the 1980s, team owners were directly instructed by MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth to collude. Ueberroth’s private advisement was for owners to communally agree not to offer any free agent a contract that reflected the player’s actual market value, killing any possibility of a bidding war that could escalate salaries.

They set a strike deadline of August 12, 1994, working from the premise that the owners would cave in order to stop the cancellation of the postseason. The players misjudged the owners’ resolve. The owners were completely willing to cancel the World Series, arguing that 19 of the 28 MLB franchises were already losing money.

The owners had banked on the fact that no matter what they did, sports fans had no other summer option and would inevitably return, and the owners were right.

The late nineties will forever be defined as baseball’s Steroid Era, to the exclusion of all other events that transpired within that same window of time.

Armstrong was continuously accused of doping, most aggressively by French journalists. He denied this constantly, suing those who claimed otherwise and ruining the lives of teammates and acquaintances who contradicted his purity.

The U.S. operatives—Richard Dresner, George Gorton, and Joe Shumate—presented themselves as harmless sales representatives, transferred to Moscow with the aim of selling flat-screen TVs. What they were really doing was assisting Tatiana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, who ran his campaign despite having no political experience.

The more nuanced half of the strategy was to focus not on what the Russian people wanted, but on what they feared: a return to breadlines, a potential civil war, and the possibility of social unrest that would never go away.

There’s always been a demand for lighter beer, but nobody ever asked for a beer so light that it would be possible to look through the bottle and read a newspaper. So why were such beverages invented? Why, from roughly 1992 to 1995, did the beverage industry operate from the position that there was an underserved sector of the populace who desperately wanted transparent drinks?

The fact that many consumers perceived Crystal Pepsi as having a different flavor from the original cola was a consequence of psychology, which also led to its doom.

It was (briefly) popular to consume something familiar that looked alien, even if doing so unconsciously made you nervous. But that seemed like a dumb thing to admit, so the fake explanation became quasi-empirical.

MTV launched The Real World in the summer of 1992, a wonderful time for watching people do nothing. The concept was to place seven young strangers in a New York loft apartment and film what happens when “people stop being polite” (which happened right away) and “start getting real” (which barely happened at all).

Some assumed Dolly would have numerous internal weaknesses and deformities. She did not. Others assumed Dolly would only survive for a few months. She lived over six years, dying of a respiratory cancer common to sheep raised indoors. By every possible metric, this experiment worked.

The world, as always, was changing. But it seemed increasingly possible that it was changing faster than its inhabitants could understand, so they just had to pretend that they did.

TV was considered so inferior to not just film, but to almost every other variety of entertainment from this era. The prevalence of that dismissive view clearly had no relationship to its popularity—statistically speaking, television was more popular than everything. But here again: In the nineties, that was its own kind of problem. If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?

The result was a phenomenon that had never happened before and hadn’t even been imagined as a prospect: There were numerous reports of people buying full-priced tickets for Meet Joe Black,[*] watching the Phantom Menace trailer, and then immediately exiting the theater.

Star Wars superfans started living in tents on the sidewalk outside of movie theaters, lining up for the chance to buy tickets six weeks before opening night. This was even stupider than it sounds: At the time, no theater chain in the country had definitively secured the rights to show The Phantom Menace. It was possible—and somehow unsurprising—that people were living on the street in order to buy tickets for a movie that might not even be available.

Movie critics disliked The Phantom Menace, but diehards hated it more. The easiest, laziest detail to blame was the introduction of a character named Jar Jar Binks. A semi-aquatic humanoid Trachodon with bunny ears, Jar Jar Binks was the first exclusively CGI character in movie history and unilaterally perceived as annoying, except by those more concerned with the possibility that he was racist.

“I’m sorry if they don’t like it,” said Lucas. “They should go back and see The Matrix.”

It was written and directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, who were still living in 1999 as men. Their eventual gender transition is now the most glaring subtext to The Matrix, directly illustrated when the story’s main character has to choose between swallowing a blue pill (which would allow him to continue living a false, fabricated life) and swallowing a red pill (allowing him to experience physical existence as it actually is).

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.

I employ the word “allegedly” only out of journalistic habit and professional sarcasm. It’s pretty much impossible to find people who are still of mixed mind about what happened on the night of June 12, 1994, including members of the jury who declared Simpson not guilty in 1995. “I’m probably pretty sure that [Simpson] probably is the person that went over there and killed Nicole Brown Simpson,” admitted jury member Lon Cryer in 2017.

When the prosecution (stupidly) forced Simpson to try on a glove found at the scene of the murder, Simpson histrionically behaved as if the glove were several sizes too small. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” argued his attorney.

Al Cowlings (later identified as O.J.’s closest friend). The freeway was cleared of westbound traffic as a fleet of police cruisers and multiple news helicopters followed the Bronco in a low-speed chase (Cowlings rarely pushed beyond forty miles per hour).

The number of people who watched the chase is estimated to be around 95 million, many of whom were watching the NBA Finals before NBC interrupted coverage of a basketball game with coverage of a slow-moving SUV.