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.

Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape,

But that deluge of data remained, at the time, ephemeral and unavailable.

if you missed an episode of Seinfeld, you simply missed it. You had to wait until it was re-aired the following summer,

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 perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.

There was a longing for the 1970s, but not in the way people of the seventies had longed for the fifties.

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.

It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed.

The erroneous belief that Mandela died in the eighties (as opposed to December of 2013, the month of his actual demise) has spawned an entire category of conspiracy theory now known as the Mandela Effect.

the most rational explanation is that most of these memories were generated by people of the early nineties, a period when the obsession with popular culture exponentially increased without the aid of a mechanism that remembered everything automatically.

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.

For the most part, the dissonance between the sixties and the nineties involves how things were designed, manufactured, and packaged.

That evolution is easy to comprehend, unlike the profound structural dissonance between consumer life in 1990 and consumer life in 2020.

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

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.

Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.

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 1990s represented the longest economic expansion in U.S. history; as a consequence, the entire Gen X experience is almost exclusively remembered as socioeconomic.

This is a minor misreading of history. The prosperity of the nineties didn’t begin until slightly later in the decade and rarely included younger adults.

It took some time for Boomers to reach their “uncomfortable analysis” phase. This stands in contrast to Generation X, who entered that phase immediately and never left.

Its boldest psychological assertion was that nineties young people were terrified of romantic relationships and commitment, the consequence of being raised by divorced parents who shielded them from adversity:

Almost everything written in this pre-X period portrays the demographic as damaged.

There was, quite suddenly, a shift in how the aesthetic desires of youth culture were perceived. It was not that Xers were merely thought to have bad taste—the hotter take was that Xers had bad taste on purpose.

This was perhaps the most charming Gen X quality: a continual willingness to absorb and internalize its caricature.

When informed that they were apathetic, the most common Xer response was disinterest in the accusation, inadvertently validating the original assertion.

An unknowing precursor to Wikipedia, Alt.Culture provided countercultural definitions for things that weren’t important enough to be defined anywhere else.

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.

By 2010, it was hard to illustrate to a young person why this act was once seen as problematic; by 2020, it was difficult to explain what the term literally expressed.

It meant someone was compromising the values they originally espoused in exchange for something superficial (which was usually money, but not necessarily).

Conversely, if your only core value was conventional success, you would never be seen as credible, but you also couldn’t be criticized for abandoning the values you never originally possessed.

But hipsters of the nineties added one more psychosomatic layer to the conundrum: There was, in real time, an awareness that the whole idea of criticizing people for selling out was ridiculous, even as it was actively happening.

The result was a period of communal cognitive dissonance. It was insane to take selling out seriously, yet still unforgivable to actually sell out.

Saturated with product placement, Reality Bites is the sellout version of the problem with selling out, which is why it portrays the problem so intuitively.

The initial reaction to Reality Bites, particularly among those outside its target market, was that Ryder picked the wrong guy.

It was assumed that such dissonance was eternal. It wasn’t. As years have passed, each new crop of young people introduced to Reality Bites tends to see the relationship the same way Ebert did. On this one esoteric point, Boomers and Millennials are in lockstep.

The generational disinterest in contradicting any allegation of apathy proves that the allegations are correct. Accusations of an overreliance on “irony” are met with ironic rebuttals.

It will not matter that most Gen X characteristics only applied to a sliver of the Gen X population.

The updated Time thesis was that early Gen X categorizations had unfairly misjudged the forces shaping the twentysomething mind-set.

Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will,

It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.

Prozac Nation was published when Wurtzel was twenty-seven, and it defined the philosophical difference between memoir and autobiography.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. These are supposed be the bookends for when the nineties (really) started and when the nineties (really) stopped.

The line between what was mainstream and what was underground was extraordinarily clear, as was the line between high and low culture.

It was as if certain things about the production of culture had finally been figured out, and 1990 was launched from this static plateau.

Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

Nevermind becomes the most commercially successful punk album ever made, in large part because it doesn’t sound like punk music (yet still is). It’s the ideal mainstream version of counterculture ideology.

The prehistory of Nevermind is a series of small events that illuminate the transition of an underground mentality forced to the surface.

The earliest Nevermind reviews were detached from what would become its historical reputation (Rolling Stone gave it only three out of five stars), but the overall response was positive.

The cultural implications for the nineties aren’t the same if the centerpiece is “Jeremy” or “Black Hole Sun” or “Touch Me I’m Sick.” The legacy of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is not transposable. It had to be this song, delivered by this person.