The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

In the middle of the song, Cobain casually intones, “Oh well, whatever, never mind,” a Gen X aphorism so on-the-nose it would have been ridiculed if the Gen X proboscis were not still in utero.

It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.

Every visual reflects the same statement: The hedonistic, euphoric, high-gloss 1980s are over. It took five minutes to killdoze an entire decade.

Rock music had reached its logical conclusion—not as a genre, but as the pivotal force propelling youth culture. There would be hundreds of consequential rock albums recorded in the wake of Nevermind, yet none would approach its nonmusical importance.

“We had grown up admiring punk bands and thinking all those groups on the pop charts were embarrassing . . . and suddenly we were one of those bands.”

what was innovative about Nirvana was how central this perspective was to their iconography.

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.

There was no longer anything exceptional about rock music, even when it was great. Being a so-called Rock Star was embarrassing, and acting like one was even worse. It could only be done as a joke.

Grunge had the media-age advantage of easy information; for the first time, a rock scene being exploited could fully understand what was happening.

The number of accidental and premeditated deaths by grunge (and grunge-adjacent) artists is staggering.

Grunge, by a wide margin, was the most morbid genre in pop history.

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

The dichotomy of Shakur’s life is now understood by almost anyone who cares about his music. But during the zenith of his fame, it was easy to be aware of Tupac Shakur without any knowledge of how he’d grown up or who he used to be.

But this legacy is inseparable from his deliberate transformation into the revolutionary “gangsta” he aspired to be and the central role he played in the nonsensical rivalry between rappers hailing from the West Coast and rappers hailing from the East Coast.

Part of the reason the Democrats nominated an unproven, unfamiliar Arkansas governor to run against him was the widely accepted notion that Bush was unbeatable. They didn’t want to waste a better prospect.

the timing for George Bush was strategically perfect—the Soviet collapse and Germany’s reunification both occurred while he was in office, and both were initiated by events that had transpired during an administration in which he’d served as vice president.

The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was. Technology was advancing faster than the human condition.

There was an astounding video-game aesthetic to the warfare coverage—cameras were mounted on the noses of missiles, providing the viewer with the sensation of riding weapons directly into their targets.

The social and political failure of Vietnam had taught the U.S. military that the public conception of warfare was almost as important as the warfare itself.

The Gulf War was a triumph of public relations. But it was forgotten almost instantly.

The network footage was live and raw, but dependent on the military’s willingness to grant those networks access, which meant the rawness was clandestinely cooked. The public saw almost no casualties from either side.

Despite the buildings that were annihilated and the civilian lives that were lost, there was no obvious emotional component to the war, which meant there was no narrative. And since American audiences had been trained to understand the world through the process of storytelling, a war with no story was a war they did not care to remember.

In the wake of his greatest triumph, Bush devolved into a milquetoast figure no one wanted.

Perot saw things differently. He was a “process” guy. The positive outcome of the war did not mean it hadn’t been a bad idea to begin with.

With the war evaporating from public consciousness, his platform adopted the usual signifiers of economic populism: Balance the budget, fight globalization, and oversee the government the same way a CEO would oversee a factory.

Clinton’s outreach to younger people, particularly through MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign, juiced overall participation (Clinton was, for anyone under twenty-five, the first presidential nominee in memory to resemble a father more than a grandfather).

Part of the reason 20 million people voted for Ross Perot was because it didn’t seem like a particularly big deal to do so. Communism, and whatever threat it allegedly posed, was over.

The ’92 election was a “change election,” where voters mainly wanted something unlike what they already had. Did the direction of that change even matter? What’s the worst that could happen?

It seems counterintuitive, but the modern Republican Party would likely be much less extreme if George H. W. Bush had been reelected in a landslide.

Despite his deep influence on the landscape of the nineties, he was not really a “nineties person.” This was not the right person emerging at the right time.

The failed 1993 bombing of the WTC became a footnote to the 2001 attack that worked. The superstorm now seems minor when compared to the damage from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, when 1,800 people died and New Orleans was evacuated.

What makes Falling Down generationally noteworthy, however, has less to do with its reactionary politics and more to do with the way it allows the viewer to sympathize with a violent person who overreacts to mundane inconveniences.

As Nasty As They Wanna Be was also the first pop album to be classified as legally obscene, a categorization even its ideological supporters could not dispute (“This record is pornographic,” wrote Robert Christgau of The Village Voice. “That’s one of the few good things about it”).

“Cop Killer” operates from the literary premise that all cops are the same, that police brutality is inherent to police activity, and that the only justification required for killing a cop was that the cop was, in fact, a cop.

In the city of Los Angeles, young Black males were actively at war with the police force, and an explanation as to why was no longer required.

An anti-cop viewpoint was not universal. But what mattered was this was now a possible viewpoint to hold, even if you weren’t young or Black or living in Los Angeles.

This phenomenon of white-bread audiences suddenly confronting ideologies that minority groups had long considered inescapable parts of life accelerated during the first half of the nineties.

in December of 1996, seemingly out of nowhere, the Oakland, California, school board publicly recognized Ebonics as the primary language for the majority of its Black students and that this linguistic difference needed to be considered within the education process.

in the gay community, the meaning of queer had been incrementally changing throughout the seventies and eighties.

Within ten years, the notion of nonchalantly using homophobia as a vehicle for unironic humor would disappear almost entirely (at least in the entertainment industry).[*]

Kids could be hated for being too real as easily as it could be hated for being too fake.

When first consumed in theaters, Kids and In the Company of Men felt like provoking exaggerations.

Decades later, the themes and personalities in both movies have been systematically accepted as endemic and incontrovertible.

The alarm over political correctness was grounded in the fear that people were losing control over what they could casually say in public, and there was some truth in that.

But the freedom to use coarse, nonpolitical language in middle-of-the-road entertainment was actually expanding, and that freedom felt novel.

But, like all fabricated freedoms, the new parameters were immediately reconfigured into a prison.

It was the worst of both worlds—Exile in Guyville sold only a fraction as much as Jagged Little Pill, but it was dissected more obsessively and analyzed with a critical seriousness that warped the framework of pop’s true potentiality.

Over time, Phair’s adoration from the same male audiences she criticized became a weapon used against her. How could she be dismantling the patriarchy if the patriarchy had a crush on her?

The pattern is dependable: Every new generation tends to be intrigued by whatever generation existed twenty years earlier.

A fascination with the 1970s was predictable, but not because that era was seen as more wholesome or more political. The appeal was in the conviction that it had been neither.