The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There’s no evidence that people of the nineties wanted clear versions of beverages that were readily available in non-clear form. It wasn’t something that was possible to want, because it’s not something people imagined.

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?

Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.

In reality, Zima was just the cheapest version of regular Coors, stripped of all identifiable characteristics and injected with a blast of citrus flavoring.

“Right Now” was a mature, piano-driven rock track with a message about embracing the present moment, imbuing Crystal Pepsi with a forced sense of modernity.

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.

Pepsi was (a) telling people to drink something that unconsciously disturbed them, while (b) latently suggesting this new, disturbing product was a healthier alterative to regular Pepsi, the foundation of their entire business model.

Making matters worse was Coca-Cola’s 1993 introduction of Tab Clear, another translucent beverage with an overtly sinister purpose: It was terrible on purpose.

Crystal Pepsi was just a gimmicky version of regular Pepsi, but Coca-Cola persuaded people to incorrectly view it as a caffeine-free diet drink that resembled their worst product.

The prospect of a terrible beverage created to kamikaze a moronic beverage is an apt metaphor for this entire period of marketing.

In the seventies, the joy of straightforward dumbness had been enough. In the nineties, you had to pretend dumbness was smart. Zima and Crystal Pepsi were miniature examples. But there were big ones, too.

Biosphere 2 was an experiment, technically speaking. It was science. But it operated more like an unscripted soap opera, imbued with a tension MTV could never have fabricated.

In practice, Biosphere 2 was primarily an ecology project, better suited for understanding the regular Earth we were all currently using.

The absence of food was a greater problem than Nelson’s diary suggests. The crops were supposed to be pollinated by honeybees and hummingbirds, but the birds and bees all died.

This necessary O2 injection slaughtered the premise of the experiment. It was supposed to be an entirely closed system, sealed from within.

But what’s most historically instructive is that this project was attempted at all. It was a collision of multiple worldviews that could have only intersected at the specific time that they did.

In the early seventies, when New Age thinking was emerging as a movement, it was a fringe ideology practiced by people purposefully living outside conventional society.

The early nineties were the closest New Age dogma ever came to real credibility, simply because it was the only time when those who cared about it most had enough cultural and economic power to force it into being.[*]

The nineties anxiety over cloning was, almost exclusively, a mass media creation.

There was also a collective lack of understanding of what the mechanics and intent of mammalian cloning actually were.

Over and over, fictional representations of genetic manipulation fixated on the metaphysical tragedy that would accompany its success.

the dissonance between the public sensitivity to genetic engineering and the actual progress being made can be seen as a signpost for the modern anti-science movement in Western culture.

Kid A became the number 1 album in both the U.S. and the UK, but the standard modifier to describe it was “difficult.”

Radiohead (and Yorke in particular) had built a nonmusical ethos around alienation, social anxiety, and the escalating oppression from an expanding corporate dystopia.

This was a decade of full-on metacognition, when people spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about why they were thinking whatever it was they were thinking.

There have been many versions of the New Sincerity, always unified by the same motive: the belief that people should be honest about what they feel, and that consumers of art should not reward artists who use emotional estrangement as an intellectual crutch.

But the zenith of its influence occurred in the late nineties, when it temporarily became the dominant way to think about literature.

But what the New Sincerity was, and what it always is, was anxiety over the comfort of emotional uninvestment, magnified by the luxury of introspection.

This was the crux of the psychosomatic problem: I think I should feel guilty for enjoying something I don’t actually care about. The solution was to be less cynical, and one way to be less cynical was to elevate the expression of sincerity.

Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it;

If you ask a semi-educated young person to identify the root cause of most American problems, there’s a strong possibility they will say, “Capitalism.”

In the nineties, when a semi-educated young person was asked to identify the root cause of most American problems, the probable answer would not have been capitalism. The more likely response would have been commercialism.

A hatred of commercialism is unconsciously optimistic.

The problem of commercialism is the motive, and that can be recognized in how the thing is packaged. This differs from a hatred of capitalism, where the problem is the thing.

A hatred of capitalism is consciously pessimistic. It works from the premise that—if you are American—the very structure of your workaday reality is pernicious.

Yet both positions do share one common enemy: the psychological dominance of mass success.

But when you’re still trapped inside a specific window of time, the prevailing forces are the forces that run the show. Anything that gets invented on the fringe is a reaction to whatever (or whoever) has aesthetic control.

Mass popularity is a zero-sum game that will always confirm whatever is offered as the explanation, so any espoused theory behind why certain things got huge is not that illuminating.

There’s no way to engage with a song like “Achy Breaky Heart” without fixating on the incongruity between the magnitude of its popularity and the overwhelming consensus that it was terrible.

And what it was, really, was an example of what happens when culture moves in two opposing directions at the same time.

Grunge musicians openly disdained the posturing of longhaired arena rock, most notably its relationship to masculinity.

But the public appetite for those qualities was still there, and country artists increasingly encroached upon the classic tropes of classic rock. Cyrus was a caricature of that migration:

The things casual consumers liked about “new country” were the same things casual consumers had liked about “old rock.” The music itself was important, but secondary to the experience it offered and the lifestyle it valued.

Garth Brooks was, by a broad margin, the biggest musical act of the decade. He would have been the biggest act of whatever decade he lived through, because Brooks is the biggest solo artist of all time.

What’s curious, however, is how rarely Brooks is identified as an iconic nineties figure.

Brooks’s relative lack of historical clout does not compute. Yet it’s possible that this future disregard was already presupposed at the height of his success, which illogically propelled him further.

But the quality that made Brooks most relatable was a kind of unforced, benevolent populism.

Garth’s version of populism did not pit the poor against the elite. Instead, it implied that the difference was immaterial, and that all people ultimately want the same ordinary things.

Unlike most creative people, Garth’s personal taste in music naturally gravitated toward artists who were commercially huge. As a consequence, he never had to construct a hit—all he had to do was write songs that sounded the way he liked songs to sound.

What mattered most, though, was his singularity of purpose: His only goal was to provide maximum entertainment to the largest possible audience at all possible times.