The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

When it was new, American Beauty seemed to address uncomfortable domestic conflicts other movies were unwilling to confront.

The modern reading is that Burnham’s behavior is the juvenile manifestation of unearned privilege.

Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the

And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.

“You know the world is going to hell when the best rapper out there is a white guy and the best golfer is a Black guy.”

it captures a discombobulating societal feeling that had started percolating throughout the last half of the nineties: the electrifying possibility that previous impossibilities were now entirely possible.

labeling entities as “alternative” was now a viable way to sell any otherwise unsellable product, prompting a genuine motivation to find and produce content that was once considered too off-kilter to make real money.[*]

What if we convinced strange, uncompromising artists to commoditize their least strange, most compromised material?

There was a preponderance of minor hits where the lead vocalist did not sing or rap, but instead monotonously and nonsensically talked over atmospheric backing music:

There was growing evidence that the trait drawing people to art was an artist’s ability to succeed without appearing professional or studied.

Here’s the important thing, though: It wasn’t all marketing. It wasn’t all constructed.

Some of these previously impossible possibilities were superior to all models that had come before.

Eminem was a Caucasian rap star who did not appear to be adopting hip-hop as an unorthodox performance style or an artistic choice. He appeared to have few other options and no other interests. He was alienated and poor, and his family life was terrible.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when he was still the human representation of neutral perfect. You cared about Tiger Woods or you didn’t care about golf. There was no third option.

Mike Tyson—desperate, infuriated, and realizing he was going to lose—leaned into Evander Holyfield during a clinch and bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s right ear.

But the attempt to gnaw an opponent’s flesh was so outside what could reasonably be expected from a professional boxing match that there was a temporary attempt to treat the attack like an accidental infraction.

Tyson epitomizes a kind of contradictory public figure that emerged in the nineties and would dominate the encroaching epoch of reality TV and social media: an undeniably tragic figure who did not engender (or deserve) sympathy.

Y2K was a catastrophe that never happened, prompting many to conclude it was a catastrophe that had never been possible to begin with.

The essence of the problem had the qualities of 1950s science fiction: The smallest possible detail, overlooked by technologists unaware of their godlike power, would instantaneously return a futuristic society to the Stone Age.

What’s essential to note, of course, is that the majority of people never truly believed this would happen.

As years have passed, the growing academic sentiment regarding Y2K is that it was going to wreak some level of pandemonium, and the ultimate absence of any disorder is an example of preemptive science at its absolute best.[*]

When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968—and even when Prince recorded the song “1999” in 1982—the twenty-first century felt farther away than it actually was.

But as that distance decreased to nil, the year 2000 began to resemble what it actually was—just another year, negligibly different from the year preceding it.

Once it became clear that nothing tragic had transpired, it was acceptable to express sardonic nostalgia for a disaster that never occurred.

The memory of September 11 is deeper and the emotional toll was greater, and it temporarily made much of the previous ten years feel superficial (including the squabble over that electoral outcome).

The perceived resemblance was more personal than political: These were two white guys in their early fifties who seemed to be running for president because no one else had a better idea.

Bush was bad in all three debates, rarely able to express cogent thoughts on policy. But the lowbrow consensus was that the debates played to Bush’s advantage, mostly because Gore sighed too much.

This conclusion invented a political perspective that’s become omnipresent in any two-person race but still felt original in 2000: Again and again, Bush was described as the candidate voters “would rather have a beer with.”

It has become common—almost compulsory—to blame Al Gore’s loss in the 2000 election on third-party candidate Ralph Nader and the people who voted for him

He seemingly never had a romantic relationship,[*] and he claimed to live off $25,000 a year. For Nader, and especially for the people who loved him, self-righteousness was an admirable quality.

There appeared to be a hard ceiling on how much any lone individual’s action could change anything outside of their own life. The world was going to happen the way it was going to happen—but here was an opportunity to criticize the system while still engaging with the process. Voting for Nader was an expression of self.

Nader voters were proud of the moral decision they were about to make. But by the afternoon of November 8, that moral high ground had become a mudslide, and those 2.9 million moralists were suddenly impossible to find.

What much of the public had considered a milquetoast competition between uncharismatic clones was understood by the court as a straightforward war for control of the future.

On the biggest possible stage, it was established that every sociopolitical act of the twenty-first century would now be a numbers game on a binary spectrum.

People inject their current worldviews into whatever they imagine to be the previous version of themselves. There is no objective way to prove that This Is How Life Was. It can only be subjectively argued that This Is How Life Seemed.

What was happening, really, was the media version of what physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn had classified as “normal science” in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn’s assertion was that, most of the time, scientific work mostly entails refining little details within a larger umbrella concept that everyone accepts as obviously true. This process continues until the paradigm transforms.

Whenever the world rapidly and dramatically changes, the gut response is that society must be disintegrating.

The only other major moniker for people born between 1966 and 1981, periodically employed through the early nineties, was “the 13th Generation,”

Though it seems a bit absurd in retrospect, the conventional wisdom of the nineties insisted that the first Black U.S. president would have to come from the Republican Party.

There was, however, an especially goofy period in between not knowing and knowing: the fleeting era of “*69.”

An amusing factoid about the early internet was how much of its philosophy was created by tech-obsessed hippies.

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be.”