The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Here again, the friction was contextual. When white people engaged with new language through a hip-hop album, it was seen as enlightening and mind-expanding. But the moment that engagement encroached upon regular day-to-day life, the response turned negative. The fleeting 1997 panic over Ebonics was proof. The term was invented in the mid-1970s, a blending of the words ebony and phonics. The premise was that differences between traditional English and the way the English language was used in segments of the Black community were not errors or flaws, but part of an organized vernacular built over time and governed by its own grammatical rules (pronouncing the word “ask” as “ax,” for example, or the purposeful employment of double negatives). The academic version of the term was African American Vernacular English, and nobody outside of academia paid much attention to the theory for twenty years. But then, 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. The news was not exactly greeted with bemused curiosity. It prompted a national freak-out over the sanctity of language, driven by a detail that wasn’t even accurate: The popular assumption was that Oakland public schools were not simply recognizing Ebonics but replacing traditional English education with Ebonics...

It culminated with two key events in 1990: the formation of the splinter activist group Queer Nation[*] and the distribution of the combative leaflet Queers Read This! during the New York City Pride March. Published anonymously, Queers Read This! is eternally provocative—it calls for “a moratorium on straight marriage, on babies, on public displays of affection among the opposite sex and media images that promote heterosexuality.” It outlines “Rules of Conduct for Straight People” and explicitly explains the adoption of queer as a means of self-identification: Ah, do we really have to use that word? It’s trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. That’s okay, we like that. But some gay girls and boys don’t. They think they’re more normal than strange. And for others “queer” conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering. Queer. It’s forcibly bittersweet and quaint at best—weakening and painful at worst. Couldn’t we just use “gay” instead? It’s a much brighter word and isn’t it synonymous with “happy”? When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being different? Well, yes, “gay” is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer. Using “queer” is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t ha...

To say homophobia was “more common” in the eighties wildly underrates the degree to which it was ingrained. Unconcealed homophobia was still an acceptable topic for commercial entertainment. The 1988 family-oriented action film Crocodile Dundee II jokes that being gay is a valid reason for committing suicide. The Beastie Boys, a musical group who’d eventually become progressive icons of inclusion, wanted to title their 1986 debut album Don’t Be a Faggot. Eddie Murphy, whose stand-up routines mocked gays with obsessive regularity, was (by far) the most popular comedian of the eighties. All those retrograde sensibilities were about to transform at an astonishing pace: 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).

Another movie from this period, Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, was more nuanced and (perhaps) even more traumatizing. Two nondescript businessmen are temporarily assigned to a branch office in a nameless city (here again, the unspoken message is that these men could be any men, and that this story could happen in any place). One man, Chad, is good-looking, misanthropic, and dominant. He represents the worst possible version of masculinity. The second man, Howard, is submissive and weak. Both are angry at women. Chad convinces Howard that they should play a game on this business trip: They will select a vulnerable woman at random, pretend to romantically pursue her, and then obliterate her heart for sport. This is exactly what they proceed to do (and the woman they select is deaf, amplifying the psychological brutality). The final twist is that the trick is not just on the woman, but also on Howard. The insinuation is that the way men talk when women aren’t around is the only time men are actually honest.

“You Oughta Know” was sung from the perspective of a woman who’d been dumped by her partner and needed her ex to realize just how much pain the breakup had inflicted. The plot wasn’t original, but the details were rich and disarmingly explicit. One of Morissette’s rhetorical questions was whether the man’s new girlfriend was willing to perform oral sex inside a movie theater. The implication was not unclear—this question was being posed as a reminder of something Morissette herself had done when they were still a couple. It was too specific to be a metaphor. “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?” she asked in the next verse, and (of course) the word fuck was removed for the radio edit. But that edited fuck was not replaced by some other word—it was just a blank space near the end of the phrase, meaning anyone who heard the line didn’t need to hear the fuck to realize it was there. There was no other word that fit. Alanis was subliminally saying fuck on Top 40 radio every other hour for an entire summer.

Still, the central media obsession with “You Oughta Know” was antiquated: Who was the man she was talking about? The unnamed womanizer at the song’s center became the most compelling blind item since Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” It epitomized the long-standing complaint that a male artist’s experience is seen as universal while any female experience is inexorably viewed as personal—instead of becoming a song about breakups, it became a song about this specific breakup. Morissette was asked about this anonymous man constantly and always declined to say whom the story was about. When a gossipy consensus about the man’s identity was finally reached, the answer—Dave Coulier, an edgeless comedian from the family sitcom Full House—was unexpected and deflating.

Morissette and [Fiona] Apple[*] focused their anger on many of the same issues as Riot Grrrl; however, they were carefully constructed as non-threatening and their form of female empowerment was something to buy in CD format rather than something to actively produce. . . . Morissette is unusual only in that she is a woman expressing the same ideas. But how strong does that make her? Her discussion of sexuality in “You Oughta Know” suggests that a good girlfriend is one who will perform sexual acts for a man at any time, even in a movie theater. She offers no examples of a woman receiving sexual pleasure, which casts women back into the traditional sexually passive role. Also, if Morissette is truly a feminist rock heroine as the papers claim, is being unable to let go of a relationship a positive message for young girls? That analysis comes from sociologist Kristen Schilt’s paper “‘A Little Too Ironic’: The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians.” Some of its content now seems perilously close to academic satire.

But the effect on filmmaking was profound. Video stores invented a new kind of independent director that became so pervasive it instantly became a caricature: the fiscally insolvent, vociferously unglamorous dude (and it was always a dude) who used his video store experience to build an encyclopedic, unorthodox, pretentious cinematic worldview. The 1995 coming-of-age comedy Kicking and Screaming includes a minor character who manages a video store while preparing to direct his own feature film, yet plans to continue working in the video store after his movie is released so that he can properly stock it on the shelves. “The video store was the beginning of everything. It was the cradle of civilization,” director Kevin Smith says in the 2015 oral history I Lost It at the Video Store. “It was like having a film library. You could watch anything and you could watch it over and over again.” Smith was the insolvent, unglamorous indie director sent from central casting.

In the 1992 film Singles, the romantic lead (Campbell Scott) drunkenly calls the woman he loves (Kyra Sedgwick) from a pay phone in a rock club, only to have his rambling confession destroyed when the answering machine’s audiotape unravels. In just over a decade, both sides of that equation would be moot. Pay phones would vanish and analog answering machines would be replaced by digital voice mail. But the scene remains as a deft depiction of landline communication at the onset of the nineties: It seemed as good as it could possibly be, with flaws that didn’t seem unacceptable until they were already eradicated. If a phone call was critical, you simply had to stay home. It was the only way to control the experience and the only way to ensure that the message would be received. And why would anyone have expected otherwise? Cell phones were the size of a brick and cost $4,000. They were gratuitous, even for millionaires. A TV commercial for the Canadian beer Labatt Blue was plotted on the premise that anyone who brought a cell phone into a bar was automatically an asshole,[*] much in the same way Ben Stiller’s character from Reality Bites is introduced as self-absorbed by talking on a car phone in his very first scene. Zack Morris carried a cell phone to school on the adolescent sitcom Saved by the Bell, and that seemed no less ridiculous than his ability to freeze time. You had to be at home to talk on the phone. Home was where the phone was. Until (of course) it wasn’t. In...

It sometimes seems like 1995 was the year the future began. This is particularly true if the last book you happened to read was W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began.

But 1995 was still a period when the internet was mainly something to speculate about, as opposed to something to use. Only 14 percent of American adults had ever been online.

Late in 1993, The New York Times ran a small story about Mosaic, the pre-Netscape web browser now credited as a catalyst for what the internet would become. Within technology circles, Mosaic was immediately perceived as a game-changing software application. It added graphic elements to what had been a purely textual experience and increased the reach of where the web could go. But the article also noted its limitations: There remain, however, significant barriers to using Mosaic. It requires that the user have a computer that is directly connected to the global Internet. Many businesses and almost all universities now have such connections, but the majority of personal computer users currently connect to the Internet only indirectly through on-line information services like Delphi or America Online. Though it’s easy to understand this problem now, imagine how confusing it would seem to a nation where less than a quarter of its households possessed a home computer. It was perplexing even to early adopters of dial-up providers like AOL. If they weren’t already reaching the “global” internet, what level of internet were they reaching?

The optimism was fueled by a simplistic brand of ad hoc Marxism crossed with social libertarianism, though such political terminology was still verboten and rarely expressed: The internet would eradicate the institutional obstacles that could traditionally be overcome only with money or status. This process would democratize the culture as a whole. It would reset society by flattening the hierarchy. Within the digital sphere, that premise was already self-evident, at least socially: Becoming “internet famous” had no connection to fame in the conventional world (in 1993, Wired claimed “the best-known online personality in the country” was a sixty-four-year-old retired army colonel named Dave Hughes). It would now be possible, or so it was believed, to construct a competing version of reality that would be governed by the morally neutral meritocracy of an agenda-free network. Every online citizen would be exactly the same. Handing the reins of society over to the machines was not seen as a risk. The risks came from conventional society. Internet pioneers believed governments would try to invade the virtual sphere and legally impose the same constrictions the web had eliminated. That was the inside view. The outside view was that what internet insiders valued was the central danger. When Time magazine ran its first major article on the subject, a 1994 cover story ominously titled “The Strange New World of the Internet,” its inadvertent emphasis was on the potential chaos gene...

The internet is described as “transactions, relationships, and thought itself.” Its enemies are marginalized as “weary giants of flesh and steel.” Governments, argued Barlow, derive power from the consent of the governed, and the citizens of the internet never consented to anything of the sort. Here’s a section from the middle of the document: We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Reliance on machines, the Unabomber argues, limits human freedom by changing the very understanding of personhood. “Technology,” he writes, “is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.” 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. There is no separation, the Unabomber insists, between “good” and “bad” technology: It’s all part of the same symbiotic structure, asserting control over consumers who thoughtlessly seek to be controlled.

He resigned from Cal in 1969, eventually moving to an off-the-grid cabin in rural Montana. Living in solitude without electrical power or running water, he traveled by bicycle and raised his own food. 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. When finally captured in 1996, Kaczynski looked like a bearded wild man, the unwashed caricature of a brilliant, misanthropic ecoterrorist. His attorneys wanted to plead insanity, but Kaczynski refused—he knew classifying himself as mentally ill would invalidate the credibility of his manifesto, which is all that he cared about.

Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns was awarded the league MVP in 1993, and the award was seen as a defensible measure of the statistical season he’d just delivered—but even as Barkley accepted the trophy, no one seriously thought he was actually better than Jordan (and when the Suns lost to the Bulls in that June’s championship series, Jordan averaged 41 points a game).

There was a tenacious impression that baseball was somehow more important than other sports. It was taken more seriously, by people alleged to be serious. There was still a generational memory of 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak. The prologue of novelist Don DeLillo’s masterwork Underworld, published in 1997, opens at a Giants-Dodgers pennant playoff game from 1951. The peak of baseball had coincided with the peaking of white middle-class society, and baseball’s displacement by football was sometimes viewed as a symptom of national decline. “Football combines two of the worst features of American life,” wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” In 1994, PBS debuted the Ken Burns documentary miniseries Baseball, chronicling the history of the sport as a shadow history of the twentieth century. It did not seem coincidental that Burns’s previous nine-episode PBS series had examined the Civil War. Thinking about baseball as only a game was reductionist. It was (supposedly) bigger than that. It was a way to understand the American experience.

What the owners wanted, more than anything else, was a way to control player salaries. The problem was that they’d already proven untrustworthy in their recent attempts to do this. 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. The most infamous example was Andre Dawson, an all-star free agent who signed a $500,000 contract with the Chicago Cubs in order to get away from the Montreal Expos. Dawson wanted to leave the Expos because the hard artificial turf in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium was destroying his knees, and the Cubs played on natural grass. The annual $500K he accepted from Chicago was half as much as the Expos were willing to pay and perhaps a third of what he was actually worth, but no other team made an offer. Dawson took the pay cut and won the National League MVP award the following season.

In 1991, arbitrators ruled that Major League Baseball owed the players a combined $280 million for three separate collusion grievances. The secret strategy of collusion was dead. The new transparent strategy was a salary cap. The owners started pushing for a hard salary cap in 1992. They also wanted to decrease the players’ share of MLB revenue from 56 percent to 50 percent and end the practice of salary arbitration.[*] The players believed the threat of a strike was the only way to stop these changes from being forcibly implemented when the collective bargaining agreement expired on the last day of 1994. 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. White Sox owner Reinsdorf claimed he was even willing to miss all of the following season, if that’s what it took. He claimed a year without baseball would lose less money than the alternative. The league’s new commissioner, Bud Selig, officially killed the season on September 14. For the first time in ninety years, there was no World Series. That December, the owners implemented a salary cap. That cap was later revoked and replaced with a luxury tax.[*] In January of the following year, President Bill Clinton demanded that the owners and the union reo...

A football game in 1995 bore no resemblance to a football game from 1945. The greatest pro basketball player from the fifties, George Mikan, could not have made an NBA roster in the eighties. The physical and technical evolution of football and basketball had been so dramatic that the past wasn’t comparable with the present. That wasn’t true with baseball. Baseball had evolved less. The aesthetics and physiology were more similar than different, and it was not remotely unreasonable to suggest that the greatest player of all time was still an overweight alcoholic who’d retired in 1935. Part of what made baseball historically compelling was its ability to transcend time. The skills of hitting and pitching were static, frozen in amber. It was the rare game where statistics from the past were comparable with statistics from the present. And then Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs in one season. Brady Anderson was a center fielder who spent his best years with the Baltimore Orioles. He entered the league in 1988 as a scrappy, fleet-footed leadoff hitter; had he played in the fifties, they would have called him a “Punch and Judy.” During the first eight years of his career, he appeared in 945 games and hit a total of 72 home runs. His first great year was ’92, when he hit 21 home runs, stole 53 bases, and made the All-Star Game. But then, as a thirty-two-year-old in 1996, something distorted. Anderson became a power-hitting machine. Throughout all of the 1980s, not one player hit 5...

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. Anderson’s inconceivable ’96 season isn’t even among the most remembered details of the period, when batting numbers irrationally mushroomed and almost every top player was later questioned about drug use (Ken Griffey Jr., who hit 56 home runs two years in a row with the Seattle Mariners, is one of the era’s rare superstars above suspicion). This scandal proved even more damaging than the ’94 strike. The most depressing episode emerged from what was temporarily seen as the apogee of late-twentieth-century baseball: In 1998, the country was captivated by the most astounding home run race in the history of the sport. Mark McGwire, a stoic hulk with a compact swing, clubbed 70 home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals. He was chased (and sometimes passed) all summer by Sammy Sosa, a magnetic Chicago Cub hailing from the Dominican Republic. Sosa unexpectedly hit 66 home runs and boyishly hopped out of the batter’s box whenever he smashed a ball deep. The two adversaries appeared to genuinely like each other, amplifying the feel-good nature of the competition. Bob Ley, the most credible of ESPN broadcasters, argued that the last time sports had made Americans feel this good was when the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team defeated the Soviet Union. McGwire and Sosa had redeemed baseball. When it was later proven that both had used PEDs...

As leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Yeltsin had won big in Russia’s inaugural democratic election in ’91, but his nation was experiencing the quagmire of chaos one would expect from a geographically gigantic landmass rapidly converting from state-controlled communism to capitalistic sovereign democracy. The Russian parliament tried to impeach Yeltsin in ’93, but Yeltsin deployed the military to remain in control. Some half-jokingly claimed Yeltsin’s approval rating was lower than that of Stalin, a tyrannical dictator who’d been dead for forty years. It appeared Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, would win the ’96 election, perhaps easily. From the U.S. perspective, any halfhearted return to communism was a step backward. Yeltsin (who’d sunk to the bottom of preelection polls) was the opposite of perfect, but he was the best option available and Clinton liked him personally.[*] Clinton helped him get a $10.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. But the more intriguing (and less verifiable) aspect to Yeltsin’s comeback was the work of three American consultants secretly living in Moscow’s President Hotel and “Americanizing” the Yeltsin campaign strategy. 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 thirt...

Nonetheless, the first Biosphere mission was completed in ’93—not exactly as planned, but not without some measure of mild success. The public understanding, however, was that the mission had failed. The day-to-day problems encountered by the crew received far more attention than any of their subtle achievements. This escalated when the second Biosphere mission was launched in March of 1994, and a new person was hired to manage Space Biospheres Ventures: Steve Bannon.

It concluded with the March 1997 mass suicide of thirty-nine Heaven’s Gate members (the suicidal cultists wore Nikes, put exactly $5.75 in their pockets, willfully swallowed applesauce mixed with barbiturates, placed plastic bags over their heads, and waited for the starship to arrive).

“It’s unbelievable,’’ Princeton molecular biology professor Lee Silver told The New York Times. ‘‘It basically means that there are no limits. It means all of science fiction is true.” What had happened was this: The previous July, a team of UK genetic researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh had cloned an adult female sheep. It had taken 277 tries, but a fifty-two-year-old embryologist named Ian Wilmut had successfully combined the DNA from the cell of one sheep with the unfertilized ovarian egg cell of another sheep. The ovarian cell had been stripped of its nucleus, making it a vessel for duplication. The original cell had come from a female sheep’s mammary gland, which is why the eventual offspring was named “Dolly” (in tribute to buxom country singer Parton).

In 2000, the British rock band Radiohead released an album titled Kid A. Anticipation for the record was unusually fervent. The band’s previous album (1997’s OK Computer) had been acclaimed as a minor masterpiece, and Radiohead was widely considered the most commercially popular band still making artistically important music. Kid A was shrouded in pre-release secrecy. No advance copies were available to critics.[*] When it finally came out in October, the reception was complicated: The music was a departure from the group’s previous work, sonically closer to electronica or post-rock. It was less melodic and lyrically esoteric. Kid A became the number 1 album in both the U.S. and the UK, but the standard modifier to describe it was “difficult.” It had been a while since a rock album was given such serious contemplation, and part of that analysis focused on the meaning of the title. The trendy theory, spurred by a minor mention in the British music publication New Musical Express, asserted that “Kid A” was a reference to the first cloned baby, which Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke believed to already exist. Such a connection made sense to the group’s fan base. Radiohead (and Yorke in particular) had built a nonmusical ethos around alienation, social anxiety, and the escalating oppression from an expanding corporate dystopia. Obsessing over the menace of genetic engineering felt like a predictably Yorkean move. But like so many other things related to clones and cloning, this w...

Is Kid A really about cloning humans? That was entirely my fault [laughs]. Early on, Stanley Donwood, who does our artwork, and I started doing this thing, Test Specimen, a cartoon about giving birth to a monster, the Frankenstein thing . . . The idea was loosely based on stuff we were reading about genetically modified food. We got obsessed with the idea of mutation entering the DNA of the human species. One episode was about these teddy bears that mutate and start eating children. . . . It was this running joke, which wasn’t really funny. But in our usual way, it addressed a lot of our paranoia and anxieties. “Kid A” was just a name flying around—it was a name of one of the sequencers. 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.

So here’s something interesting about the times happening right now, since “right now” is the only place we can ever be: 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.” Polls taken throughout the presidential tenures of Donald Trump and Joe Biden persistently show that people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine view socialism more positively than capitalism, especially if they’re Democrats (the once-promising 2020 presidential campaign of Elizabeth Warren was derailed by her unwillingness to identify as a socialist, torpedoing her vocal support among the so-called extremely online). Capitalism is connected to every extension of American life, so it can be cited as the source for almost any social ill: wealth disparity, the legacy of slavery, housing shortages, monopsony, clinical depression, the tyranny of choice, superhero movie franchises. Its alleged insidiousness is ubiquitous, and that places the present moment at odds with the 1990s. 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. That shift prompts a loaded question—what’s the core ideological difference between those two generational complaints?

A hatred of commercialism is unconsciously optimistic. It operates from the (possibly naive) premise that—in and of themselves—things have merit, regardless of what those things are. Social sickness only emerges from how those things are presented: Art is intrinsically good, but attempts to make it palatable to those who don’t understand art make it bad. It’s cool to wear flannel, but not if someone is convinced to wear flannel as a way to be cool. Christmas is wonderful, but hearing “Jingle Bells” in a mall two weeks before Thanksgiving is perverse. 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. Anything produced through capitalism is a tool of capitalism, so the things people most desire become the obstacles upholding capitalism most effectively.

If one is trying to understand the idealistic difference between people who lived through the nineties and people born into the nineties, this is a good place to start. It was certainly possible to be against capitalism in the nineties, but much harder to have your opinion taken seriously (particularly since all the noncapitalist societies seemed to be collapsing or surrendering). It’s still possible to take a modern stand against commercialism, but that argument runs counter to the creative aspiration of almost everything produced (the idea of a commercial product becoming “more commercial” is not a compromise but the self-evident goal). Part of this is fashion. The twenty-three-year-old activated personality railing against commercialism in 1993 might be emotionally identical to the twenty-three-year-old activated personality railing against capitalism in 2023. But even if that’s true, the transitory worldviews they adopt get hammered into the transitory structures of society and interpreted by people who have no investment in the underlying conflict. In the same way that every historical era feels extraordinary within the moment it happens, the present-tense status of culture exists in a constant state of crisis, with the tenor of the crisis shaped by whatever people assume to be the cause.

“Achy Breaky Heart” became the first country single in almost ten years to sell a million copies. It hit not only number 1 on the country charts but number 4 on the Billboard pop charts, higher than the zenith of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It reintroduced the phenomenon of line dancing, where people in bars would align in parallel rows on the dance floor and simultaneously mimic the same steps. The song itself was a chemical compound of sonic guile: It was musically and lyrically repetitive, with every chord change and verse laser-focused on catchiness and immediacy.

Rock, despite its supremacy, was ideologically moving away from itself. The idea of chasing fame and trying to look sexy was suddenly embarrassing. Grunge musicians openly disdained the posturing of

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: He wore his hair in a mullet, often performed in sleeveless shirts, and appeared to be more influenced by polished eighties power rock than the roots of country music. There was a level of calculated redness to his neck: It was erroneously publicized that he’d tried to cash a $1.6 million royalty check at his local bank’s drive-through window. When he spoke, he talked like a rural Southerner: His Kentucky drawl defined him as country, and his vocal delivery was genre specific. But the packaging of “Achy Breaky Heart” translated to people who normally associated themselves as non-country fans. “It’s just a song that everybody can rock to,” Cyrus would say.

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. He released twelve albums during the nineties, and eight would eventually sell more than 10 million copies.

Citing his belief in “the Wal-Mart school of business,” Brooks would slash the retail price of his late-nineties albums in order to generate mind-numbing opening-week sales. His emphasis was always on volume. When Brooks toured the world for 220 concerts in the middle of the decade, he capped the price of every ticket at $20. Though he almost certainly lost some short-term revenue by doing this, it guaranteed that every show was a 100 percent capacity sellout. The traditionally regional draw of country music was disconnected from his popularity: When he put on a free show in Manhattan’s Central Park, 980,000 people showed up.

Throughout the nineties, the only year Brooks did not release an album was 1996. He was a workaholic who never allowed a glimmer of opportunity for another artist[*] to usurp his dominion. 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. Brooks was immune to the prevailing attitudes of the era; he did not view total commitment to the consumer as a compromise of his artistic credibility. Garth operated in a separate silo, disassociated from all other conceptual abstractions and cultural intersections. He appeared to have no interest in the signifiers of credibility, which made him difficult to criticize in any damaging way.

Almost everything about how television was perceived in the early nineties can be encapsulated within one three-second clip from the fourth season of Seinfeld. The premise of the two-part episode, titled “The Pitch,” is built around its two main characters, Jerry and George, pitching a sitcom to NBC based on the banality of their day-to-day lives. The brilliance of the concept was the depth of its meta-commentary: Seinfeld was an NBC sitcom based on the day-to-day banality of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who were now concocting a story line where the fictional versions of themselves were trying to concoct a fictional version of their already fictional life. This level of self-awareness was virtually nonexistent in the television topography of the time. It was legitimately innovative. But the episode’s make-or-break moment comes from an exchange between George (whose character was based on David) and Russell Dalrymple, the fictional NBC president (based on the real-life NBC executive Warren Littlefield). George is explaining the potential show to NBC and adamantly insisting the program will be “about nothing.” There will be no stories and no conflicts. At one point, he suggests the show may feature characters silently reading. The point, according to George, is that this will be a TV show where nothing happens, ever. “Well, why am I watching it?” asks Dalrymple. “Because it’s on TV,” replies George.

In 1997, the alt-rock band Harvey Danger had a minor hit with the song “Flagpole Sitta.” One of the lines from the song was, “And I don’t even own a TV,” which was a phrase a certain kind of person used to say a lot during this era. It was a sign of pretension, but also code for brainpower and maturity—a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time. Though accepted as true by virtually every knee-jerk intellectual of the time, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why 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?

Cameron’s artistic commitment to water cannot be overstated. In order to get footage of the actual Titanic shipwreck, he and a film crew dove 12,500 feet to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean—and not just once, but twelve times.

The mania surrounding DiCaprio in the wake of Titanic was astronomical, bordering on unsettling. His unprecedented ascendance was the product of two divergent phenomena: He was the last actor to achieve superstardom as a vestige of the monolithic Hollywood system and the first actor to become a megastar within the emerging paradigm of postmodern celebrity. He will always be the only person to have both of those experiences at the same time.

But the response from audiences was so overwhelming that part of covering Titanic inevitably became an exercise in trying to explain why people were so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio. Article after article emphasized how teenage girls were seeing the movie multiple times, a box office phenomenon previously associated with adolescent boys. DiCaprio was twenty-three, but he looked younger and acted older. There was also this idea—impossible to prove or disprove—that the perception of the character DiCaprio played and the perception of the person he actually was had morphed into a singular entity, and that the consumption of Titanic was simply the means for consuming its main actor. Instead of buying a ticket to Titanic and seeing DiCaprio, it was as if kids were buying a ticket to DiCaprio, who happened to be inside a movie called Titanic. He was bigger than the biggest movie of all time. And what’s noteworthy about this was not that it happened, but what DiCaprio did to sustain and expand this hyperbolic level of popularity: almost nothing. DiCaprio was not a recluse. He participated in all the perfunctory functions expected of someone promoting a movie, he showed up at the various award shows, and he led an active social life.[*] But he did very little in terms of self-marketing. He rarely gave interviews and appeared in only five movies in the six years following Titanic (one of which was a small role in Woody Allen’s Celebrity).

In a 1998 story headlined “Loving Leo,” The Boston Globe described a new metric for measuring popularity: Meanwhile, on the teen message boards of America Online, there are more than 30,000 postings from young subscribers pertaining to DiCaprio. The next highest number for any star, teenage actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, is 15. That second statistic is obviously (and absurdly) incorrect. It’s mostly evidence of how new and confusing the internet still was in 1998, when a mistake so egregious could go unnoticed by a major metro newspaper and all the smaller papers that reprinted it in syndication (the story hit the AP wire and ran uncorrected all over the country). It’s entirely possible the newspaper copy editors proofreading the article had never heard of AOL chat rooms and had little idea what “postings” even referred

Unlike most teen icons, DiCaprio’s leverage as a cinematic powerbroker decreased only negligibly over the next twenty years. He appeared in fewer movies than most of his peers, but any appearance by DiCaprio automatically qualified a picture as substantial. Titanic made him the kind of perpetual movie star that was supposedly a remnant of a different age—the untouchable, unknowable playboy who can only be understood through the scant movie roles he elects to accept. His career is both a contradiction of what is assumed about modern stardom and a living example of how many of those assumptions are created by a media complex that willfully misunderstands what consumers actually want. Which, in all probability, is the easiest way to comprehend why Titanic was the most successful movie of the century. What now seems most “interesting” about nineties

Before screenings of Meet Joe Black, movie houses across the country debuted the 131-second trailer for The Phantom Menace, the first prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, slated for the summer of 1999. 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.

It’s unknown how many ticket buyers actually did this, or whether all the articles claiming the practice was widespread were exaggerations (in ’98, any trend story in The New York Times was challenging for readers to contradict, so it was automatically assumed to be accurate).

In Hollywood, 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. The fervor surrounding The Phantom Menace was an amalgamation of several obvious factors: Here was a canonical extension of the late twentieth century’s most popular entity, written and directed by the same man (George Lucas) who’d come up with the original idea, delivered to a willfully unhinged fan base that had waited fifteen years for a movie they’d long assumed would never happen. The fact that it eventually earned over $1 billion is an afterthought that barely warrants mention (anything less would qualify as fiscally disappointing). What matters more is what The Phantom Menace has come to represent: the saddest repudiation—and the harshest confirmation—of the entire Generation X ethos.

The Matrix was a sci-fi action film about a computer-simulated world constructed during a war between humans and self-aware computers. The movie is a series of interlocking contradictions that should not equate to the blockbuster it became. 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). The metaphoric meaning of this decision has been projected back upon the Wachowski siblings, prompting Lilly to eventually admit that this was, in fact, the original thematic intention (there was even a transgender character in the original script, but the story arc was killed by the studio during preproduction).

On the morning of April 19, 1995, a wiry, inconspicuous twenty-six-year-old man drove a rented Ryder van into downtown Oklahoma City. The van contained 5,000 pounds of explosive material. He parked the vehicle near the entrance of the nine-story federal building, ignited a two-minute fuse, and walked away. The explosion would obliterate the government building’s front façade and cause half of the mid-rise structure to instantly collapse. It killed 168 people (including 19 children, most of whom were in the facility’s day care center). It occurred without any warning, in a city assumed to have no political significance (a detail that amplified the universality of the fear). The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was an American citizen and a decorated military veteran. He’d served in the Gulf War and hated the government. His actions might have been easier to comprehend had he been visibly psychotic, but he was not: Up until his execution in 2001, he spoke of his attack with cogent, clinical language, sometimes writing essays that compared his act of domestic terrorism to memorable military assaults by sovereign nations. He expressed no remorse, once telling a journalist that his coming execution only meant the final score was “168 to 1.” He remained calm and composed while awaiting lethal injection, eating two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream as a final meal. The profile

brought greater attention to the propaganda that influenced McVeigh, like the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, as well as making McVeigh a folk hero to anti-American theorists for decades to come. The bombing could not have played out any worse than it did.