The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

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.

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.

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.

You can’t be sexist or racist or classist if the only enemy is someone’s date of birth. Younger generations despise older generations for creating a world they must inhabit unwillingly, an impossible accusation to rebuff.

Older generations despise new generations for multiple reasons, although most are assorted iterations of two: They perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. 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.

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 have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world . . . it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and use against him.

What is the purpose of art if not to connect with the deepest part of other people, and isn’t the whole notion of classifying something as “so bad that it’s good” just a way of avoiding the beautiful incongruity of thoughts and feelings?

But trying to be sincere on purpose is like trying to be spontaneous on command—it ends up having the opposite effect. If the goal was to kill irony, the old version of sincerity wouldn’t work. So we had to invent a new one, again and again and again.

Television in this period was still dictated by the constraints of time and the boundaries of available space. Its main utility was just being around. There was an accepted passivity to its consumption. The most critical factor within the introduction of any TV pilot was whatever show immediately preceded it, based on the principle that people would be too lazy to change the channel. An extremely popular show like Seinfeld, airing on the same night as the equally popular Friends, was used in this capacity constantly.