The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

It took some time for Boomers to reach their “uncomfortable analysis” phase. This stands in contrast to Generation X, who entered that phase immediately and never left.

The video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

Explaining the qualities of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a little like trying to explain the taste of Coca-Cola: A description of the components cannot reflect the experience.

“If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet,” wrote Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence, “we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After.”

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found. You had to trust people, and they had to trust you. If you made plans over the phone and left the house, those plans could not be changed—everyone had to be where they said they’d be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they’d arrive. Life was more scripted and less fluid, dictated by a machine that would not (and could not) compromise its location. Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less.

The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened. But it’s actually just easier than trying to understand how things felt when they originally occurred.

There will be a time, in the not-too-distant future, when almost no one will remember that Robert Redford was the biggest box office star of 1975, or that 1975 saw the release of Born to Run. But there will always be a rough awareness that Gerald Ford was president in 1975, even though he was never elected and achieved almost nothing.

In the same way twenty-first-century adults would grow comfortable with classifying their own personalities as “brands,” late-twentieth-century adults nonchalantly accepted the possibility that their principal social function was to serve as consumers.