The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The most unhinged explanation for this phenomenon involves quantum mechanics and the possibility of alternative realities; the most rational explanation is that most of these memories were generated by people of the early nineties, a period when the obsession with popular culture exponentially increased without the aid of a mechanism that remembered everything automatically.

Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.

Since the intent mattered more than the result, the success of the attempt was almost irrelevant—selling out and failing was no better or worse than selling out and succeeding.

Leyner wanted you to believe he was indestructible. There was no one else like them, except for everybody.

Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik and The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest.

We tend to assume that seeing an event “live” deepens its imprint on the mind. It should, in theory, make the experience more intense, and the associated emotions should be more ingrained. But the prolonged liveness of the Gulf War produced the opposite effect. Like a CGI action movie with no character development, the plot vaporized as it combusted.

As of the publication of this book, there are still many humans alive who voted for H. Ross Perot in 1992. But asking someone to explain the motives for a decision made three decades ago is asking for a misinterpretation on purpose. People change, and they tend to view past actions through the prism of their current self. Memories are replaced by projections.

The material difference between being gay in the summer of 1989 and being queer in the summer of 1990 was negligible. But the language was different, so static concepts became dynamic concepts. What seemed to happen was what so often happens with radical activism: Outrage from the periphery moved the needle beyond the comfort zone of Middle America, prompting pushback. But when the needle drifted back, its home position had shifted.

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.

Exile in Guyville was presented as a track-for-track response to the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album Exile on Main St. That sonic relationship did not always cohere, but the intent was enough to confirm her integrity.

In 1992, people referred to this kind of thing as “postmodern,” partially because 1992 was the golden age of classifying anything as possibly postmodern.

The answer is that the invention of the wheel was not the key to wheeling things around. The key was the invention of the axle.

In 1995, being pushed toward a pile of books that might be about grizzlies was a real breakthrough. But consider whom this would interest, and how that would shape the kind of person who cared most about the internet. An unorganized public library wouldn’t be as practical (or as popular) as a library with alphabetized shelves and the Dewey decimal system. But an unorganized library would still attract the type of exploratory patron who didn’t mind a haphazard afternoon of paging through dozens of books that might only have a peripheral connection to their area of interest.

the sensation that the mediated version of an event will overwrite one’s own personal memory of the same experience, forcing the individual to reinterpret the way that memory sits within their own mind. The internet abbreviated this equation by eliminating the need for a mind.

In The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” the man replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” For almost a century, this insight has been referenced so often that it has become its own kind of cliché, in part because it applies to almost everything. Ernest Hemingway’s description of change is the way most things change.

Coors Brewing Company announced the invention of Zima in 1992, describing it as a “malt-based spritzer.” The word Zima, displayed on the packaging in a futuristic font, translated as “winter” in Russian.

Crystal Pepsi was presented as a visual product. It looked like 7Up, so that’s what people anticipated it would taste like. Yet despite its clarity, it tasted like regular cola, and the human mind does not respond positively to familiar products that contradict expectations.

“We would launch a Tab Clear product and position it right next to Crystal Pepsi, and we’d kill both in the process,” Coca-Cola marketing strategist Sergio Zyman explained in the 2011 book Killing Giants. “It was a suicidal mission from day one.

What society classifies as “credible” is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.

There was a sense, coming out of the 1980s, that the difference between something that grew colossal and something that stayed local was a reflection of how commercial that thing allowed itself to become. Looking back, there’s now a sense that the elevation of specific entities was the predictable result of a market controlled by the mundane appetites of whoever had the most disposable income.

Friends directly addressed the insecure ideologies of the nineties without acknowledging that the nineties had a meaning, or even that “the nineties” were a thing that was happening. It was casual modernity.

The movie was not good. That, however, was not the problem. The problem was that The Phantom Menace forced people to realize they’d been betrayed by the falseness of their own constructed memories.

Conspiracy theories arise from gradations of information, delivered indecisively.

McVeigh watched the buildings in Waco burn, live on his television, operating from the position that the people inside were innocent. It perpetuated his belief that the loss of innocent lives was acceptable collateral damage in a war he was fighting alone, inside his own mind. It was possible for him to believe this, because it had become possible for anyone to believe anything.

Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

back to the dawn of public education in the New World. But Columbine High represents the baseline for a different level of school shooting—the full incarnation of a nightmare that had previously seemed like a theoretical possibility too extreme to actually occur. It’s also a mega-depressing example of manufactured meta-history, where the slaughter of thirteen people was obscured by the need to impose a cogent narrative upon a scenario that had no cogent explanation.

When something as terrible as Columbine occurs, there’s a wish to have it explain something crucial about how the world is. Learning the truth is supposed to help.

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.

CERTAIN events are impossible to understand the first time they are explained. Sometimes this is because the information is too complex to comprehend. But just as often, they’re impossible to understand because the information, despite being basic and unambiguous, does not cohere into a circumstance that’s rational enough to accept.

But then, in February of ’90, an unfocused Tyson traveled to Japan and lost a title defense to James “Buster” Douglas,

Moving forward, all differences would be ideological. And this was partially because the two men at the center of the 2000 dispute had seemed similar in a lot of uninteresting ways. A new antagonism had to be manufactured.