The decade culture war forgot

Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties is, appropriately enough, a book about ambivalence. Not apathy, the trait most commonly and incorrectly applied to the 49-year-old author’s generational cohort, true ambivalence: When Norman Blake of the grunge-era Scottish cult group Teenage Fanclub crooned “I’ll never know which way to flow, set a course that I don’t know” on one of the band’s iconic early singles, for all of the generationally existential angst implied, he could have been dithering over subjects from Winona Ryder’s choice of cinematic paramour to the difference between Tab and Crystal Pepsi to Bush v. Gore.

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The Nineties: A Book; By Chuck Klosterman; Penguin Random House; 384 pp., $28.00


Klosterman addresses each of these subjects in the course of the book’s 300-some pages, with the goal of convincing incredulous readers that they could possibly have once been weighed with similar gravity. Rather than a traditional, Halberstamian project of historical boundary-setting, The Nineties is a sort of temporal act of conjuring. With an avalanche of hypergranular cultural context and his trademark, drier-than-dry rhetorical assault, he attempts to restore the texture of daily life during the comfortable interregnum between the Cold War and the War on Terror — and by way of doing so, answer the question presumed to be screamingly obvious to anyone who didn’t actually live through the era: How could you all have not seen the rest of this coming?

Klosterman, a bestselling pop culture essayist and novelist and the co-founder of the departed-yet-influential website Grantland, wields a combination of cultural eclecticism, firsthand authority, and matter-of-factness that enables him to answer that question without the embarrassing abashment of many of his generational peers. “I am comfortable with my service as a demographic cliche,” he writes in an early footnote, deftly acknowledging his biases — and pre-dispensing with the inevitable, question-begging criticism of his worthiness to undertake such a project. “It’s one of the few things in my life I got right.” The media construction that is “Generation X” is not, in fact, identical to the experiences and preferences of the median person born between 1965 and 1976. Still, those media constructions shape our reality, and an exploration of the mechanisms by the extent to which that occurs is The Nineties’s great innovation.

Like much of Klosterman’s earlier work, the book is presented as a collection of discrete but thematically related essays, covering topics from Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign to the cloning of Dolly the sheep to Mike Tyson’s mutilating the ear of a heavyweight rival. Unlike most of his prior collections, a clear thesis connects each of them. That is: From roughly 1991 to 2001, a historically anomalous condition occurred in which it was acceptable, even expected, to experience these phenomena while still conceiving of one’s self as, well, one’s self, operating autonomously from society, politics, and any larger moral imperative.

And furthermore, Klosterman argues that to defy this autonomy was to exist somewhere on the spectrum from embarrassing and gauche (Ralph Nader supporters, the “Soy Bomb” Grammy protester) to violently anti-social (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber). It’s a construction of one’s relationship with society that is almost totally inscrutable today. And that tension is equally present whether Klosterman is recounting events as grave as the Columbine shootings or as trivial as NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup — maybe even more so in the case of the latter, given the profound political weight with which modern critics and tastemakers have imbued pop culture.

But the book is called The Nineties, not The Difference Between The Nineties and the Twenty-tens and Twenties. Klosterman’s full powers are brought to bear in his descriptions of 1990s phenomena drawn largely from the worlds of entertainment, tech, and politics, his wit and deep well of knowledge augmented by a newly research-driven sobriety brought to bear for the project’s scope — and which sacrifices neither. From a legion of throwaway streaming documentaries to the digital media’s mania for politically driven revisionist history, the past decade hasn’t lacked for attempts to parse the decade. But few of them have demonstrated, as Klosterman does, the extent to which the public’s changing relationship with media, namely television, shaped its perception of Nirvana or James Cameron or Anita Hill. In doing so, he doesn’t need to comment explicitly on their modern-day counterparts — the comparison is obvious, and usually unflattering.

In keeping with Klosterman’s culturally omnivorous body of work, each arena he covers gets a neat little dichotomous exploration: Pulp Fiction and Titanic, superficially at odds with each other, are still both examples of the extent to which during the 1990s a movie could just exist in the world of movies, with no real-life societal referent to justify its appreciation. Perot, the most un-Gen X man imaginable, capitalized on the very Gen X belief that the two mainstream political parties are no different from each other, the very same view that led to Nader’s unexpected and catastrophic success. The first successful cloning of a sheep, a modern miracle, inspired the same moronic, tribal paranoia that led McVeigh to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Everything was changing, but it was all part of the same story.

The crucial difference of life in the 1990s being, as the book goes to painstaking lengths to illustrate, that opting out of that story was still…an option. An early, crucial passage explains exactly what it meant in the 1990s to be a “sellout,” a term that carries only the faintest echo of meaning, or injury, today. Klosterman draws a contrast between contemporary malcontents who ascribe society’s ills to “capitalism” and their counterparts of the 1990s who ascribed such things to “commercialism” — the latter being the conscious effort to present one’s self in such a way that would appeal to as many theoretical consumers as possible. For the generation that followed Klosterman’s, such debasement is viewed as necessary to survive a rigged system. For his, the ambivalence at one’s survival outside it was the point — the refusal itself a badge of ascetic honor.

In the book’s final chapter, Klosterman provocatively suggests that the 9/11 attacks, traditionally recognized as the end of “the 90s” in our cultural imagination, should share space with another landmark in American history — the resolution of Bush v. Gore, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 along partisan lines to stop the recount in Florida’s presidential election and therefore certify George W. Bush as the election’s winner.

“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,” he writes. “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. My undefined, uncommitted Gen X worldview was instantaneously worthless. That was over. Now there were only two sides to everything.”

There are two immediately intuitive responses to this passage, depending on your intellectual and ideological perspective: “Wow, that’s very sad,” and “Welcome to the party, pal. You’re late.” The Nineties is perhaps most useful in how it illuminates the extent to which the events and innovations of its titular decade almost universally ended up pushing people into the latter category. The ambivalence toward circumstances outside one’s immediate life, or community, that Klosterman describes as a feature of the generation was the product of unprecedented prosperity and global stability.

But it was also born of a media environment that both producer and consumer understood more honestly: One could be a “sellout” because there was an agreed-upon establishment to which one could “sell out” in the first place. The media narrative was real, insomuch as it was the only one that existed. All but the most naive knew that to some extent it was “fake.” People simply decided to accept or reject it accordingly, continuing to live their lives absent the maniacal obsession with political intent that grips us today.

In that light, The Nineties is easily Klosterman’s most political book, both by virtue of its subject matter and its historiographical function. Yes, it’s jampacked with analysis of the grunge movement, the O.J. Simpson trial, and “Achy Breaky Heart” that recalls his earlier, lighter works. But all cultural detritus aside, as important as that may be, the book poses an existential question that the reader, depending on his or her level of curiosity, might find difficult to shake: When, if ever, is it acceptable to posit that life is just fine, or at least not catastrophic, the way it is? And why does that seem so impossible now?

Klosterman understands the assignment, as his generational successors would say, and doesn’t proffer a definitive answer. And neither does he present the titular decade as without its flaws and tragedies. But the book is less an attempt to characterize, celebrate, or condemn the events that occurred during a particular time than to capture the manner in which we processed them together. Despite Klosterman’s trademark Terminator-like, anti-sentimental authorial voice, it’s difficult to come away from the book without a sense of loss regarding that experience, if not longing. But by the time one puts the book, or this review, for that matter, down, there won’t be time for such things. The rest of the world is calling, and it’s been decades since it has seemed possible to ignore.

Derek Robertson is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine. Find him at Afternoondelete.com.

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