How Much Do the 1990s Matter?

I t takes 20 years or so for an era’s uniqueness to become visible, so despite recent distractions, now is the time to ask: What was special about the 1990s, and what remains of them?

It wasn’t that long ago, and yet when you cast your mind back to that time, as Chuck Klosterman does in The Nineties, life really was appreciably different. Klosterman on what the telephone used to mean:

There are no statistics illustrating how rare it was for someone to ignore a ringing telephone in 1990. This is because such a question would never have been asked (or even pondered). To do so was unthinkable.

Before everyone had answering machines, Klosterman notes, you had to answer the phone, whose ring was typically set at 80 decibels, just to shut it up. But you also needed to find out why you were being called.

Every ringing phone was, potentially, a life-altering event. It might be a telemarketer, but it also might be a death in the family. It could be your next-door neighbor, but it could also be the governor, and there was only one way to find out. It was a remarkably democratic device.

Klosterman applies his typically mordant and wry humor to a period that came to be delineated by clear and sharp borders: A new era began when the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989, and came to a sudden close on September 11, 2001. Today, the Nineties look a bit like a short-lived respite from concern, a holiday. Before it, communism was a looming menace; after it, Islamism. Not caring about politics was a perfectly rational, and widespread, stance.

Those of us who (like Klosterman and me) came of age in the 1990s, or just before it, are the last generation who remember pre-Internet existence. We’re a liminal tribe, the only one equally comfortable on either side of the digital barrier. Gen X are also the last ones to remember life before safetyism — when we were young, smoking was allowed almost everywhere including in hospitals, on airplanes, and in theaters; I don’t remember a single kid ever wearing a bike helmet; and hardly anyone used a seat belt before the 1980s. These characteristics stamped us.

But trying to cobble together a theoretical framework that connects unrelated events (Michael Jordan’s brief retirement from basketball, the fall of George H. W. Bush, the rise of cellphones) is a fool’s errand, and Klosterman is at his worst when he uncharacteristically strays into abstruse and jargony theories about what was in the cultural air rather than sticking with his trademark color commentary on pop-culture tectonics. His analysis is frequently off-base, and as is true with many cultural writers, he seems to take leave of his senses when he strays into political thought. (He asserts in passing that the U.S. is “a failed state,” providing no evidence or argument whatsoever, and the flippancy suggests to me that in his circle, saying something completely absurd raises no eyebrows as long as it sounds suitably left-wing.)

At his best, though, Klosterman simply retells legends of the weird and the forgotten from our shared spring break from history: the hilariously inept New Age eco-fantasy Biosphere 2, the brief mania for clear beverages, the way the U.S. meddled heavily in the 1996 Russian election to drag Boris Yeltsin to victory. Here is Klosterman on how the Internet worked in its infancy (in 1995, only 14 percent of Americans had ever used it, a process then so lacking in direction it was called “surfing”): “Imagine a library of physical books that didn’t have any shelves — instead, it just stored the books in various piles. . . . [Search engine] AltaVista was like a reference librarian who’d dreamily point at a pile of books and say, ‘I know there is some stuff over there about bears.’” And isn’t it strange that we’ve all forgotten that, as late as 1990, you could get arrested for selling an obscene album to an undercover cop (the album was As Nasty As They Wanna Be, by 2 Live Crew) given that “this obscenity was (more or less) the whole artistic idea”?

Facts were, in most situations, impossible to pin down, and people were okay with that. It was the end of the age of epistemological uncertainty, “a period when the obsession with popular culture exponentially increased without the aid of a mechanism that remembered anything automatically.” At the same time, the generational statement “Oh well, whatever, nevermind,” from Nirvana’s surprise 1991 hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” was being widely applied. Being cool was everything, and caring too much about anything was uncool.

Klosterman reflects at length about the related concept of “selling out,” which is today difficult to explain, yet it was a ruling ethos in the 1990s, at least among the kinds of young people that he hung around with. A signal movie of the era, 1994’s Reality Bites, is a disquisition on the concept; alternative-documentary filmmaker Winona Ryder is torn between bustling young media executive Ben Stiller, who is hardworking, destined to be rich, and kind, albeit shallow; and smelly underground musician Ethan Hawke, who is an arrogant jerk but is also “authentic” and not a sellout. She chooses Hawke. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were the exemplars of never selling out. It became exhausting. “Famous is the last thing I wanted to be,” Cobain once said. “What was innovative about Nirvana was how central this perspective was to their iconography,” Klosterman holds. “It was, ultimately, more important than the music they made. . . . Cobain was obsessed with telling people that the illusion was stupid, and he was stupid for allowing it to happen.”

Yet the alternative or indie sensibility that inspired so much discourse rarely won the culture. As Klosterman points out, Shania Twain sold 14 albums for every one sold by Courtney Love. And what to make of Friends, in which everyone wore clean clothes, behaved relatively well, and steered clear of angst and drugs? It was anodyne, but it was aspirational. Klosterman dismisses it because “it tended to reside in a generic universe that did not interact with the cultural moment,” but it met its viewers where they were — at coffee bars, headed for marriage and upper-middle-class jobs, not wallowing in a grunge demimonde and rejecting everything that seemed “corporate” or “commercial.”

In a similar tone, Klosterman attacks Titanic — received as genuinely heartbreaking by its audience, especially young women and teen girls — as inauthentic because supposedly “the deepest moments of emotion could have been sequenced by a computer.” The movie proved that moviegoers’ tastes and yearnings hadn’t changed much since Gone with the Wind landed with a similar impact 60 years earlier. Irony and knee-jerk dismissiveness can be heavy burdens to carry around, as Cobain discovered.

Yet Klosterman often comes up with a way to invert cliché that’s amazingly perspicacious. Here he is on why generations are bound to hate one another:

Younger generations despise older generations for creating a world they must inhabit unwillingly, an impossible accusation to rebuff. Older generations . . . perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But . . . 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.

Counterintuitive, yet absolutely true. Klosterman has written better books, but The Nineties has plenty of intriguing approaches to making sense of a decade that’s in danger of fading prematurely from our collective memory.