The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman Narrated by Chuck Klosterman, Dion Graham

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Remember the 90s? Think you have that decade sized up neatly in your rearview mirror? After all, the 90s weren’t that long ago, or that consequential, right? Think again! Blending cultural observation and historical clue gathering, Chuck Klosterman, with his inimitable talent for relishing the hidden and reconciling the incongruous, teases out the zeitgeist of a deceptive era, one surprise connection after another.

An instant New York Times bestseller!

“Informative, endlessly entertaining.”-BuzzFeed

“Generation X's definitive chronicler of culture.”-GQ

From the author of But What If We're Wrong comes an insightful, funny reckoning with a pivotal decade

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the*Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. Landlines fell to cell phones, the internet exploded, and pop culture accelerated without the aid of technology that remembered everything. It*was the last era with a real mainstream to either identify with or oppose. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition, and a shift in consciousness, that we're still struggling to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

In*The Nineties, Klosterman dissects the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the pre-9/11 politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan, and (almost) everything else. The result is a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as*Klostermanian.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

Chuck Klosterman, American popular culture commentator, narrates his latest audiobook in a suitably unvarnished style. He highlights a decade of indelible cultural moments and increasing political polarity. Klosterman comments on quirky cultural diversions tied to the nineties—what, exactly, was the clear beverage phenomenon all about?—and provides background and context to address the way our memories about them may fail us. For example, Y2K was a mounting global concern even if the majority didn't think it was a big deal. Klosterman's voice may take some time to warm up to, but he knows where to hit his points and keep the listener engaged. Dion Graham's authoritative voice delivers the quotes and footnotes that clarify and frame Klosterman's myriad thoughts. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

10/25/2021

Pop culture critic and essayist Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) turns his flinty eye to the 1990s, “the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.” Blending cultural analysis with his own caustic hot takes, Klosterman claims that the chief characteristic of the ’90s was a pervasive feeling of ambivalence, “defined by an overwhelming assumption that life... was underwhelming” (his writing has a similarly detached tone). He views how this societal apathy coursed through the decade’s indie films, such as Larry Clark’s 1995 cult hit Kids (its theme: “there was no meaning to anything, ever”), and was embodied by Nirvana’s Nevermind, the ideal soundtrack for, as Kurt Cobain put it, “a completely exhausted Rock youth Culture.” But at the same time, Klosterman counters, the decade gave rise to art that tackled timely issues including the AIDs epidemic—with Rent debuting on Broadway in 1994—and brought queer stories to TV via such shows as NBC’s Will & Grace. “The world, as always, was changing,” he writes, citing how the decade saw a shift in everything from politics and awareness around race to the explosive growth of the internet and celebrity culture—a preview, he writes, of what was to come in subsequent decades. This nostalgic look at the waning days of offline culture both piques and entertains. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

In The Nineties, Klosterman examines the social, political and cultural history of the era with his signature wit. It’s a fascinating trip down memory lane.” —Time

“An engaging, nuanced and literate take on the alternately dynamic and diffident decade.” —Washington Post

“Serving up the moments and meanings of a modern decade in a few hundred pages is no easy task, but Chuck Klosterman has managed to boil a hearty stew of insight. . . . [Klosterman is] a master of smooth setups and downbeat finishes.” —USA Today

“[Klosterman is] Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture.” —GQ

“From one of our great chroniclers of pop culture comes this entertaining romp through the twilight years of the twentieth century. . . . Roving across flashpoints in movies, music, and politics, Klosterman captures a world where apathy was the defining tone, art was experiencing a seismic shift, and celebrity culture was on the eve of a digital explosion.” —Esquire

“Simultaneously a deep and light sprint through the decade that doesn’t just namecheck people and bands and movies, but burrows under as to why they were important then. And what that means today. . . . Klosterman zips in and around the entirety of the decade, and even readers who were up on pop culture at the time will be reminded of things they haven’t thought about in two or more decades. . . . If you came of age in the ’90s, you will love The Nineties. If not, it’s a singularly wonderful analytical and historical book of a time not so long ago.” —Houston Press

“Leave it to Chuck Klosterman to examine the decade in a fresh, unpredictable way that avoids nostalgia and easy generalizations. . . . Klosterman’s text is never anything less than wise, challenging and winningly idiosyncratic.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“An informative, endlessly entertaining look back at the 1990s. . . . What [Klosterman] always succeeds at is conveying an anecdote, oddity, or thought exercise about the decade that you immediately want to share with a friend.” —BuzzFeed

“Always an astute cultural observer and a fan of deep dives into any subject, Klosterman is focused here on a decade in American life that he says is often portrayed as ‘a low-risk grunge cartoon’ . . . Klosterman’s gift is seizing on those moments that any Gen Xer can readily recall and pulling the strings a bit to put it in some kind of historical perspective.” —Associated Press

“Klosterman’s remarkable book made me rethink my decade and rethink myself.” —Airmail
 
“The nineties continue to fascinate, especially with a wonderful guide like Chuck Klosterman.” —Toronto Star

“A book that you’ll read in about two days, but then want to re-read to make sure you didn’t miss anything.” —Fatherly

“[The Nineties] attempts a comprehensive analysis of the texture of the 1990s—‘the feeling of the era.’ Perhaps no cultural critic is better suited for this task than Klosterman. . . . By immersing himself in the objectivity furnished by the past, Klosterman opens a critical space wherein we can consider the present.” —SPIN

“Klosterman zooms in on the interplay between the titular decade’s opposing generations—Generation X and Baby Boomers—and puts the era’s technological transformations in their rightful historical contexts. . . . His greatest service here is his resistance to assign sharp edges where there is only an underwhelming, fuzzy consensus.” —Vulture, “49 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022”

“Klosterman is far too ambitious to merely let readers wallow in nostalgia and instead looks at the ’90s by applying the accessible style of cultural criticism that has been his brand during a career that has now spanned 12 books. The Nineties examines everything from pop culture (Ross and Rachel) to politics (Ross Perot and Ralph Nader), as well as the Information Age’s age of innocence when the internet was looming out there somewhere, waiting to happen and transform society.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[T]he 1990s is about the arrival of new media technologies that would upend our lives in endless ways large and small. . . . Klosterman’s take on all of this often is insightful, prompting the reader to think about what the internet and social media have done to our brains, to our sense of selves, to our physical environments. . . . [A]n entertaining tour. Klosterman skillfully analyzes Gen-X touchstones like Quentin Tarantino and ‘Seinfeld,’ Nirvana and Garth Brooks.” —The Oregonian

“Wonderfully researched, compellingly written, and often very funny, this is a superb reassessment of an underappreciated decade from a stupendously gifted essayist.” —Booklist (starred review)

“An entertaining journey through the last decade of the 20th century. . . . [Klosterman] brings the decade to vivid new life. . . . As in his previous books of cultural criticism, Klosterman delivers a multifaceted portrait that’s both fun and insightful. A fascinating examination of a period still remembered by most, refreshingly free of unnecessary mythmaking.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“There’s not much missing from this delightful collection of quotes and culture from the era that most find difficult to define. . . . With humor and history (supported by articles, TV news segments, advertisements, and interviews), Klosterman’s volume is the perfect guide for millennials who wear vintage t-shirts ironically. From politics to Prozac, a fascinating exploration of Generation X from the perspective of those who lived it and witnessed it. Readers will be raiding closets for mom jeans and drawers for scrunchies after reading this nostalgia-inducing book.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“The Nineties Is a fun and funny romp through a decade just now distant enough to be viewed in historical relief. Chuck Klosterman is old enough to have grown up in the old order of culture and politics that began to tremble, and eventually collapse, during the 1990s; he’s young enough to be immersed fully in the new societal currents that began in those years and define us now. For all the delight Klosterman takes in his narrative excursions, his sketches of the Bill Clinton years evoke melancholy. For a moment, it seemed plausible that a young new president could play usher to a post-Cold War era of humane and rational politics. For now, at least, we must recall the 1990s as the soil in which our contemporary politics of contempt, paranoia, alienation, and violence blossomed.” —John Harris, founding editor, Politico

“The Nineties is a fascinating, wholly original exploration of a bewilderingly bygone time, written by one of our wisest, wryest cultural critics. Who else could pull Quentin Tarantino, college football, and Alan Greenspan—not to mention Tiger Woods, Dick Morris, and Reality Bites—into a coherent examination of a world about to undergo a paradigm shift?” —Louisa Thomas, staff writer, The New Yorker

“This might be the book Chuck Klosterman was born to write: a witty and unpredictable history of the decade that just won't go away. From OJ to AOL to the GOP, he has a theory about everything, and a story about how all of it fits together.” —Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels

“Chuck Klosterman has done something remarkable and, to be honest, frightening. He's hacked his way through the great clutter of our information age, where we know everything but understand nothing, to arrive at a magical oasis of reckoning and recognition, to discover a fact that's been hiding in plain sight, the only fact that matters anymore, really, namely this: the 1990s were the last decade of the United States of America, as a functioning cohesive society and as an idea. Buy this book right now, not because of the smart history it unspools, although that's a delight, but because of the window it gives you into the future.” —Wright Thompson, author of Pappyland

Library Journal - Audio

06/01/2022

The 1990s nostalgia is upon us, and pop culture raconteur Klosterman is the ideal author to take on the decade, from music and movies to sports and politics. Each chapter mixes facts, reminiscences, and analysis to create an overview of the highs and lows of the decade. There's plenty of attention paid to iconic events and people of the time, but Klosterman's knowledge of the obscure is consistently entertaining. He shifts effortlessly between topics—one chapter begins with The Matrix and Keanu Reeves's 1990s career, then turns to the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the O. J. Simpson trial, and the Columbine massacre, then back to The Matrix and the ways television defined reality during the era. Klosterman narrates the majority of the book, and while he's not a professional narrator, his enthusiasm for the subject matter, combined with his upper-Midwestern accent, draws listeners in. His occasional mimicry of famous voices (1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot, former president Bill Clinton) is endearingly clumsy. Co-narrator Dion Graham reads the chapter titles and selected footnotes. His smooth, measured narration contrasts well with Klosterman's excitable style. VERDICTA must-listen for Klosterman's many fans, nostalgic Gen-Xers, and those interested in the many ways the 1990s shaped how we live now.—Nanette Donohue

Library Journal

★ 01/01/2022

Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) dissects an iconic era that remains a mystery even to those who grew up during the 1990s. The decade of landlines, glossy magazines, and TV antennas propelled pop culture without social media or streaming services. There's not much missing from this delightful collection of quotes and culture from the era that most find difficult to define. As Klosterman points out, "doing nothing was a valid option" and selling out was the worst sin you could commit. Apathy was appealing, slacking off was a career path, and a polished exterior was gag-inducing. A self-proclaimed demographic cliché himself, Klosterman points out pivotal moments in the era, such as the end of 1980s glam and the rise of 1990s aesthetic when Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit hit MTV, and grunge rock demolished an entire era of saxophones and Brat Pack wannabes. With humor and history (supported by articles, TV news segments, advertisements, and interviews), Klosterman's volume is the perfect guide for millennials who wear vintage t-shirts ironically. VERDICT From politics to Prozac, a fascinating exploration of Generation X from the perspective of those who lived it and witnessed it. Readers will be raiding closets for mom jeans and drawers for scrunchies after reading this nostalgia-inducing book.—Alana Quarles

MARCH 2022 - AudioFile

Chuck Klosterman, American popular culture commentator, narrates his latest audiobook in a suitably unvarnished style. He highlights a decade of indelible cultural moments and increasing political polarity. Klosterman comments on quirky cultural diversions tied to the nineties—what, exactly, was the clear beverage phenomenon all about?—and provides background and context to address the way our memories about them may fail us. For example, Y2K was a mounting global concern even if the majority didn't think it was a big deal. Klosterman's voice may take some time to warm up to, but he knows where to hit his points and keep the listener engaged. Dion Graham's authoritative voice delivers the quotes and footnotes that clarify and frame Klosterman's myriad thoughts. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-10-27
Klosterman returns with an entertaining journey through the last decade of the 20th century.

“Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape, along with thousands upon thousands of trivial moments that meant nothing at all,” writes the author. “The record is relatively complete. But that deluge of data remained, at the time, ephemeral and unavail­able. It was still a present-tense existence.” In this retrospective, which examines a decade that most of his readers lived though, Klosterman acknowledges that “there is always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was.” Throughout the wide-ranging narrative—from technology and the rise of the internet to key trends in music, TV, and film; indelible moments in sports; and significant political moments—Klosterman takes pains to ensure that references are addressed in relation to their historical context rather than through the foggy and often inaccurate lens of memory. He brings the decade to vivid new life, whether he’s discussing attempts to classify Generation X; how the ascendency of grunge “initiated rock’s recession from the center of society”; or the unprecedented phenomena of Meet Joe Blackbeing the “all-time highest grossing movie among ticket buyers who did not watch one minute of the film” (many theatergoers entered to view the “131-second trailer for The Phantom Menace” before walking out). In the 1990s, writes the author, “No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not.” As in his previous books of cultural criticism, Klosterman delivers a multifaceted portrait that’s both fun and insightful.

A fascinating examination of a period still remembered by most, refreshingly free of unnecessary mythmaking.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176132977
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/08/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	471,326

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can’t read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in ’62 and ended with the shootings at Kent State in May of 1970. The seventies were conceived the morning after Altamont in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of American Gigolo, which means there were five months when the sixties and the seventies were happening at the same time. It felt like the eighties might live forever when the Berlin Wall fell in November of ’89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die).

When writing about recent history, the inclination is to claim whatever we think about the past is secretly backward. “Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade,” historian Bruce J. Schulman writes in his book The Seventies. “This impression could hardly be more wrong.” In the opening sentence of The Fifties, journalist David Halberstam notes how the 1950s are inevitably recalled as a series of black-and-white photographs, in contrast to how the sixties were captured as moving images in living color. This, he argued, perpetuates the illusionary memory of the fifties being “slower, almost languid.” There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What’s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.


The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media. Its trajectory can be traced with accuracy. Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape, along with thousands upon thousands of trivial moments that meant nothing at all. The record is relatively complete. But that deluge of data remained, at the time, ephemeral and unavailable. It was still a present-tense existence. For much of the decade, Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. Yet if you missed an episode of Seinfeld, you simply missed it. You had to wait until it was re-aired the following summer, when you could try to manually record it on VHS videotape. If you missed it again, the only option was to go to a public archive in Los Angeles or Manhattan and request a special viewing on eight-millimeter videotape. But of course, this limitation was not something people worried about, because caring that much about any TV show was not a normal thing to do. And even if you did, you would pretend you did not, because this was the nineties. You would be more likely to claim that you didn’t own a television.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard. Every generation melodramatically assumes it will somehow be the last, and there was some of that in the nineties, too—but not as much as in the decade that came before and far less than in the decades that would come after. It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional. Many of the polarizing issues that dominate contemporary discourse were already in play, but ensconced as thought experiments in academic circles. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there. Concerns and anxieties were omnipresent, but the stakes were vague: Teenagers were allegedly obsessed with angst, and the explanation as to why was pondered constantly without any sufficient answer. It didn’t even seem like those asking the question particularly cared what the explanation was, or at least not until twelve kids were massacred by their classmates at a Colorado high school in 1999. But by then it was too late, and the question seemed less important than the problem, and the problem had just become what was now considered normal.


It’s impossible to claim that all people living through a period of history incontrovertibly share any qualities across the board. It’s also difficult to dissect a decade that was still operating as a monoculture without habitually dwelling on the details of dominance (when I write “it was a remarkably easy time to be alive,” I only refer to those for whom it was, and for whom it usually is). Nothing can ever be everything to everyone. But it’s hard to exaggerate the pervasion of self-constructed, self-aware apathy that would come to delineate the caricature of a time period that already feels forgotten, mostly because those who embodied it would feel embarrassed to insist it was important. The fashions of the 1980s did not gradually fade. The fashions of the 1980s collapsed, and—almost immediately—the zeitgeist they’d elevated appeared garish and gross. There was a longing for the 1970s, but not in the way people of the seventies had longed for the fifties. It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less. In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. 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 paradox is that the indoctrination of these attitudes had little impact on how the decade actually unspooled. The nineties ethos was deeply internalized but sporadically applied. The number of midlevel celebrities increased, as did the public appetite for personality-driven news. Unemployment peaked in ’92 but decreased thereafter. The economy boomed, much more than it had during the wealth-obsessed administration of Ronald Reagan. Banking deregulations untethered the financial superstructure from frugal orthodoxy, most notably the 1999 repeal of legislation separating commercial banking from investment banking. Income disparity enlarged. Many of the goals now associated with the eighties did not really come into fruition until the nineties. Despite an overabundance of historical information, the collective memory of the decade tends to be simplified and minimized, dictated more by the texture of the time than by anything that transpired.

And yet: The texture is what mattered. The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time.

It is not the thinking now.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

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