Klosterman’s generation may believe in something or they may not. But they more likely to believe in it, if not by too much.
That something could be almost anything and that is the attitude taken throughout The Nineties, a 2022 book written by Chuck Klosterman. That is not to say he takes no position on an issue. He does and I feel he understands the 1990s (from Gen X perspective) exactly through this prism: a prism that suggests disagreements during the decade (in the US) was never too big to matter by too much. This idea is repeated several times throughout the book but the point achieves clarity at the very end when he discusses the competition between George Bush and Al Gore during the 2000 US Presidential election.
Klosterman argues that in the run up to the election, both candidates were really standing on the same policy platform and that made it impossible for many voters to decide who should be voted in based on substantive matters. So difficult it was that Klosterman highlights that voters were deciding who to decide based on whom they prefer to have a beer with. The answer is Bush, who was more affable and less aloof than Al Gore. So similar were the two that a third candidate—Ralph Nader—became the credible second candidate, as Bush and Gore merged into one candidate in the mainstream consciousness.
Of course, things changed after the election and definitely after the 9/11 attacks. And that was really the last time politics were taken so unseriously by US voters, or so Klosterman argues. Differences since began to become so big that that kind of ambivalence during the 1990s could not exist anymore.
But the book is not primarily about politics. The Nineties mostly tries to capture the mood of the decade and that means multiple references to hit songs and major movies. While I regularly refer to Wikipedia or YouTube to immerse myself into a book, this the first time I went through Spotify to listen to songs while reading. Nirvana’s Smell Like a Teen Spirit gets an early mention as the author explains how the band from Seattle changed everything we understood about rock music. Yes, Nirvana is more grunge than rock, but Klosterman rationalizes songs such as In Bloom evolved as a rebellion against the overcommercialization of rock, which itself was pioneered by unruly teenagers in the 1950s. When rock stars of the 1990s wanted fame and wealth, Nirvana (and Kurt Cobain especially) represented a new breed of artists who despise those. It was uncool to be famous and wealthy. Feeling so guilty of his success, Cobain took a gun and shot himself in the head. There are several other songs that Klosterman goes in detail. Alanis Morissettte’s You Oughta Know. Tupac Shakur’s is another. Each has an outsized influence on the 1990s US.
Reiterating the ambivalence of the 1990s, Klosterman discusses Seinfeld in a segment of the book. It is a comedy sitcom famously about nothing. What follows is a discussion on television programming, on how many sitcoms received high ratings only because they were aired in certain prime slots and that those slots were in high demand because many viewers were too lazy to switch channels after watching something earlier. People were watching only because, to paraphrase Klosterman who in turn quoting George Costanza, “because it’s on TV”, in reply to the question why would anybody watch it. Not because it was good or anything else.
But not all fell into that logic. Some drove the market and were ‘Must See TV’. Friends did that. Here, Klosterman describes Friends in the ambivalent contradictory way: “None of the characters were supposed to be cool, so the audience didn’t need to be cool in order to understand why they were appealing.” And there is Frasier, described as “a white-collar show openly obsessed with intellectual sophistication. Characters casually joked about Jungian philosophy, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alfred, Lord Tennyson… But its dynastic grip on critics and Emmy voters galvanized a paradox: Frasier was seen as brilliant television because it focused on characters who would never watch television.”
Again, later on the author’s commentary on the Star Wars prequel that came out in 1999: “Movie critics disliked The Phantom Menace, but diehards hated it more… Lucas tried pretty goddamn hard to satisfy an entire generation of strangers who likely wouldn’t have been satisfied by anything he delivered. Did such a mean-spirited categorization bother him? Maybe. But not really.”
You get the drift.
I find the yes-no-maybe noncommittal construction as slightly offputting. Yet, beyond the noncommittal statements are brilliant assessment of the 1990s. Maybe, the decade was that complex that it is difficult to be sure what was really going on, unlike the decades after that seem to be governed more by black-or-white logic; either you’re with us or against us even in the face of ever more complex world.
Maybe, the possible lesson here is that in order to solve our contemporary divisions, we just need to be less sure of ourselves.
