The Nineties
The Nineties: A Book
By: Chuck Klosterman
[This was on my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2022]
I don’t think I did enough research before I put this book on my list of most anticipated books. I just saw the title and the cover and thought- yes. this is for me.
Turns out it wasn’t.
I always wanted one of those phones and this book was nominated for Best Humor so I thought it was going to be a nostalgic joy to read. Nope. He didn’t even talk about the phone so that’s a pretty big first strike!!!
I call myself a 90s kid but being born in 1990 puts you in a different category— I’m not Generation X. I was largely unaware of most of what happened in the 90s.
And Klosterman highlights every bit of those happenings in this book with what felt like a pretentious, hard to grasp, disjointed writing voice. It had an overall vibe of over-analysis, pondering random things and dissecting them into oblivion.
It just wasn’t a pleasant read. I did learn some interesting things I’ll share with you, but it’s not a book I would recommend to the majority of people.
Plus I can’t think of a worse ending to a book. The very last sentence of the book (which is about 9/11) reads: “The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers." Boom. It’s over. What a way to leave your audience. But at the same time, it kinda does sum up the vibe of the entire book so there’s that.
The Writing
I have never read nor heard of Klosterman before this book. Perhaps if I had any inclination of his prior writings I would have avoided this from the beginning. But my nostalgia made me a bit trigger happy.
Those familiar with his writing are probably used to his vocabulary and the way he writes.
I suppose what people ‘in the know’ thought was funny was over my head or came across to me like cynicism and an ‘I’m above it all’ attitude. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be getting out of it with each chapter.
I’m not sure what his main point of this book was really. It was a mash-up of 90s references, ponderings, and theories on things from politics, to sports, to music, TV, and movies, to technology and science.
He hits on: Nirvana, Reality Bites, 2 Live Crew, the UNABomber, Zima, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs (which I’m now glad I never saw), Napster, the CD-ROM (which I used to play Zoombinis and my American Girl program), Michael Jordan, commercialism vs capitalism, Friends and Seinfeld, the Titanic and Leonardo DiCaprio’s popularity, McVeigh and the OKC bombings, the Columbine shooting, the OJ trial, Bill Clinton, Mike Tyson’s ear rampage, Y2K, and some more stuff.
It felt monotonous and it’s not a book you can skim. If you try to skim it you might as well not read it at all because you won’t grasp a single idea.
Here’s a few sentences from the book that somewhat captures his writing style:
“There was an athletic incomprehensibility to his sentences— a hyperintellectual unorthodoxy that was both undeniable and distancing.”
“There was a misguided notion that the populist esoterica of the seventies that had come to signify kitschy subversion had always been seen and experienced in the same way they were now being recalled in retrospect.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this isn’t a book for the masses.
I mean I think I know what all the words mean individually, but to grasp the sentence takes way more brainpower than it should for a humorous book about the 90s.
I critiqued Nick Offerman’s book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, for being pretentious and using big words just for the sake of big words, but at least with his book I generally knew what he was saying. Klosterman is on another level.
Am I just dumb? Is this book just for Ivy Leaguers who like to overanalyze everything to the point where nothing is fun anymore?
Of the show Friends he says, “the ‘Friends’ feel that other shows desperately tried to copy was the ability to immerse itself in emerging generational dilemmas, performed by characters who did not readily identify as members of that generation.”
Huh? Is that what they were doing? This is what I get annoyed about when it comes to art in these forms (and I’m an art major…) what is the point of this? I hate how much overanalysis there is to everything that’s supposed to be entertainment. Is it effective if no one but Klosterman and his posse understand what you’re doing? People just like the show!
It’s why I tend to avoid the movies that win Oscars because they’re usually way too existential and I feel like people just try to convince themselves that they loved it so that they seem cultured and smart but really they just want to watch Dumb and Dumber again.
I mean, sure, sometimes it’s fun to ponder the ‘why’ behind certain things, but I think Klosterman pushes the envelope in a few too many places in this book.
It almost felt like the subtitle for this book should have been: “Everything that’s wrong with the nineties.” And if I’m way off that’s Klosterman’s fault.
I wanted to read happy and funny nostalgic stories and facts and memories that would make me smile and say- Oh yeah! With some interesting trivia and facts I can tell all my friends. Not rants and dissertations that make me squint and say- What??
What Resonated
Although much of the references did nothing for me, there were a few things that made me smile.
For example, he begins a chapter with a very detailed description of the sound dial-up internet made. And I could hear every tone. I didn’t have to be an adult in the 90s to grasp that concept!
But also he commented on how ‘You’ve Got Mail’ is grammatically incorrect and I had to sit on that for awhile.
He described the general vibe of the 90s being obsessed with the concept of ‘selling out.’
“The degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything— is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”
I don’t know about that… but I did watch Brink! and learned all about the dangers of selling out versus soul skating. So in one sense, I know exactly what he’s talking about.
He talked about how everyone always answered the phone because you never knew who it would be and it would keep ringing until you did. There was not a lot of privacy in those days. And maybe that’s actually better. But then there was *69 and we kids had a fun new game to play when we weren’t playing Super Nintendo or riding our bikes to the pool by ourselves.
It was also interesting how he highlighted the control phones had on people in a different way than today. Then, if you were going to get a call, you had to literally wait by the phone. You couldn’t change plans easily after you’ve left your house. And you didn’t get a new model every other year because your phone didn’t really matter that much.
Today we’re controlled by our phones because they matter significantly. When thinking back then about the potential effects of Y2K they weren’t that drastic, but if the same thing were to happen today, it would feel like a lot bigger deal because of how dependent we are on our technology.
What I Learned
There was a lady who recorded over 40,000 VHS taps of news broadcasts between 1979-2012. This blows my mind. He talks about how “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
We couldn’t fast-forward commercials. We had to catch our shows on the time it aired— “Hurry, it’s about to start!”… and racing to the bathroom on commercial breaks. And Friday nights were always for the Disney Channel Original Movies (which he failed to analyze… missed opportunity Chuckster!)
Everything was not saved on the internet.
There was no easy way to verify information, unless you could look it up in the Britannica Encyclopedia collection— which I definitely had and can still remember the smell of.
Because there was no frequent fact-checking, there was a lot of misremembered information that lived years with people. The Mandela Effect. I had never heard of this before. It’s called this because people were convinced Nelson Mandela had died before he actually had.
Speaking of VHS tapes. Apparently those bad boys typically cost $70-90 when they were new, first copies of popular movies! When Top Gun came out, it was “the lowest introductory price for major releases at $26.95.”
There’s a guy named Allan Lichtman who has a 13 point system that he has used to correctly predict every election since 1984. I’m not sure what to think about that. But it’s pretty interesting.
I learned about the ‘93 Superstorm! I was only 3 and living in the Midwest so I don’t think it affected my life much but that thing was craaaazy!
Garth Brooks’ real name is Troyal.
Star Wars fans really hate The Phantom Menace.
Ice-T wrote a song called ‘Cop Killer’ but then plays cops as an actor so that’s confusing.
The Matrix was originally written as an “elaborate transgender allegory.”
Fantasy Football existed before the internet. And I can’t really wrap my brain around who in their right mind would want to keep track of all of those stats and all of the points manually for an entire league. I think I need to hear some personal stories about this one.
Both Craigslist and Amazon were online by 1995. At this point “Only 14% of American adults had ever been online.” Can you remember the very first time you entered the internet?! I kind of wish I could experience that feeling because as a kid I never understood the gravity of what was happening.
Google was originally called Backrub. That weirds me out. It was renamed after the word ‘googol’ was misspelled. And I think that’s for the better. But personally I kinda wish Ask Jeeves had become a bigger search engine. It felt like I was really getting the best results when I was asking a real live person.
In 1987 the philosopher Allan Bloom published a book called ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ “claiming that the modern university system had prioritized relativism over critical thinking, inadvertently leading to nihilism.”
I find this particularly intriguing because a couple years ago I read the (fantastic) book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ which has a very similar thesis! I’m guessing it must have been a play on words and an extension of Bloom’s thoughts.
A Few Interesting Quotes
“Whenever a new demographic comes into prominence, there’s a temptation to insist its inhabitants care less about money and material wealth. But this is mostly because any new demographic will always be composed of young people, and young people always care less about acquiring money.”
“Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatures against their will, simply because they happened to be born in a particular year. It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.”
“While it was easy to be crazy in the early nineties, it was difficult for like-minded crazy people to organize… Before social media, there was no way to gauge the size of the conspiracy population.”
“When staring into the shallow mirror of time, there’s an intellectual inclination to de-emphasize the significance of everything super-popular and prioritize off-kilter artifacts that emerged from the counterculture.”
“The process of revisionism is constant. It happens so regularly that it often seems like the only reason to appraise any present tense cultural artifact is to help future critics explain why the original appraisers were wrong.”
Conclusion
I am struggling to think of a reason why you would want to read this book. I think your time would be better spent watching old Disney Channel originals, Seinfeld, Friends, or Home Improvement.
I don’t doubt that Chuck Klosterman is an intelligent fellow, he just doesn’t write like I would want to be his friend or discuss nostalgic things with him.
His research process for this book had to have been insane, and I appreciate the time and effort he put into creating this, but he probably should have written more simply and clearly if he wanted to be understood and ‘amen’d’ by the average person.
Come to think of it. What should have happened was a collaboration between Klosterman and Andy Samberg. I’d read that book.
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