I was born in the late 80s. My childhood was in the 90s. I became a teen in the new millenium. 90s culture informed my every move growing up. It was there all through the horrid ”aughts” too. My view is that there was no placeholder culture to take over the banner from the 90s when the new decade came , so the 00s were mostly rehashed 90s culture and revival waves in an infinite bad loop (i’m looking at you, skinny jeans rock revival). The 90s ethos reigned supreme for 20-25 years or more! It started fizzing out with the notion of the ”hipster” (of which it was an offshoot) and died with the advent of so called gen z zoomer culture of respectability and 1950s ethics.
All this to say that I feel very much part of the target audience for this volume of essays about the years 1990-1999 (of course Klosterman latches on to the current practice of loose end definitions, roping it in to ’89 to ’01 (Berlin Wall, Twin Towers)).
Its twelve essays range a bunch of topics, some of which interest me (the changing face of music culture, the rise of the nascent internet, celebrity ethics, vhs cinema) and some I would never have read unless they were part of this book (college basketball, Dan Quayle, trends in soft drinks). Klosterman was born in 1965, so he was well into adulthood when the 90’s began, so his perspective differs from mine. He adapted to 90s culture as an adult, whereas I swam in its wake.
Anyway, the essays meander and move from one thing to the next, filled with the kind of tidbits and ephemera only available to those who do strenuous research. The biggest topic for me in assessing the 90s and how they differ from our current climate is the complete change in what is considered cool, or to speak in bourdieusian terms, consecrated. The epitome of 90s affectation was to not care, to use irony, and to make obscure references. Not so today. There is something of a ”new sincerity” among younger people today, and their worldview is so massively built around silicon valley communication ecology that the generational rift is probably greater than ever before.
Having devoted much of my own youth to movies, I found the chapter on cinema of particular interest. Movie culture was probably in its apex in the 90s. Films were considered important in a way they don’t anymore. Also important was the rise of VHS and video rentals. Klosterman explains the rise of a new kind of filmmaker who had seen all the movies growing up, which created a hyperaware style of movies, epitomised by Quentin Tarantino. Movies were water cooler talk in the 90’s; it was a sort of monoculture that created a sense of coherence.
What is arguably most interesting when comparing the 90’s and today is, in my view, the effect of the internet on human affairs. To this Klosterman devotes parts of chapter 6. He writes about early mp3 filesharing with Napster, which to my recollection more belongs to the early 00’s (he gets a pass on the technicality that Napster launched in late ’99).
There is also a lot of material about the dynamics of cultural memory, about what is remembered and what is forgotten, and why. A recurring phrase is ”times change as they always do”. That’s a pretty shallow statement when you think about it. But these kinds of musings on the passing of time are sprinkled throughout, and I think Klosterman even wrote a whole book on that theme in 2016, called What if We’re Wrong? (but I haven’t read it).
A trademark klosterman gimmick is to take two seemingly unrelated people and juxtapose them as similar or opposites to prove a point. He contrasts Alan Greenspan with Oprah Winfrey. Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. Even Tiger Woods and rap singer Eminem. New stuff comes to light in these exercises.
I can’t pick up all the threads this book led my thoughts on to, but to me it was a pretty good ride. It seems deliberately kaleidoscopic, maybe because Klosterman wants to fit so much stuff in. It never feels cramped, though. A criticism of the book has been that it is too US-centric, and that it doesn’t mention the Balkans war. I don’t know if Klosterman is the right fit for writing on the Balkans war. I think he’d do better writing something about ”culture jamming”, adbusters or cyberpunk; three very 90’s phenomena that are absent from the pages of this book.
In the last chapter he proposes a theory that the 90’s were the last decade of identifiable cultural look, because the 00’s and 2010’s have both been so muddled and hard to define. This is an interesting statement, that echoes Kurt Andersen’s much-discussed 2012 Vanity Fair article “You Say You Want a Devolution”, where he contrasts 1992 to 2012, and drives an argument about cultural stagnation. A similar thesis is proposed in music critic Simon Reynolds‘ 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. These ideas have fallen out of favor, possibly because style and pop culture is less regimented than under 20th century conditions: ten years on, and we still have a hard time formulating a definitive typical 2010s mainstream style. My bet is that the arenas for expression have migrated more online than in music and clothes, which to older people is hard to understand.
Nineties is part of a current 90s revival, grappling with the cultural legacy of the period. Other recent books about the 90’s include Teddy Wayne’s 2020 book Apartment, and the Ben Lerner book The Topeka School. The movie Landline from a few years ago and the recent miniseries Lea’s Seven Lives are also part of this trend. It must be that one cohort of writers have now reached the age where they look back at their younger years, and want to depict it. I’m glad they did, because I’m here to read it.
Kinship of all Species 