Title: The Nineties
Rating: 5 Stars
For those long term readers (and I know that you’re legion) of this blog, you know that I have had serious problems in the past with Chuck Klosterman. We’re about the same age. We have about the same cultural influences. He writes about said cultural influences. Given that, his books are ones that I should buy and just devour with joy. Before The Nineties, I’d read five of his books. I found one of them tolerable and I was actively annoyed at the other four. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s his writing style. Maybe it’s his opinions. Maybe, despite being relatively close to age, our paths have been so divergent that I just can’t relate to his thoughts, analysis, and feelings.
The nadir came when I read his 10,000 word essay on the Kiss rock band. It was so self indulgent that, when I finally finished it, I was so enraged that, if I’d seen him walking down the street, I would have attacked Gene Simmons with a baseball bat, even though he had nothing to do with the writing of the essay.
Over the years, I repeatedly swore off Klosterman. Never again will I be fooled by a clever title, I said. Never again will I peruse the essays in the contents and think, these seem good, maybe I’ll give him another chance. Despite such firm resolutions, I would see his latest and feel myself getting suckered in and think, this time will be different, just to be disappointed again.
This time I was serious. I was done with Klosterman.
And then I saw this book: The Nineties. A collection of essays that was exclusively focused on the 1990s. I was twenty-seven in 1990. This was kind of my decade. I was young enough to be engaged in mass culture yet old enough that I made a point of keeping on top of world events.
If there was any chance that Chuck and I might have a moment together, this was it. Even though I’d sworn him off, yes, I gave him another chance.
And he blew me away. I enjoyed reading every single essay in this book.
I’m not sure why. It could be that this topic (an entire decade) was so broad that he couldn’t do his usual deep navel gazing on whether or not Tool and Nickelback deserve the hate that they receive or if Wilco or Pavement is creating the most significant alternative music. God, how I don’t care.
He starts off by discussing how the 90s culture was a reaction to the 80s culture of corporate vapidity. In the 90s, to sellout was a legitimate criticism of an artist. You saw that in the 90s with the ultimate Gen X film, Reality Bites, and with the music of Nirvana.
Communication changed during the 90s. At the start of the decade, very few people had cellphones. There was no texting. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to call a number, hope that they were home, and hope that they picked up. That’s another thing. For most people, when the phone rang, you had no idea who was calling. It could have been your dad telling you that your mom had just died or it could be someone trying to sell you a magazine advertisement. You didn’t know, so you had to answer the phone. In fact the relative few people that had cell phones were kind of considered assholes. They’d walk around with these big blocky devices with an antenna shooting out of it. Usually, the first words out of their mouth would be something like, “I’m on a cell phone”. Forget about getting a new phone every year. As Klosterman said, in the early 90s, getting a new phone every year would just about be equivalent to getting a new toilet every year.
It was in 1991 that the Soviet Union fell. Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia. Well, years later, it became time to choose a new president. Yeltsin was running again, but the front runner was the leader of the Communist Party. Yeltsin’s ratings were horrible and he was clearly a barely functioning alcoholic by this time (such that during a state visit to the DC, a drunk Yeltsin, in his underwear, in the middle of the night, tried to hail a taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue to get pizza and no, I’m not making that up).
There was no way that the US was going to let the Communist party get back into power again. They sent some high powered election political consultants and they took over and crafted the campaign that ultimately led, against all odds, to the barely cognizant Yeltsin being reelected. Keep that in mind when we mutter about Putin intervening in our elections.
Klosterman covered the 1992 US Presidential election. He profiles how George HW Bush, in the aftermath of the very successful first Gulf War and with an 89 percent approval rating, managed to blow it. He discusses how an odd, runty, Texan billionaire named H Ross Perot managed to maybe or maybe not play a decisive role in handing the election to Bill Clinton. We see how Bill Clinton wins despite many allegations of sexual indiscretions.
If the 1992 election wasn’t interesting enough, how about the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore? Klosterman discussed the significance of Ralph Nader voters, liberal / progressive voters all, who threw the election to Bush in Florida, ushering in eight years of conservative rule that was anathema to all that they stood for. He also discussed, the 5-4 ruling of the Supreme Court to stop the manual recount in Florida. The base partisanship of that ruling has led us to this point in our history where our politics are now seen as being exclusively binary.
There were many big moments in the 90s that consumed the national attention in a way that might not ever be possible today. The biggest of them all was OJ Simpson. To this day, I can recollect where I was watching the Bronco chase (at a restaurant, ignoring my food, staring mutely at a screen over my head, watching a white Bronco move slowly on an empty interstate). Some 95 million people watched the chase. Later, CNN basically became 24 hour OJ trial for months.
Those are just a couple of events discussed. Among many other topics discussed were: Rodney King and the riots (and yes, I can remember exactly where I was when I saw Reginald Denny get pulled out of his truck and brutally beaten live while the TV helicopter hovered above this impotently blowing its horn in a pathetic attempt to stop the attack), Seinfeld, Michael Jordan, Garth Brooks, Titanic, Matrix, Oprah, the Oklahoma City bombing, Clarence Thomas, Columbine, and Y2K. He goes in depth on events that were huge at the time that they occurred but by now have been forgotten. A great example of this is the murder of Chandra Levy and the role, if any, that US Congressman Gary Condit played in her murder.
If you’re young and didn’t really know what was going on in the 90s, this book will serve as a great primer to that decade. If, like me, you lived that era, reading this book is like taking a walk through a park that you once loved but have mostly forgotten about.
dorkenstein 