the NINEties a book PDF
Preview the NINEties a book
Also by CHUCK KLOSTERMAN Fiction Downtown Owl The Visible Man Raised in Captivity Nonfiction Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas Eating the Dinosaur I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking about the Present As If It Were the Past Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2022 by Charles Klosterman Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. “The Modern Things” Words and Music by Björk Guðmundsdóttir and Graham Massey. Copyright © 1995 by Jora Ehf and Universal Music Publishing Ltd. All Rights for Jora Ehf Administered by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing. All Rights for Universal Music Publishing Ltd. in the United States and Canada Administered by Universal - PolyGram International Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Klosterman, Chuck, 1972– author. Title: The nineties : a book / Chuck Klosterman. Other titles: 90’s Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021014971 (print) | LCCN 2021014972 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735217959 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735217973 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. | United States— Civilization—1970– | United States—Social life and customs—1971– | United States—Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC E169.12 .K556 2022 (print) | LCC E169.12 (ebook) | DDC 306.0973/09049— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014971 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014972 Cover design: Darren Haggar Cover photograph: Kelli Prewett Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi pid_prh_6.0_139121902_c0_r0 For Melissa, Silas, and Hope, and in memory of Jimmy Meiers (1989–2020) and J. Thomas Kidd (1953– 2020) All the modern things Like cars and such Have always existed They’ve just been waiting in a mountain For the right moment —Björk, “The Modern Things” (1995) Contents Introduction 1 Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less [projections of the distortion] 2 The Structure of Feeling (Swingin’ on the Flippity-Flop) [i see death around the corner] 3 Nineteen Percent [casual determinism] 4 The Edge, as Viewed from the Middle [the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past] 5 The Movie Was about a Movie [the power of myth] 6 CTRL + ALT + DELETE [alive in the superunknown] 7 Three True Outcomes [vodka on the chessboard] 8 Yesterday’s Concepts of Tomorrow [the importance of being earnest] 9 Sauropods [giving the people what they want, except that they don’t] 10 A Two-Dimensional Fourth Dimension [the spin doctors] 11 I Feel the Pain of Everyone, Then I Feel Nothing [just try it and see what happens] 12 The End of the Decade, the End of Decades Acknowledgments Sources Index THE NINETIES BEGAN ON JANUARY 1 OF 1990, EXCEPT FOR THE F 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
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