The Nineties
Chuck Klosterman
The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. more
370 pages, Hardcover
First published Penguin Press
3.88
Rating
24652
Ratings
3184
Reviews
Chuck Klosterman
128 books 4742 followers
Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine.Community reviews
The nineties is a decade that seems so recent, and yet in so many ways it was a very different world. The last few years before the ubiquitousness of internet changed the way we think and process endless information overload; the last few years of landlines supremacy (“There are no statistics illustrating how rare it was for someone to ignore a ringing telephone in 1990. This is because such a question would never have been asked (or even pondered). To do so was unthinkable”). The time when a CD collection could you tell you a lot about a person. more
“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. more
I have a hunch you already know if you have any interest in reading Chuck Klosterman’s latest topical deep dive, but here’s a handy checklist just in case you’re not sure The Nineties is for you:- Did you have the phone on its cover. - Do you enjoy books that might be assigned in college courses like Media Studies or History of the Twentieth Century. That’s it. That’s the entire list. If you didn’t answer a resounding yes to either one of those questions, keep browsing. more
Update 2/8/22: Reposting my review to celebrate that today is publication day. The texture is what mattered. The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. more
This is EXCELLENT. I loved the Chuck Klosterman of my twenties, but I ADORE the version of him in my forties. As someone born in 1980, I'm of that weird period/microgeneration of people who don't identify as Gen Xers or Millennials, but this book that covers my adolescence and teenage years completely spoke to me on an almost molecular level. I sent a dozen screen shots of passages to my friends, and I devoured this book in one long lazy day. I've often said that Chuck Klosterman is one of the few people who I believe speak in coherent paragraphs, but when you give him an actual page to formulate connections and thesis statements about the intersections of pop culture, politics, race relations, and terrorism (both domestic and foreign), you're going to have your mind blown. more
I can no longer remember why I loved Chuck Klosterman's writing. I don't know if he got too smart, or I got too dumb. or vice versa. But I found this book impenetrably weird and genuinely don't understand what points he was trying to make about, well, anything. more
I think I was expecting more of, well, a fun nostalgia trip through the Nineties supported by witty modern prose. Instead, this is painfully boring and meandering. Major events through music, politics, movies, and the news are covered, but there is no real flow to the "story" progression. I've been interested in reading Klosterman for awhile now, but I think I'm going to walk that urge back. As for the Nineties, maybe they're best covered on VH1. more
Listen, assigning a grade to a Chuck Klosterman book is kind of ridiculous. Such scores are supposed to signal to other people the value you’ve placed on a book and whether they should read it. But with Klosterman in particular, each reader’s relationship to his writing seems distinctively unique. A five-star rating is going to mean next-to-nothing to an ardent detractor, while his biggest cheerleaders would write off a one-star rating as the opinion of a person who just “doesn’t get it. ” Neither is wrong; it's just that subjectivity and confirmation bias seem to have an even more outsized significance with his work. more
The Nineties is a collection of twelve essays, ostensibly about the cultural and political moments that defined the decade, but also a work that serves as Klosterman's playground for musings about generational framings, how culture tethers to public consciousness, and how our modern understanding of the 90s formed over time. As a child of the nineties, there is a certain nostalgic joy that is inherent with a tour of this time period. Like any decade you grow up in, it has the illusion of a simpler time, childhood romanticism smoothing rough edges. In some ways, however, it was simpler. Pre 9/11, my dad would take me to the airport to watch planes take off and land--no tickets necessary, no intensive security apparatus to be found. more
Chuck klosterman’s main thesis is that things were not then exactly as you see them now. Fine. Ok. But they also weren’t exactly as he saw them either. The 90s, according to this book, we’re just about the punk bands and movies CK loved and hated. more
I was a child of the 1990s and reading this book was a nostalgic trip down memory lane. I was too young to grasp many events as they occurred — the O. J. Simpson trial and Bill Clinton’s presidency, to name a few — but others, like Michael Jordan’s utter dominance in the sports world and waiting for the connection to “get on” the internet were more familiar. Other fun references in The Nineties include Seinfeld, landline phones, Titanic, the (widely agreed upon as irrational) fear surrounding Y2K, and Napster. more
Up at the top of my Klosterman books that I love. Have so much to say about this and will very likely reread at some point later this year. Favorite of the year so far by quite a margin. 5. Review coming to tiktok soon. more
“It was a complicated time to like things. ” My husband and I are 1983 and 1984 babies, respectively. That makes us a bit young to be Gen X and a bit old to be full millennials; I think that officially we are Xennials (https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Xennials), but I have personally embraced the “geriatric millennial” label; I like the way it sounds. more
The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. It is not the thinking now. Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. more
I am GenX. I was in my teens and early twenties during the nineties. I still love Nirvana and Guns n Roses. I remember Blockbuster fondly. I even had the phone on the cover of this book on my desk while I did my homework and wrote my term papers. more
I was around for the 90s, but I wasn't really there. By way of illustration here are three 90s events and where I was at the time:-The OJ Simpson verdict found me on the playground playing Butts Up. My primary feeling was relief; now they'd quit wheeling the TV into class for boring courtroom footage. -The Clinton BJ scandal broke in my middle school homeroom via Channel One News. Far from any concern of political blowback, I wondered why any grownup would opt for a blowjob— couldn't they just do real sex. more
This book started rough for me. Chuck Klosterman spoke of the nineties being easy times and right then I knew exactly what the perspective was going to be- a telling of the decade from an exclusively white American middle-class lense. After all the nineties began with off the charts levels of violence in many of our cities as the Crack Epidemic was still raging and gang-banging was at an all time high (and responding to this mass incarceration bills were passed). This climate gave birth to classic films of the era such as Boys in The Hood and Menace II Society. The nineties certainly weren't carefree if you were living in Compton or North St. more
First, a dial tone, followed by eleven rapid beeps from an invisible push-button telephone. This was followed by three or four high-pitched electronic whistles, collapsing into a longer whistle resembling the flatlining of a dying patient hooked to an EKG machine (this was the sound of the phone line’s echo suppression being disabled). There were a few more beeps absorbed into a wall of white noise, and then the white noise abruptly doubled, meaning the receiving modem was now interacting with the calling modem. There was an instant where it sounded like something inside the computer had broken, spontaneously repaired by the digital interplay of two probing modulators, similar in pitch to a metal detector passing over a pocket watch. This was bookended by another fleeting second of white noise, and then . more
Full disclosure: I won a free ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. As the title would suggest, this is a look back at the 1990s, mostly with regard to what was happening in the USA at the time. I don't think I can summarize the book better than this paragraph from the back cover of the ARC (it will likely end up on the front jacket flap when the hardcover is released. ):"It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. more
Welcome back to the nineties. (Again. ) We certainly seem to be making a lot of trips back there these days. With that, we know we are going through a moment of cultural nostalgia, if we are not fully in the throes of a culture of nostalgia. In any case, with this entry into the burgeoning literature, Chuck Klosterman weaves his recollections and considerations into the expanding nostalgic collective consciousness. more
I didn't make it out of the Introduction of this book, as Klosterman's tone of dead earnest seriousness, as if something called 'the 90's' actually existed rather than just being a bunch of peoples' opinions, was a total turnoff for me. My own sourpuss self should not dissuade others who are interested in this sort of thing read it, though. more
I’m still reading this book, but for the purposes of this review I’m done. I’m past halfway, and I’ve been skipping all the parts about sports and most of the parts about television. I can only take small doses of Chuck Klosterman mansplaining the 90s to me. I lived through the 90s and while I agree with some of what Klosterman talks about in terms of the ‘vibe’ of the decade, the fact is he’s viewing through the same filtered lenses I have as a white male Gen Xer in America. Sure, he’s a good writer and yes, he’s relatively perceptive when it comes to American popular culture critique. more
Instead of being a book with nostalgic and fun history (though still mentioning and tackling certain tragedies and serious topics), as I had expected, this book felt more like a diatribe by a megalomaniac who couldn't get over his own intellectualism. He would constantly portray his opinions as accepted facts and showcase an arrogance that left me rolling my eyes and reading the book just to be done with it. He also left out a lot of important cultural moments, bands, shows, and movies. I had high hopes for this book and was excited to read it. But I found myself more annoyed or bored as I trudged through its pages. more
This was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it. Klosterman takes us on a trip through the 90s that is less about nostalgia and more about the meaning of the 90s, and how memory and feeling work. But there is still a ton of nostalgia - from Garth Brooks to Seinfeld to the Bulls to Ross Perot. There were several things I knew a lot about because it’s 90’s stuff I remember fondly (Liz Phair, Art Bell) and a few things I absolutely did not know anything about (We interfered in the 1996 Russian elections. more
This book is awesome, I don't really need to tell you which decade it's about or avoid spoilers because, well, human history is mostly a spoiler. So the most useful thing is to talk about what makes this book unique, because it is unique among books that try to talk about a period in history. And I mean unique in a good way, not the way that, like, my mom cutting up my Ghostbusters t-shirt to make cleaning rags when I was a kid, was a "unique" way of getting cleaning rags. I'm going to address the uniqueness of the book. Because I listened to a podcast where two dum-dums discussed this book, and they were both like, "I don't understand why this needs to exist. more
This is my third recent nonfiction read that discusses how history can not be explored or understood as history until enough time has passed that we're no longer "living through" that history. See Music Is History and Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. It likewise dovetails nicely into the work of podcasts like "History of the 90s" and "You're Wrong About. "Klosterman's book is an exploration of the actual history of the 1990s through politics and pop culture. It's fascinating how he takes disparate stories and weaves the narrative together, with plenty of "why was the media obsessed with Michael Jordan's baseball career that meant nothing, really. more
Oof. The book is vapid and the author preoccupied with the unbearable burden of being a Gen-Xer forced to relinquish the luxury of having no opinions or caring about anything in particular. Despite being about a decade in which the world seismically changed — the USSR fell, neoliberalism was unshackled, globalization began in earnest — this book is aggressively apolitical, weaving in and out of isolated cultural ephemera without providing a context, meaning or unifying framework for understanding. He is very fond of immediately negating any claim that contains something remotely resembling a worldview. But after all, there is no creature more ideological than the one who claims to have no ideology, and Klosterman clearly deals in an inane brand of liberalism that seeks to obscure the machinations of power by presenting life as a series of largely unrelated phenomena that we simply can’t understand well enough to deduce anything meaningful about. more
Man. what the hell is this. Chuck Klosterman wrote a book ostensibly investigating the cultural roots and lasting impacts of the 1990s, but it's just hundreds of pages of him remembering stuff, throwing theories at the wall to see if he's got anything. And for the most part, he doesn't. Just discussing how Alanis Morissette was popular, then shifting into a half-hearted political analysis of what Ross Perot's popularity meant about national sentiments - it's all too much. more
I was really looking forward to this one. That cover is amazing. However, it really doesn't capture the tone or vibe of the book. On the surface, this a fine look at some of the "big" events of the 90s: presidential elections, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the OJ trial, the rise of the internet, Oprah's dominance, and Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination. It's just a shame that Klosterman couldn't get out his Gen X white man head in order to see beyond his own experience. more