The Nineties: A Book,by Chuck Klosterman, is out now.
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But he also thinks the basic, hand-me-down cliche of the time is a pretty good shorthand.
That portrait is imperfect.
It is not, however, wildly incorrect.
Time seems to be microscoping.
In the 90s, there was almost a perverse excitement over discounting the past.
For us, it starts with Janes Addiction.
And then theres the second period, which does seem significantly different.
The 90s was kind of a confusing time to want things or have aspirations or any desire to succeed.
LikeReality Bites the whole movie is about the problem of selling out.
There was never a time when people were like, I want to be poor.
They just sort of wanted to be rich with the trappings of someone who never wanted to be rich.
But theres a limit to how long that could happen.
People see through that.
I mean, it is a fear that still resides in me.
But you obviously think the period was important to write about for some reason.Yes.
The 90s are still a little bit of an unsettled era.
Those are the positions, and you either have to validate those or contradict them.
Whereas in the 90s, I did not feel like that.
That didnt really happen.
Did you ever see a documentary calledRecorder,about Marion Stokes?
Stokess perception seems to have been everything is important thats being presented through the media.
Its not like we have to prioritize this idea or this event over this idea or this event.
Round-the-clock news programming really shaped our memory of 90s events likethe O.J.
Simpson trialand Columbine.We often talk about journalism being the first version of history.
The things people still remember about Columbine are the false parts the idea of atrench-coat mafia, for instance.
And it doesnt matter how many subsequent versions of Columbine are told and improved upon.
The first one just sticks.
And then you really cant overturn those ideas.
I think modernity is the process of distancing ourselves from reality.
And once you sort of accept that, its always gonna prove itself.
Its always gonna be that way.
You write a lot about authenticity for example, when talking aboutAlanis MorissetteandLiz Phair.
You set their reputations and profiles against one another.
And what youre getting when you buy that record is her.
You could hear it in the sound of her record.
But then the way both records were received, the lyrical content became really dominant.
Is that because they were women?
That probably did play a role.
But if Phair or Morissette writes that song, it wouldve been, Did this happen to you?
Did someone in your class shoot themselves?
A similar thing happened with Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.
People would say things like, If that guy hates fame so much, why doesnt he just stop?
We did not fully believe that Kurt Cobain was actually unhappy.
And then when he killed himself, it made that music suddenly weirdly true.
It actually was incredibly sad and depressing to him that people he didnt like loved his music.
It legitimately bothered him that, say, homophobes liked his music.
It bothered him in a way that for other artists, it wouldve been seen almost as branding.
One of two things is true about him.
If he hadnt become involved in the race and George H.W.
Bush had won a second term, I think the Republicans probably become significantly less radical.
Which is odd considering that, at least by the end of his tenure, Clinton was a centrist.
To some people, at least.Maybe.
He also did not seem at all like a 90s character.
He really had Depression-era values.
He was just a shorthand for a superwealthy, greedy, nonpolitical figure.
They were dudes who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead.
That was the kind of person who was drawn to this.
Their optimism was insane in an era when everyone sort of views the Zeitgeist as cynical and underwhelmed.
But there was really no ceiling to the kind of change that the early internet adopters seemed to express.
And they could sort of operate from a position where they assumed their understanding would become the normative understanding.
We all decided that it had to be free.Well, for one thing, thats 1998 basically.
The music industry seemed to understand it before a lot of other people did.
But the music industry could see this is gonna happen.
And they started trying to find ways to stop it and that only accelerated it.
Generally, there is not a lot of hip-hop in this book.
Brit-pop did seem important to me, but I didnt feel I could get into it.
And I do talk about Eminem and Tupac, and 2 Live Crew and Arrested Development.
But also, frankly, I have more natural understanding of rock than I do of hip-hop.
In high school, I probably had four hip-hop records.
But I could say that about so many things.
This book, the size of it now, its like a normal-size book.
I couldve written a 700-page book instead.
The directorMichael Bayis an important figure in our culture, and he began in the 90s.
Hes not mentioned one time in the book.
The difference is nobody is going to complain that I didnt write about Michael Bay.
And people will definitely complain that I didnt write about hip-hop.
But thats life, you know?
There will always be someone who says, I thought that at the time.
Youre acting like no one thought that, but we thought that!
Thats how people in 1840 thought about slavery.
And someone else will always say, Well, what about this person?
This person wrote the exact opposite.
They thought they were doing this, but then the result was that.
The fact of the matter is thats just kinda how things work.
Any attempt you make to solve a problem is going to create smaller unanticipated problems.
Thats just how it is.
The climate right now is to sort of view everything as a sociopolitical battle.
Im not going to do that.
Take the Clinton crime bill, for instance.
Today, that is seen as a straightforwardly racist statement.
But the idea at the time was more like, Crime is going down, which is good.
She was like, You keep mentioning how the prison population is going up.
You dont seem to be saying how awful this was.
Now, that might sound like Im trying to avoid this problem.
But that really isnt it.
My books probably 70 percent culture, 30 percent politics.
Rodney King and the riots are a bit different, arent they?
They were not narrowly political events; they were also cultural events.
Nobody watching that footage on TV thought they were meaningless or trivial.It was also a mediated event.
That was another part.
And you could look at the consequences of what happened after the verdict.
But everyone was sort of shocked when it happened.
Shock was the most common response to the riots.
And then that all flowed into the O.J.
So I guess the question is: Is culture upstream from politics, or is politics upstream from culture?
I guess I tend to work from the position of it being the latter.
So I write more about culture than policy.
I guess I am operating from the perspective of a historian.
Im not a historian in the traditional sense at all.
So I kind of felt like,Well, its still my book.
That really distorts what the experience was actually like.
I suppose my book will kind of serve as the foundational text for people to disagree with.
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