Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
The ‘90s don’t get a lot of love. The last decade of the 20th century is often seen as a kind of pregnant pause – a political and social interregnum between an event that put an (apparently) full stop on the conflict that had shaped much of the previous century (the Cold War) and one that shifted our gears into a new reality for which we weren’t prepared (the World Trade Center attacks). It was the decade that began with talk about a “peace dividend” and “the End of History,” and ended just as the internet was about to transform the way we read, learned and communicated.
There’s an argument that dividing history up into decades, or even centuries, is an arbitrary activity, shoehorning events and retroactively making judgments about what was important based on hindsight. Writing about “decade-ism” in the Journal of Social History in 1998, Jason Scott Smith said that “the concept of the decade represents thinking about time in a punctuated, discontinuous manner. Discontinuous time encourages viewing history not as a seamless web of events, but as discrete, temporally fragmented snapshots.”
We know now that the Cold War didn’t really go away as much as transform into something baroque, with Russia and China and the West assuming the stance of wary sides in a fight, eyes darting from one opponent to another like the gunfighters at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (Your politics will help you decide who is which; you might even argue that Europe and America are no longer one, homogenous West, and that the end of the bilateral world is turning the gunfight into a melee.) We also know that terrorism against the West has long roots and precedents, and that 9/11 was mostly an institutional failure of imagination, policy and vigilance. Seen in that light, the ‘90s don’t seem like an interregnum as much as an anxious lull between eruptions.
In his recently-published The Nineties: A Book, Chuck Klosterman doesn’t bother to address any caveats about “decade-ism” since his aim is to restore the decade to its rightful place in the quickening sprint of modern history. “There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was,” he writes. “What’s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.”
Like much of Generation X, the ‘90s was the first decade I experienced from beginning to end as an adult; it began and ended with two huge personal milestones – the messy end of my first serious relationship and meeting the woman I would marry. I have understandably vivid memories of the decade, but even at the time I had a hard time describing the tone and significance of a period that really did seem like it was just running in place; looking back that might have had more to do with a stage in my own life than what was really happening.
Reading Klosterman’s book certainly brings all the – at the time, seemingly disconnected – events I’ve sometimes forgot about into focus, as notable cultural, social and political moments that were inexorably building the significantly different circumstances of a new century. Just a list made by skimming through the people, things and events Klosterman writes about builds a picture of a decade that was hardly history in sleep mode: Nelson Mandela; Douglas Coupland; Infinite Jest; Nevermind; Tupac Shakur; the first Gulf War; Ross Perot; Falling Down; 2 Live Crew; “Cop Killer”; Kids; Alanis Morissette; VHS rentals; Quentin Tarantino; the Bowl Championship Series; AOL; Craigslist; Napster; the Unabomber; Art Bell; The X-Files; Michael Jordan; steroids; Boris Yeltsin; Crystal Pepsi; Biosphere 2; Dolly the sheep; The Real World; “Achy Breaky Heart”; Garth Brooks; Seinfeld; Titanic; The Matrix; the Oklahoma City bombing; Clarence Thomas; white Ford Bronco; Fox News; Columbine; Alan Greenspan; Monica Lewinsky; American Beauty; Eminem; The Blair Witch Project; Mike Tyson; Tiger Woods; Y2K; Florida recount.
Someone living outside North America might come up with a very different list; the perception that the ‘90s was a more inward-looking – solipsistic if you want to be uncharitable – decade is ballasted by this list. There is no war in Yugoslavia here, no Rwanda genocide, no Good Friday Agreement, no Oslo Accords. You could say that its massively American focus is Klosterman’s fault, but if I’m honest I’m not sure I could have come up with a terribly different list on my own; living in North America in the ‘90s, it seemed like the end of the Cold War had made the rest of the planet uninteresting, maybe even unimportant, as we learned to live in the world that took shape after the fall of the Iron Curtain and Tiananmen Square.
Our perception of the decade is certainly mediated by memory, but it was also about perception, in the last moments where movies relied on box office, music was purchased on physical media, television was tied to time and place, and landlines far outnumbered cell phones. And politics was still mostly local, inasmuch as hot takes and memes on every issue weren’t shared instantly and globally; if you had an opinion, it was only broadcast outside your circle of friends if you had an op-ed column in a newspaper or access to airtime on TV or radio. If you wanted to read one, you had to buy a paper or tune in. We kept our thoughts to ourselves, mostly because we had no other choice.
Klosterman’s specialty is history framed mostly through the lens of popular culture and personal experience, in books like Fargo Rock City, I Wear the Black Hat, Eating the Dinosaur and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. Born in 1972, it’s no surprise that his viewpoint is wholeheartedly Generation X in scope. For Klosterman, the ‘90s truly began with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind album in September of 1991, which he analyzes as an agent of profound cultural change: “It’s the ideal mainstream version of countercultural ideology. Society at large, still trapped in the 1980s, now has a viable art product that can be used as a fulcrum to overturn everything else. The nineties began in earnest.”
One of Klosterman’s key arguments is that ideas in popular culture can go from marginal to mainstream quickly, once they lose their ability to shock or offend. He recalls two movies, Kids (1995) and In the Company of Men (1997), which were released to enormous controversy: “When first consumed in theaters, Kids and In the Company of Men felt like provoking exaggerations. The kids in Kids seemed too wild and nihilistic to be normal; the men in In the Company of Men seemed too hateful and misogynistic to be typical guys. Decades later, the themes and personalities in both movies have been systematically accepted as endemic and incontrovertible…The ideological perspectives within these films are more relevant now than they were in the nineties. Yet it’s almost impossible to imagine either movie being made today.”
Klosterman is right to say that much of Kids would be called triggering today, and that the obvious satire built into In the Company of Men would be “willfully misinterpreted.” The latter suggests the rather dark possibility that societies don’t actually become more sophisticated with time, and that the passage of just a couple of decades can go in a retrograde direction.
“Conceptually,” he writes, “Kids and In the Company of Men were too prescient for most audiences in the mid-nineties to fully appreciate. But the incendiary language used to express those concepts? That was totally fine. People wanted to hear those words. They wanted people to talk like that, especially if they weren’t expected to agree with what those people were saying. It was fun to be shocked, or to pretend to be shocked, or to feign a lack of shock to prove you were unshockable. The words themselves were not the problem, as long as you didn’t believe them.”
But isn’t it just as likely that, given time, almost anything can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when, as Klosterman suggests, we want to imagine people embodying our worst suspicions or bleakest fantasies about society, or the people we have cast as our enemies? The big difference between the ‘90s and now is that the marketplace for hot takes encourages us to say “all kids” or “all men” (or “all Christians” or “all liberals” or “all conservatives) when entering the battleground of social discourse in the internet age.
While the internet existed in the ‘90s, it was mostly a rumour, or a place we were trying to imagine in cyberpunk novels by authors like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, who had actually been setting stories in “cyberspace” since the ‘80s – probably why they don’t merit a mention by Klosterman. Most home computers weren’t networked, and hard as it is to imagine, you could live a fulfilling life entirely offline.
I spent most of the decade in what I can only describe now as a Luddite cul de sac. I wrote on a manual typewriter built in the ‘40s, and made my living as a photographer, relying on chemical and mechanical technology largely unchanged for decades. My ‘90s ended not when I bought a computer, but when I hooked it up to a 14k dial-up modem, and while the world I entered with it looked nothing like the one described by Sterling or Gibson, it really did change everything.
Setting aside the cyberpunk fantasies, there was a lot of optimism about what the internet would bring us – what Klosterman describes as “a simplistic brand of ad hoc Marxism crossed with social libertarianism, though such political terminology was still verboten and rarely expressed.” It would be, in the words of the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written by net pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, “a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence of conformity.”
Obviously, that didn’t work out, but utopias never do.
Looking back, we often imagine that the internet and its social networks have been around longer than they were, perhaps because we had been imagining them for years before enough of us were really online, or had smart phones, or spent so much of our time on Facebook or Twitter, or wondered just what our children were doing on TikTok. “What’s so disorienting about the internet of the 1990s,” Klosterman writes, “is the paradox of its centrality: It was the most important thing that happened, but its importance is still overrated. The facts don’t align with the atmosphere of our memory.”
Today, that thing few of us had looks like the most crucial, revolutionary thing that happened – even if it wasn’t. We’re struggling to cope with the changes it’s brought, and panic when we think of what would happen if it collapsed or disappeared – like the Y2K crisis that never was. You can’t help but wonder what overlooked event or technology today will look world-changing in a generation. I want to remember that the ‘90s was the last time I felt like the future wasn’t arriving too quickly for me to understand, though Klosterman’s book makes me suspect I might be fooling myself. As he says in what are probably the two most important sentences in his book: “The world, as always, was changing. But it seemed increasingly possible that it was changing faster than its inhabitants could understand, so they just had to pretend that they did.”
