I’ve become a Chuck Klosterman fan in recent years so when The Nineties: A Book was released 3 years ago I was eager with anticipation, and luckily it turned out to be maybe my favorite book of his(especially lucky since his previous book, Raised in Captivity, is my least favorite). It’s only natural this book would appeal to me since I’m sort of a ’90s kid. I say “sort of” because I started high school just a week before 9/11, so all but the first week of my high school years happened after the ’90s had finally died in spirit. However, I have more nostalgia for the ’90s than the ’00s in large part because, while I have plenty of good memories of the ’00s, overall they kinda sucked. Also, they didn’t really have an “end of an era” moment like the ’90s did with 9/11.
Meanwhile, Chuck’s pretty solidly an ’80s kid, in that he graduated high school in ’90 and by 9/11 his first book had been released(which, appropriately, was about ’80s metal), which gives him a more objective view of the decade than someone like me. He says that the ’90s ended in spirit with 9/11, which I agree with, but he says it began in spirit with the September 24, 1991 release of Nevermind, whereas I think it really ended 3 months later with the end of the USSR, since I think the main defining characteristic of the ’90s is the lack of a major enemy for America.
As much as I like this book I do have some issues with it, and I’m going to focus a disproportionate amount on those because just praising the book would be boring. My main quibble with the book is its title, which I think is too on-the-nose. Here’s some other ideas:
- From Nevermind to 9/11
- Smells Like Nostalgia
- Isn’t it Nostalgic?
- What’s the Deal With the Nineties?
The book has an introduction, 12 chapters, and 11 mini-chapters in between on smaller topics. One I have some comments on is the one on the ’92 election, which focuses mostly on Bush and Perot since Clinton gets his own chapter later. In ’92 Perot got 19% of the vote, the highest of any 3rd party candidate in the last century. Chuck briefly mentioned Perot’s ’96 run and how he only got 8%. I think, though, that that deserves more credit because that was the 3rd-highest finish for a 3rd party candidate in the last century(the 2nd being Wallace in ’68). In fact, in the last century no other 3rd party candidate has gotten even 1% of the vote more than once.
Chuck also discusses the idea of Perot as a proto-Trump(Peroto-Trump?). He concedes some similarities while disputing others. One point I agree with him on is that it’s hard to call Perot anti-intellectual considering he did infomercials where he pointed at charts and graphs for a half hour. I disagree with him on other points, though. He says of Perot that “He did not emerge in a derange, desperate era.” but I think it’s debatable whether Trump did; from what I remember the 2016 election looked like it’d be a pretty normal one before he announced his candidacy. Chuck also said “It could be argued that his main similarity to Trump was an overdriven ego, but that’s hardly worth mentioning. An egoless president cannot exist.”, which I think unfairly flattens things out. Just because you need a certain level of ego to be president doesn’t mean that, say Obama is comparable with Trump in that regard. One difference Chuck didn’t mention is that I get the impression Perot wasn’t that famous before he ran. In fact, I’d say Trump was probably more famous than both Perot and Clinton at the beginning of ’92.
Now on to the Bill Clinton chapter:
- Chuck begins by using Pauly Shore’s movie career as an example of something that seemed normal then but seems bizarre now, and that’s even more true now that Pauly’s best known for harassing Richard Simmons.
- I think Chuck overstates how bizarre Clinton’s presidency seems in retrospect. It may be true that the bar for how progressive a Democrat can be has moved leftward since the ’90s, but we still elected a centrist Democrat president in 2020. Also, it’s hardly unusual for a figure who seemed progressive in his time to seem backwards by the standards of later times. I also think that, as bad as some of his personal conduct was, especially through the lens of MeToo, it’s less defining of him as a person when you look at all the admired figures who’ve done bad things in their personal lives.
- Chuck mentions that a big part of Bill’s ’96 victory was his campaign using a “neuropersonality poll” that polled undecided voters according to their non-political desires, which reminds me of a prototypical version of “the algorithm.”
- The chapter closes by comparing the drop in Clinton’s popularity in recent years to that of American Beauty, especially because of the movie’s plot being about a middle-aged man being attracted to a girl much younger than him. Speaking of Kevin Spacey, I think you could also draw parallels with the decline in popularity of House of Cards, especially given the parallels between the Underwoods and the Clintons.
Here’s some more thoughts:
- In the chapter on baseball, Chuck talks about the ’98 McGwire/Sosa home run race and how it was credited with saving baseball before the discovery that it was all due to steroids. Another thing about that season that seems odd in retrospect to me was the fact that the Yankees had one of the best seasons ever and their dominance was treated as a feel-good story.
- Speaking of sports, one mini-chapter is about Division 1 college football’s decision to adopt a playoff system, which Chuck thinks may have been a bad idea(although it appears the NCAA disagrees, since they expanded the playoffs again from 4 teams to 12). A couple other long-awaited changes in sports that finally happened in the ’90s were D1 college football’s adoption of overtime and elimination of ties, and MLB’s adoption of interleague play.
- Chuck mentions the ’93 WTC bombing as an example of something that was big at the time but has been forgotten thanks to later events. It may be true that 9/11 dwarfed that bombing, but it’d already been dwarfed in terms of death toll by the ’95 OKC bombing. If anything, I’d say 9/11 helped ensconce the ’93 bombing in people’s memories as an important precursor to 9/11.
- When talking about Oprah he made it sound like she’s an unassailable figure these days, which I disagree with considering how much she’s been criticized for supporting some dubious people and causes.
- Ending on a note of praise: one passage I really liked was the last 7 sentences of the book’s penultimate paragraph. It’s a long paragraph about what different American newspapers were covering the day before 9/11(the last paragraph is a short one about the morning of 9/11) before ending with “No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”