It’s tempting to say that The Nineties is the book that Chuck Klosterman, Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture, music and digressive footnotes for nearly two decades now, was born to write. But one person who absolutely does not think that is Chuck Klosterman.
“There are many people who could have done a book like this,” Klosterman says, and there’s an element of truth to that. The Nineties is much more high-concept than the typical Klosterman book: It’s his attempt to assess a whole decade from the inside out, focusing more on how the decade was actually experienced than how, 22 years later, we’ve decided we want to remember it. The book, Klosterman’s 12th, has fewer flights of fancy and arch hypotheticals; by design, it’s much more straightforward and matter-of-fact. The point is not how Klosterman personally recalls the ’90s, but to take the decade on its own terms, less a defense of the decade than a fair assessment. (The good, the bad and the Ito.)
The result is a book that has less Klosterman in it than any of his previous works, but in a way that will please longtime fans as well as newbies and skeptics. Consider it almost like David Lynch’s famous excursion into heartwarming Disney fare with The Straight Story. Sure, anyone could have made that movie … but no one would have done it the way Lynch did.
GQ spoke with Klosterman about taking the ’90s both seriously and literally, the flattening of culture, the “slow cancellation of the future” and what it would have been like if a 100-year pandemic had hit in the ’90s rather than right now.
The best part about the book is while it’s clearly packaged and sold as nostalgia, it’s an incredibly straightforward, almost analytical book. It seems to be fighting against the very notion of nostalgia.
Any person who is saying that this book is nostalgic either hasn’t read it, or doesn’t understand the definition of nostalgic. Nostalgia is looking at the past through the lens of your own personal experience and therefore changing the meaning of that memory based on the way you want to feel about your relationship to your own life. That is not a part of this book at all. I did not want to write about the ’90s the way people think about that period now. I wanted to write about the way it actually was when it was happening. It’s not a thing where I’m trying to explain the way the ’90s were in some sort of revisionist mode. It’s antithetical to that.
I realized in the coming years there’s going to be a lot of people writing about this period of time, and because of the way media is now, and because of the way literature is now, it’s going to be people writing about the past through the ideology that they possess—trying to make the past support and fit into the ideological framework that they have now. This book is meant to be more like the baseline that they can disagree with.
I felt this most strongly in the Clinton chapter. People now simply cannot fathom how he could have been supported the way he was, that his numbers would actually go up. But they only feel that way because they weren’t there.
I think people think it’s more sophisticated to look at the past and then dissect it or reconstruct it through our present tense understanding of how the world thinks. But that’s not more sophisticated. It’s just easier for the person doing it. It allows you to basically keep the way you think, and selectively apply it to this distant period where literally everything else about the world was different. All people, myself included, are trapped in the mindset that they currently possess when discussing their past or ideas about the past. They see the previous version of themselves as just a younger version of the person they are now, and that’s never accurate. So what I tried to do is go back and see how things were being analyzed at the time, and then compare it to my understanding of how those conditions actually unspooled.
Some of the things in the ’90s, I do make a clear connection to what is happening now. But for the most part, my hope was that this would be transportative—that it would transport people back to this time, as opposed to transformative, where we completely alter their understanding of the past.
You make a good argument that the ’90s was a period where people were more comfortable with looking inward rather than outward, that the idea of not being constantly involved and engaged with the larger world—with maybe not being constantly political, or even constantly invested with every overarching societal issue–was not only more common, but even the dominant mindset. Now that’s seen as selfish, even privileged.
It was a time when you could kind of just kind of drop out, and be yourself, and work on your own life, or whatever. After the 1980s, where there was this idea that you deserve to be rewarded for really going for the jugular all the time, just getting what you can was seen as admirable. There was a sense in the ’90s that it was OK just to have your concern to be, “How is my life is in this apartment in which I rent?” Or maybe even smaller—what life is like inside of my mind as I sit in this chair in this apartment that I rent.
There is now a kind of pejorative belief that thinking about yourself, and the meaning of your own life is almost some sort of selfish act—that it’s maybe an extension of privilege, somehow. That the fact that you’re thinking about your own life proves that you’re not really concerned about people whose lives are worse. But not only do I not believe that, I don’t think it would necessarily be harmful even if it was partially true. This is our one chance to be alive. If you’re not somewhat interested in your own life, then what is important? If your life is meaningless, why would someone else’s matter, then?
There is a constant refrain that somehow Generation X, and really the ’90s, have been erased somehow. Do you believe this?
I don’t think it has been erased. But I don’t really disagree with people who say it’s somehow less significant. Because there
was a smaller demographic size, and maybe there were fewer collective achievements, it has been perceived as a less important generation. In a way, I don’t really disagree with that. What I would say, as someone who’s a part of it, is that I don’t think that people who consider themselves part of the Generation X caricature or cliché are in any way upended or bothered by the assertion that it was less significant than generations that came before or after. But what’s more important, I’d argue, is that I’m getting the sense it’s going to be the last decade. What I mean by that is that it’s the last ten-year calendar span that seems to have immutable values, and immutable old fashions, and immutable ideas that make it seem separate from the period that it came previously.
I think we are now more in a period of perpetual now where the difference between 2009 and 2019 seems almost impossible to perceive outside of discussions about politics. Politics is the only place that still seems to have these demarcations of change. Culturally, it does seem to be that there’s an unexpected deceleration of culture which is just mindblowing, because throughout this last half of the 20th century, and especially in the ’90s, we talked about the acceleration of culture constantly. It seemed to be the central issue with how the experience of being alive was being understood, and what made it complicated and complex. And then when the internet became the center of culture, it seemed like that would be the ultimate accelerant, and that nothing would accelerate culture more. Yet the opposite seems to have happened, and that’s the confusing problem.
Is it the flattening of everything? I mean, my kids listen to Queen and AC/DC the way kids did in the ’70s, because on Spotify, it’s new to them. I know there are new things being made, constantly. But much of it isn’t sticking like it did in the ’90s, and previous generations. Do you have a theory as to why?
Yes, but it’s not my theory. It’s a theory by a guy named Mark Fisher, called the slow cancellation of the future. It is probably the concept that most informed the way I thought about this book, and particularly how I think about the world now, which is the idea that we have entered this point where all things now are to some degree retro, because you have unlimited access to all things equally. It’s hard to move through time in a linear way. The differences in music from, say, 1987 to 1992 are extreme. But you would not see that kind of change in a five-year span now. I think our relationship to time is changing, and that’s why it’s going to be very difficult for someone to write a book about the first ten years of the 21st century, or the second ten years of the 20th century.
One of the things I’ve thought about a lot during the pandemic is wondering what if all this would have happened at different points in my life—when I was 20, when I was a new parent, when I was in middle school, when I was a baby. Having researched this world of the ’90s, what do you think it would have been like if this pandemic had happened then?
Social media played an interesting role during the pandemic. On the one hand, it was this essential way to find out what was happening with a problem that for the first time in my life I felt like I was experiencing in a firsthand way. It wasn’t learning about some problem happening in Kuwait or whatever. It was happening everywhere in the world, including my own community, and I was literally interested in what was changing every five or ten minutes.
Over time, I think that it was probably pretty detrimental to an already horrific situation. If the pandemic had happened in an earlier stage in history, there probably would have been more death because in all likelihood, there wouldn’t have been a vaccine. We’re blessed there was. It would also be something that people would understand more by their immediate surroundings as opposed to projection and places they’re never actually going to, which suddenly became their backyard because they had access to that information. The idea of just sort of ignoring the pandemic and living your life as if it wasn’t going on—I think that probably would have been more common. It’s pretty easy to see how that could have been bad, and it’s also pretty easy to see how in some ways that could have been good.
Are people just people whatever their age? If social media had been around in the ’90s, would everyone have handled it just as poorly as we have?
If social media had happened in ’93, it actually would have been pretty similar. I think I would have lived on Twitter, it would have seemed like it had the answers to everything. But I do think because social media is so prevalent and powerful now, we talk about the 1990s in this way that almost seems to pretend that social media was already there. The internet was there. But social media wasn’t. And so often when people are complaining about things they don’t like about the internet, what they’re really complaining about is social media. Whereas you don’t hear people complaining about the internet because it’s easier to book plane reservations. You don’t hear people complaining about the internet because it’s a good way to kill time if you’re waiting in line, or you suddenly want to learn about the history of Syria. That’s never anyone’s complaint.
The complaint is always how it changes the user and how it causes people to have a bifurcated existence where they have their real life and then they have this life that they’ve built, and then after a while, the life that they’ve built becomes the predominant life. They complain about the fact that it polarizes people politically, and that it seems to empower people with less information than people with more information. But these are all extensions of social media. The people who built the internet in the middle ’90s—the internet that we understand now—were a small community of people. They assumed that their interest in the internet would end up becoming the universal interest in the internet—that the reason they liked this technology and the things that they found fascinating about it would translate to the world at large. All they had to do was experience it. But as soon as the world at large did experience it, that changed because internet pioneers shared a sensibility that later adopters did not.
Now that you’ve dug so deep into this time, what was your favorite year of the ’90s?
The first half of 1994 was my last semester of college. The last half of 1994, I was working in Fargo and meeting these people who I’m still friends with to this day. I felt as though I had a real understanding of what was happening in the culture. I did not feel like someone who was observing society as much as really integrated into what was going on with it. Also, I was not very smart. The things that were wrong about my life, or the mistakes that I was making, weren’t really visible to me. In fact, because I was 22, I probably assumed the choices that I were making were right. I was much more confident in my 20s than I am now.
When I look back at the time, though, I am forced to accept that I believed I was miserable. I certainly expressed ideas that you would hear from a miserable person. But now it seems like if I could take a vacation to any time in my life for two weeks, I would like to go back to April 1994. That, to me, is nostalgia, and that’s why I didn’t write about myself in this book. Because if I was writing about myself in this book, what I would be writing about are the experiences I had told through what was going on in the culture, and therefore working the culture to match my memory. That’s what Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is like, and this book is not like that.