The Nineties
A Book
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- € 11,99
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- € 11,99
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An instant New York Times bestseller!
“Informative, endlessly entertaining.”—BuzzFeed
“Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture.”—GQ
From the author of But What If We’re Wrong comes an insightful, funny reckoning with a pivotal decade
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. Landlines fell to cell phones, the internet exploded, and pop culture accelerated without the aid of technology that remembered everything. It was the last era with a real mainstream to either identify with or oppose. The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition, and a shift in consciousness, that we’re still struggling to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.
In The Nineties, Klosterman dissects the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the pre-9/11 politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan, and (almost) everything else. The result is a multidimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pop culture critic and essayist Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) turns his flinty eye to the 1990s, "the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional." Blending cultural analysis with his own caustic hot takes, Klosterman claims that the chief characteristic of the '90s was a pervasive feeling of ambivalence, "defined by an overwhelming assumption that life... was underwhelming" (his writing has a similarly detached tone). He views how this societal apathy coursed through the decade's indie films, such as Larry Clark's 1995 cult hit Kids (its theme: "there was no meaning to anything, ever"), and was embodied by Nirvana's Nevermind, the ideal soundtrack for, as Kurt Cobain put it, "a completely exhausted Rock youth Culture." But at the same time, Klosterman counters, the decade gave rise to art that tackled timely issues including the AIDs epidemic—with Rent debuting on Broadway in 1994—and brought queer stories to TV via such shows as NBC's Will & Grace. "The world, as always, was changing," he writes, citing how the decade saw a shift in everything from politics and awareness around race to the explosive growth of the internet and celebrity culture—a preview, he writes, of what was to come in subsequent decades. This nostalgic look at the waning days of offline culture both piques and entertains.
