daapp.blogg.se

It feels as though the 1990s weren’t just the last decade of the 20th century but sort of the last decade, period - the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own. The editor Gavin Jacobson has called the ’90s an “age without qualities,” which I think describes a pretty common feeling about the decade - that it’s just kind of floating there in our memory, a bit undefined. “The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon,” Klosterman writes in his introduction.

But he also thinks the basic, hand-me-down cliché of the time is a pretty good shorthand. Throughout, Klosterman tries to resist reducing the time to neat narratives about globalization and neoliberalism, American empire and the rise of the culture wars, or to impose the perspective of the decades to come on the past. There is also a lot of other stuff - about the internet, Ross Perot, the Biosphere 2 project launched out of environmental anxiety. There is indeed a lot about Reality Bites, and Nirvana, and selling out in The Nineties. It was, he writes, “a remarkably easy time to be alive” - at least as it was experienced by someone like Klosterman, most known for his obsessive meditations on pop culture in books like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and whose “experience across the nineties was comically in line with the media caricature of generation X.” In his new collection, The Nineties: A Book, the critic Chuck Klosterman works ground up from culture to build a sort of mood-board history of a decade that floats a little out of focus in the national memory: close enough to feel familiar, far away enough to feel weird.