The Nineties

Informationen zum Autor Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of nine nonfiction books (including The Nineties; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs ; and But What If We're Wrong? ; and Killing Yourself to Live ), two novels ( Downtown Owl and The Visible Man ), and the short story collection Raised in Captivity . He has written for The New York Times , The Washington Post , GQ , Esquire , Spin , The Guardian (London), The Believer , and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. He was raised in North Dakota and now lives in Portland, Oregon. Klappentext 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 . Leseprobe INTRODUCTION The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can't read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in '62 and ended with the shootings at Kent State in May of 1970. The seventies were conceived the morning after Altamont in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of American Gigolo , which means there were five months when the sixties and the seventies were happening at the same time. It felt like the eighties might live forever when the Berlin Wall fell in November of '89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die). When writing about recent history, the inclination is to claim whatever we think about the past is secretly backward. Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade, historian Bruce J. Schulman writes in his book The Seventies . This impression could hardly be more wrong. In the opening sentence of The Fifties , journalist David Halberstam notes how the 1950s are inevitably recalled as a series of black-and-white photographs, in contrast to how the sixties were captured as moving images in living color. This, he argued, perpetuates the illusionary memory of the fifties being slower, almost languid. There's always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What's complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself. The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily med...

Auteur

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of nine nonfiction books (including The Nineties; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; and But What If We’re Wrong?; and Killing Yourself to Live), two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man), and the short story collection Raised in Captivity. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian (London), The Believer, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. He was raised in North Dakota and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

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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.

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INTRODUCTION

The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can t read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in 62 and ended with the shootings at Kent State in May of 1970. The seventies were conceived the morning after Altamont in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of American Gigolo, which means there were five months when the sixties and the seventies were happening at the same time. It felt like the eighties might live forever when the Berlin Wall fell in November of 89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die).

When writing about recent history, the inclination is to claim whatever we think about the past is secretly backward. Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade, historian Bruce J. Schulman writes in his book The Seventies. This impression could hardly be more wrong. In the opening sentence of The Fifties, journalist David Halberstam notes how the 1950s are inevitably recalled as a series of black-and-white photographs, in contrast to how the sixties were captured as moving images in living color. This, he argued, perpetuates the illusionary memory of the fifties being slower, almost languid. There s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What s complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.

The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media. Its trajectory can be traced with accuracy. Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape, along with thousands upon thousands of trivial moments that meant nothing at all. The record is relati…