Weekend Guide: The Nineties

the age of not knowing

In high school I read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. It was my first exposure to pop culture criticism. High minded essays on music, film, sports, and television. Conversational in tone with a knowing bite. It explored the philosophical forces that underly the inaneness of everyday pop culture. For me, it was academic.

I haven’t missed a Chuck Klosterman release since.

The Nineties: A Book was an instant purchase for me. Although the cover may suggest otherwise - this is not nostalgia porn.

Klosterman takes the approach of telling the story of the nineties, not from how they seem to us now, but how they felt as they were actually unspooling. Subtle nuance, for sure. It seems simple, but it’t not.

Think about it. In the nineties it was acceptable to not know something. It was acceptable to not participate in everything. You could kind of just be.

That was reality.

Garth Brooks was a the biggest star on earth. Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs. Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of ER. Pauly Shore was a bankable movie star.

*I really did like Bio-Dome. It is actually the first movie I have a memory of seeing in the movie theatre. Klosterman does a deep dive on the Biosphere 2 project that Bio-Dome was a parody of. I had no idea!

That was reality. It seems like a distance past, but really, it wasn’t that long ago. The era of not knowing things is gone. Good or bad? Who knows.

Remember getting lost?

Try ditching your phone and going for a drive.

Or, you could give The Nineties: A Book a spin - if this sort of thing is your bag baby!

The Nineties were a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking then. Not so much now.