In his 2005 book, Mediated, media theorist Thomas de Zengotita had a name for the “psychic sauna” of media representations that we glide over the surface of, like “a little god, dipping in here and there” - he called it “the Blob.” Klosterman’s rationale for the book’s emphasis on pop culture is that technology had “accelerated culture” and changed the human relationship to reality in the ’90s. Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich, pivotal figures on both sides of the aisle, barely make an appearance. Kurt Cobain gets about as many words as Bill Clinton, and annoying former MTV personality Pauly Shore earns only slightly less attention than George H. Politics in The Nineties is portrayed as downstream from the riches of televised pop culture. He describes the period as being “heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious,” yet so easy and problem-free that you could pretend the larger society was “barely there.” “It was a period of ambivalence,” he writes, “defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming.” In The Nineties, Klosterman doesn’t seek to dispel the myth that little happened between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11. If the ’90s were a wasteland of world events, it makes perfect sense that the decade’s best-selling popular history would be written by a chilled-out Gen Xer known to inject navel-gazing memoir into meta-commentaries on cultural detritus - rather than a public intellectual like, say, Jill Lepore. So goes the prevailing rearview-mirror perspective, the idea being that Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” might be literally true and not just a prophesy about the hegemony of liberal democracy. Just as Seinfeld, the defining TV program of the ’90s, was a show about nothing, maybe the entire decade was about nothing.
To borrow a stylistic tic from Klosterman, it’s not that big of a deal. So what does it say about the 1990s that the decade’s most notable retrospective so far - The Nineties - has been written by Chuck Klosterman, the pop-culture critic who once described his experience of binge-watching Saved by the Bell reruns as being in a “parasitic relationship.”
All of them were serious professionals with serious credentials doing serious work. The scribes who divvied up the second half of the twentieth century were academic historians (Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies), mainstream political journalists (David Halberstam’s The Fifties), or some combination of both (Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and Reaganland). Review of The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin, 2022)Ĭonvincing a book publisher that you’re the right one to synthesize an entire decade of American history takes a certain brand of institutional authority.
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