“In the spring of 1990, New Kids on the Block started the Magic Summer Tour, a summer that lasted 303 days and earned $57 million. The year’s highs grossing films was Ghost and the ghost of of Patrick Swayze was not CGI. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks debuted on ABC, but its hallucinatory Melo dram was disconnected from both lear time and the rest of the TV universe, where Cheers remained the most popular show.” (p. 33)
Chuck Closterman revisits the 1990s with insights into its music, movies, politics, TV shows, and famous people. Remember Operation Desert Storm? Remember the stock market zooming to new highs?
The Nineties will be famous for the introduction of the Internet and GOOGLE. And the culture changing TV programs like Seinfeld and Friends and The X-Files. The National Football League solidified its position as the dominant sport in America. People thought David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest–1,079 pages–was the best novel of the decade.
What do you remember best about the Nineties? GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction p. 11
Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less p. 5
[projections of the distortion] p. 29
The Structure of Feeling (Swingin’ on the Flippity-Flop) p. 33
[i see death around the corner] p. 49
Nineteen Percent p. 53
[casual determinism] p. 73
The Edge, as Viewed from the Middle p. 77
[the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past] p. 103
The Movie Was about a Movie p. 107
[the power of myth] p. 123
CTRL + ALT + DELETE p. 129
[alive in the superunknown] p. 165
Three True Outcomes p. 169
[vodka on the chessboard] p. 185
Yesterday’s Concepts of Tomorrow p. 189
[the importance of being earnest] p. 209
Sauropods p. 213
[giving the people what they want, except that they don’t] p. 241
A Two-Dimensional Fourth Dimension p. 245
[the spin doctors] p. 273
I Feel the Pain of Everyone, Then I Feel Nothing p. 279
[just try it and see what happens] p. 305
The End of the Decade, the End of Decades p. 311
Acknowledgments p. 339
Sources p. 341
The fact I still had hair. Seinfeld, X Files and the Sopranos. Never cared for Friends. Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Casino, Boogie Nights, The Player,The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption. A good decade for movies.
Steve, you’re right: the 1990s was a good decade for movies! And, there were no streaming services but BLOCKBUSTER was a dominant player rented VHS tapes!
My girls were babies in 1990, music sucked, the job front was always iffy, and I adopted Spike, my fine German shepherd! I read a lot of detective novels, published MDM, and one year was the Fan GoH at Bouchercon! Best of all, I lived through it!
Bob, the Grunge music movement was big in the 1990s although I was not a fan. Loved MDM and remembered it fondly! You did a great job with MDM!
My kids were all born in the nineties, so pop culture took a back seat to all things associated with raising children. We were big Seinfeld fans though—that was our must-see tv. I watched Friends too, but not with the same level of commitment. The nineties was also the decade when I essentially stopped listening to much new music, but I do have fond memories of the Spice Girls because our oldest really liked them. I feel as if I “came back” to new/contemporary music in the 2000s as my kids were getting older and I started listening to what they were listening to.
Deb, Diane and I were big SEINFELD fans, too. Diane liked FRIENDS a lot more than I did. Patrick and Katie started listening to music as they became teenagers in the Nineties and that spilled over to me: Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, Green Day, Radiohead, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Foo Fighters. Katie loved The Spice Girls.
Desert Storm. Poppy Bush riding high one year, then losing to Bill Clinton the next year. Ross Perot (who claimed the North Vietnamese tried to kidnap his daughter) and Admiral (“Who am I? What am I doing here?”) Stockdale. Never liked Friends but did watch Seinfeld (and we’re watching it again now).
The beginning of the last (ever?) baseball mini-dynasty, the 1996-2000 New York Yankees.
Jackie changing schools after over 25 years and starting down the road to retirement. My in laws moving to Florida and my parents to Arizona. My sister getting married.
Jeff, one of my sisters and her husband moved to Arizona in the 1990s (they’re still there) and one of my other sisters and her husband moved to Florida (they’re still there, too). I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea in 1995. And, I donated 30,000 books to the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Special Libraries that same year.
If the 80s reminded us of how great the 70s were, the 90s reminded us of how awful the 80s were. My interest in new music, which was on life support by the end of the 80s was jerked back to life by grunge. Most of the new bands have already been mentioned but I’ll give a shout-out to Pavement, whose terrific SLANTED AND ENCHANTED was my favorite debut album of the decade. TV wise, I’d spent the 80s mostly watching movies on VHS, but in the 90s actual television became interesting again. And the movies!
I’m aware of Klosterman and have read pieces of his work here and there, but none of his books. I think I’ll start with this one.
Michael, I’ve read several of Chuck Closterman’s books. You’ll find THE NINETIES breezy and informative.
Work. I was in the last decade of my career and working long hours and was promoted twice during the decade. I listened to jazz (especially from Mosiac Records) and classical, still have not seen an episode of Steinfeld, watched PBS, sports and read. Was in MDM, DAPA, went to Bouchercons and Left Coast Crime conventions. I was driving a Mazda Miata most of the decade.
Rick, I started the 1990s feeling sleepy during the day. When I asked my internist about it, he said, “It’s just the Aging Process.” I went to an eye-nose-throat specialist in 1994 after my ear was plugged after a flight to Austin, Texas. The ENT looked at my distended uvula and told me, “You have Sleep Apnea.” Once I got my CPAP machine and the right CPAP mask, my Life improved immensely!
I don’t remember anything about anything.
Jeff, I remember you calculating the amount each of us owed after BOUCHERCON group dinners. Amazing!
The ’90s had a lot of great music (if only a little of that on pop charts), films, literature a lot better than INFINITE JEST, and was by the end of it at very least the best time for broadcast television in the US, if not so much because of SEINFELD nor FRIENDS.
Todd, the networks didn’t quite know what to do with BLOCKBUSTER. Many network executives dismissed BLOCKBUSTER as “a fad.” And, little did the network execs realize that streaming services were just a decade away!
Little did Blockbuster realize what to do in the face of Netflix, even before it went streaming.
The broadcast networks, noting they were losing eyeballs to HBO and other cable providers, responded with the likes of ONCE AND AGAIN, HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, THE X-FILES (particularly early on) and its better imitators, and a slew of other good-to-excellent adult fare…then, after 9/11, they discovered that game shows in prime time would get them better ratings for a lot less money, and things got worse again, and haven’t yet fully recovered, if they ever will (a plethora of game shows on prime time, and PBS taking a cue from MHz Worldview and Acorn as syndicator and importing crime drama not solely for MYSTERY! but hand over fist).
Todd, the Internet set the stage for the present content wars among the networks and streaming services. Like many people, I’m frustrated by having a 1000 channels…but nothing good is on.