I adopted the persona of Switzerland during this period.

How did you feel seeing the culture you were raised on become passé in the wake of Nevermind? It happened really quick.Īs an adolescent in the 1980s, you were deeply into KISS, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and glam metal, which was the antithesis of grunge. When I went home from the University of North Dakota for Christmas in 1991 and came back to school in January, it seemed like literally everyone I knew had Nevermind.

There was almost an illusion that this had been an organic transformative event. But it had a texture and a feel that was so unlike the way music culture had been prior to that.

I guess this is a big deal.” It wasn’t a totally accidental thing. But when the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out in the same week as the record, it shifted everyone’s perception: “This is being marketed as a major release. I absolutely did not buy Nevermind when it came out. You begin the book by writing that the 1990s truly began not on January 1, 1990, but with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind on September 24, 1991. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Over the phone from his home office in Portland, Oregon, Klosterman shared memories of his neutral stance in the bitter rivalry between arena rock and grunge, his formative first encounter with Richard Linklater’s film Slacker, and his realization that sellout paranoia was severely detrimental to the Gen X psyche. Still, I wanted to know more about his 1990s. With The Nineties, Klosterman removes himself almost entirely, allowing him to tell a more universal story of how the decade was understood as it unfolded. His 2003 best-seller, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, essentially serves as a ’90s memoir, with personal essays on The Real World, Saved by the Bell, and other totems of the era. A nostalgia-laced memoir The Nineties is not, which may surprise or even disappoint those who know only the author’s earlier works, among them Fargo Rock City and Killing Yourself to Live, which delivered a highly approachable blend of autobiography and pop critique. What’s noticeably absent from Klosterman’s twelfth book is Klosterman himself. For more than 300 pages, he covers the waning years of the 20th century: Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, Seinfeld and Friends, “Achy Breaky Heart” and Garth Brooks, Michael Jordan the baseball player and Pauly Shore the movie star, the slow, steady creep of the web and “the slow cancellation of the future”-the dispiriting notion that our post-internet world is unable to produce genuinely new culture, only recycled versions from the past. It’s the same conclusion Klosterman lands on in The Nineties, a fairly straightforward history of the American decade enlivened by his exceptional ability to draw unexpected insights from mass culture.

The nineties a book by chuck klosterman