The Nineties: A Book – Chuck Klosterman
Klosterman writes cultural criticism. His reputation-making first book, Fargo Rock City, examined what 80s heavy metal sounded like to a North Dakota farm kid. In 2022, Klosterman has worked at ESPN, Esquire, Spin, and the New York Times. He’s written books of fiction and non-fiction, and he’s earned the right to analyze the decade dominated by his Generation, the much-discussed Generation X. Klosterman talks about the topics you’d think he would: movies (like Clerks and Pulp Fiction), television (like Seinfeld and Friends), and music (like Nirvana and Tupac). But he also talks about general culture (the internet) and politics (Ross Perot and Bill Clinton get separate chapters). You get a fresh take on what’s important about Michael Jordan trying to become a baseball player as well as what is retroactively so strange about the Gore / Bush 2000 presidential campaign that ended the decade. This is a book primarily about REPRESENTATION, the celebrities we use as avatars for ourselves and the politicians we elected as our politicians. Implicitly, it’s also about SUCCESSION, the assessment of the past and what parts of it live on in the present.
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