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The Nineties QUOTES

The Nineties QUOTES

1 " In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

2 " For reasons both explicable and debatable, Xers complained less pedantically than the demographic they followed and less vehemently than the demographic that came next. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

3 " The texture is what mattered. The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time.
It is not the thinking now.
Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

4 " No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

5 " The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

6 " Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism ‘May you live in interesting times’ did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

7 " I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway,” sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. “Who wants to be in touch with all of those people? "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

8 " The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

9 " In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

10 " the Mandela Effect is a collective delusion in which large swaths of the populace misremember a catalog of indiscriminate memories in the same way. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

11 " Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

12 " Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the kind of people who voted for Bill Clinton twice and (perhaps) saw fragments of their own lives within the problems he created for himself. And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

13 " Part of the Gen X irony fixation was the result of so much accepted obviousness: When you made a TV show about the seventies, you could just call it That ’70s Show. Was that title clever, or was that title lazy? It was impossible to know. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

14 " Once consumers experienced free music, they came to view music as something that was supposed to be free. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

15 " The flavor was nothing like beer. It was closer to cheap champagne mixed with Sprite, and—unlike beer—it was the opposite of an acquired taste. Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

16 " Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

17 " Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

18 " The concept of “selling out”—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

19 " Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties

20 " The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad. "

― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties