The Decade of Misremembering

Most people hold the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to be the beginning of the ’90s: It symbolizes an era said to involve unprecedented peace, prosperity, and geo-political stability. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book, by contrast, selects fall 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind was released, as the pivotal moment when “the nineties became a recognizable time period with immutable values.” Namely, the caricatured values of Generation X: “an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.”