Chuck Klosterman's Decade of Ambivalence

The 1990s were a decade whose cultural flash points can now be readily summarized by the Twitter historian, the nostalgic TikToker, and anyone else who has processed years of received clichés into conventional wisdom. Nirvana remade rock music in the image of angst and flannel; the O.J. Simpson trial ushered in the reign of the 24-hour news cycle; the World Wide Web was slowly becoming a big deal beyond the world of nerds and losers; the travails of the Clintons polarized American politics. But surely the 1990s weren’t so easily reducible. We are a little more than 20 years removed from the final decade of the 20th century: a decade ripe for extended reappraisal as a distinct epoch of its own, yet one that is at risk of being engulfed by the hoary truisms and generalizations that reduce all historical eras into a collection of data points, rather than something that real people—many of them alive today—actually experienced.