The Nineties
A description and analysis of some of the more acknowledged events that happened in America between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers.
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What Hacker News says
- In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation.
Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.
https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...
We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.
Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.
There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.
I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".
While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(
In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!
It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
- > If you missed them, you had to wait a year.
This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinfeld and those that missed it, just missed it.
> There's a quality bestowed through scarcity.
There's a depth to scarcity, but your kids are going to watch way more things growing up than you did and you have no idea what that means for them.
I get that you aren't able to pass on that "value the thing you hold, not the two you can get later" sort of commitment to a single thing.
But that's valuing the only true scarce thing left in my life at least - my time and attention.
I remember feeling the "post-scarcity" thing going to a library for the first time in the US.
I used to buy books and read them, before I came to the US. Each book was a hard choice on whether to spend money on it or buy something else.
I now decide to read through a book based on whether I want to spend the time, not the money.
Unless I'm going to be immortal, there's no fixing that scarcity (and I get how young people/kids don't get that part at all - their life is endless from where they are).
Maybe do a little better so that my 70s aren't spent in a bed, but in a park outdoors reading.
- According to Chuck Klosterman in his book on 'The Nineties' more people watched an average episode of Seinfeld than watch the finale of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos.
About the only thing that remains for mass audiences is sport. Even there on demand replays of sports are changing things.
Also don't best selling records or streams or whatever actually indicate far less revenue and a far smaller share of what people are listening to than they used to ?
