Pat Kane: The nineties were ‘carefree’ but set rolling elements of the current times

MTV (about as 80s as it gets) announced the other day that it’s creating two new channels, MTV 80s and MTV 90s ... reflecting our audiences’ viewing patterns”. Meaning said audiences are getting old and nostalgic, and they want the fondly remembered past in concentrated doses.

Immediately, even this minor rebranding opens up the politics of who gets to define what matters, for these decades. For example, one channel being replaced is MTV Classic (her name is Rio and she dances on the sand, etc, etc).

The other is MTV Base, launched in 1999 to showcase “music of Black origin”. R’n’B, hip-hop and grime “holds a broad appeal for a variety of fans across the UK”, says the company’s press release. Therefore it can now be “integrated into mainstream playlists more generally”.

Well, it didn’t get to that stage without a significant struggle. And how you regard that may also say something about your general view of the 80s and 90s.

I’ve been generally enjoying Chuck Klosterman’s new book The Nineties. It’s a multitudinous take on the decade, from a celebrated US rock critic.

But I have to raise the hand-icon at the start. By comparison with how seriously Klosterman takes Nirvana, Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette, the juggernaut of hip-hop and rap – firmly bolting itself into the mainstream in this decade – is fitfully mentioned.

The writer wants us to understand the 90s as the Gen X era. Meaning it was filled with slackers who disdained watching TV, angsted about “commercialism” and “selling out”, and mouthed “whatever” to all ideological positions.

But as one of Chuck’s interviewers (David Wallace-Wells) pointed out, “there are plenty of people who, if they were writing a book like this now, would focus on the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, welfare reform and the Clinton crime bill, Rodney King and the LA riots”.

There’s not much slacking and “whatevers” in that history. The establishing of MTV Base was a humane response to the stresses of the 90s. Let’s see if its absorption into the “mainstream” – during an era of Black Lives Matter, decolonisation thought and sharp migrations politics – is credible.

Admittedly, this is a fun game to play – sifting through the detritus of these decades, pushing the slider back and forth between culture and politics. Maybe you regard the 90s, like Klosterman does, as a time of “ecstatic complacency”. That is, a post-Cold-War waking dream, playing between the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the 9/11 bombing in 2001.

The 90s were “a time when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional ... an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us”, writes Klosterman. “It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome.”

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Long, slow sigh. Or there’s an alternative view. Which is to regard the culture and politics of the 90s as the seedbeds of our current chaos.

Conspiracy theorising? The X-Files and Twin Peaks. An overwhelming and surveilling “metaverse”? The Matrix. Suspicion of science and tech? The Unabomber. Right-wing populism? Ukip, Italy’s Northern League, Greece’s Golden Dawn, all founded in the 90s. (The Washington near-coup in 2021 had its roots in gun clubs, veteran societies, nationalist groups, peaking with Timothy McVeigh blowing up an Oklahoma building in 1995 – still the worst act of American domestic terrorism).

Biology and ecology disordered? Dolly the sheep, the Human Genome Project, green attitudes rising to new peaks. The destablising dominance of finance capital over everything? Tip the hat to Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown for their light-touch regulations (and note the failures in emerging markets throughout the decade, like Mexico, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil).

You’d perhaps think that Putin’s horror flips us back to the 80s at its Cold-War heights, or even the 30s as we contended with fascism. However, the supposedly carefree 90s set elements of it rolling.

It's become a commonplace of Ukraine/Russia commentary over the last few weeks: that as we implacably oppose Putin’s brutal invasion, we can’t forget the profound Western mistakes that were made in diplomacy and development towards Russia, post the end of the Cold War.

Well, Klosterman relates a beauty in The Nineties. He devotes a short chapter to how American agents directly intervened to help the drunken, hapless Boris Yeltsin triumph in the 1996 Russian general election. (It’s hardly a secret: the July 15 cover of Time magazine ran with “Yanks to the Rescue: the secret story of how American advisors helped Yeltsin win”).

Assisting Yeltsin’s daughter, they literally crafted a project fear – constantly messaging of “a return to breadlines, a potential civil war and the possibility of social unrest that would never go away”. As Richard Dresner, one of the US operatives, noted: “The drumbeat about unrest kept pounding till the end of the electoral cycle.” Psy-ops practiced on all sides, it seems.

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You wrinkle your nose at some of Klosterman’s nostalgias for the 90s. One is that youth then were “anti-commercial”, not “anti-capitalist”, as the cutting edge is now.

He says the distinction is between optimism and pessimism. Anti-commercial means that it’s possible that your offer – whether artistic or technological – could be valued in and for itself, surviving all marketing crudities. (I’ll confess that, in my own late-80s/early-90s pop career, that was our working assumption: our songs were “sugared pills”, dropped into the pop charts).

Anti-capitalist means that your offer is really just a tool of the all-pervasive, digitally propelled market system. Nothing can escape its capture.

I have a complex response (due to a complex experience in the music business, at the cusp of the two decades). Certainly, the reverberations of punk and post-punk were still being felt: the first implying three chords and the truth, the second implying all chords and many truths.

Even as you went for the shiny media slots and glossy magazine covers, you though you were bringing the oceanic spirits of Scritti, or the Minds, or the Heads, or A Certain Ratio to the hearths of the nation.

But as Klosterman makes clear throughout the book, most of the 90s was a predominantly TV-defined age – where audiences were much bigger, but also tamer (if you could get to them).

He has a brilliant, and related, point about phones and phone books. In the 90s, you had to wait for a call, or make the call, or else be uncontactable – but the device was in the background. You also placed your address and number in a physical phone book.

Now we obsess with, and are addicted to, our regularly updated smartphones – they’re right in our foregrounds. And the idea of our domestic contact details being so transparently open to the prying, polemical world ...

Klosterman sees his 90s end with the terror of 9/11, “collapsing with the skyscrapers”. What he laments most is that the attack shattered “the phantasm of the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others”.

Indeed. All that 90s idealism about expressing yourself through networks and connectivity (at the time, I drank deeply) became our entanglement with an angry, unjust globe. It’s no doubt worth recalling that the origin of the name al-Qaida came from the electronic database that the CIA kept on Mujahideen militants in Afghanistan.

I remember that morning of September 11, 2001. I had the FT under my arm, with James Harding’s big read on the anti-capitalist movement ready to go. Then I looked at the unimaginable events, on a big TV in a Glasgow retail window. My own version of Klosterman’s “ecstatic complacency” came tumbling down too.

We may think we’re in a similarly collapsing moment. So it would be understandable to find ourselves escaping, maybe even restoring ourselves, by means of these new MTV channels. But behind the shoulder pads and hoodies, there’s always the turbulence of history going on. It’s the very opposite of “whatever”.

Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties is available on Penguin Press.