Why Everyone is Sad and the Nineties Were Better, According to Chuck Klosterman

Also, why "Zombie" is a weird karaoke song

Watching a drunk college crowd in an Irish bar sing along to a cover of “Zombie” by the Cranberries, I was first and foremost impressed by how many kids in their twenties knew the lyrics. Singer Dolores O’Riordan had probably never expected the song to be so popular among drunk people born after the Troubles ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. She had written “Zombie” in 1994 about an incident when the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) put explosives in trash cans in a shopping district of Warrington, England. The bombs killed two children and wounded more than fifty others.

O’Riordan explains:

There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that's why there's that line in the song, 'A child is slowly taken'.

We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that's why I was saying, 'It's not me' – that even though I'm Irish it wasn't me, I didn't do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.

“Zombie” deals with serious stuff. But that doesn’t stop it from being a singalong.

The band ended the night with Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of.” As I threw my fist in the air like a mime and the the crowd shouted: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

I wondered:

Can revolutions ever win by making songs catchy enough?

How do all these Gen Zs know the words to nineties songs?

Where is the balance between honest rebellion, genuine imitation, and the cynical certainty that nothing actually works and the fact that these songs are still relevant is proof of that reality? Maybe it’s all about the journey, not the revolution. Maybe there’s something magical in making anthems out of these tributes to tragedy.

Whatever the case, essayist Chuck Klosterman made an observation about why there’s such a sense of triumph in nineties culture that seems (to Klosterman) to have vanished in the new millennium.

In his view, the difference is simple to see: in the nineties, we hated commercialism. In the two thousands, we hate capitalism. And that’s how a society rots from the inside.

Nineties Optimism V. New Millennium Nihilism

Socialism is more popular on campuses than capitalism. But the numbers are dropping: in 2019, 65% of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism. In 2022, Pew found that the number had dropped to 57%.

In Klosterman’s essay “Sauropods” from his essay collection The Nineties, he ignores this research in typical Klosterman fashion. He instead asserts the dominance of socialism with an anecdote:

Polls taken throughout the presidential tenures of Donald trump and Joe Biden persistently show that people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine view socialism more positively than capitalism, especially if they’re Democrats.

As I established before, reading anything from Klosterman is to engage with the intention of the piece, not the logic of it. In “Sauropods,” Klosterman intends that, because college kids hate capitalism and blame it for “almost any social ill” (he lists disparity, slavery, housing, depression, superhero movies, etc.), we are obviously more sad as a nation than back in the nineties when we still knew that everyone had to make a living and that was okay. As long as you were passionate and authentic about it.

In the signature Gen X style upon which Klosterman’s finest work in The Nineties, hinges, Klosterman thinks that hating capitalism makes you hopeless (lame) but hating commercialism makes you hopeful (cool). It was fine to make money. As long as you still had your soul. According to Klosterman:

In the nineties, when a semi-educated young person was asked to identify the root cause of most American problems, the probable answer would not have been capitalism. The more likely response would have been commercialism.

Commercialism is the ideology of selling out. In the nineties, there was nothing worse than being a sell-out. At least on purpose. If TRL made your medium of rebellion popular, well, that was a different story (and it’s how you end up with Woodstock). There is something meaty about Klosterman’s distinction between anti-capitalism (hopeless and, honestly, a little cringe) and anti-commercialism (honest and never submitting to some corporate conscious). Choosing to hate commercialism lets you make as much money as possible without shame, as long as you are, like, living your dream and being an individual. I think.

To Klosterman, a hatred of commercialism is optimistic. Anti-commercialism operates from the premise that - in and out of themselves - things have merit, regardless of what those things become. He explains that the anti-commercialist may believe:

• Social sickness only emerges from how things are presented

• Art is intrinsically good, but compromising to make it accessible to the masses is bad

• Flannel is cool, but not if you wear flannel to look cool

• Christmas is a special holiday, but hearing “Jingle Bells” in a mall for weeks before Thanksgiving is perverse

This is good and smart, Klosterman determines. The hatred for commercialism in the nineties was all about sniffing out things that weren’t honest. Believing that the motive to make something was the measure of the meaning for the thing - not the popularity or the money made from it - is inherently a Romantic and optimistic notion. Anything can be saved from corruption with the purity of the creator’s intention. Even if the byproduct is money and fame.

Anti-capitalism changes the focus to say that “the problem is the thing” and everything in society seem hopeless all at once. Klosterman writes that the people who hate capitalism believe that:

Anything produced through capitalism is a tool of capitalism, so the things people most desire become the obstacles upholding capitalism most effectively. The notion of intrinsic merit is superfluous, since the only quality capitalism values is the perpetuation of itself. A hatred of capitalism is consciously pessimistic. It works from the premise that - if you are American - the very structure of your workday reality is pernicious.

Here’s how that looks like in practice:

Is your day job pointless?

When you hate commercialism, it’s only pointless if you can’t make it your own and find some meaning from it for yourself.

When you hate capitalism, the answer is unconditionally yes.

This is the “idealistic difference between people who lived through the nineties and people born into the nineties,” Klosterman writes. Yes, he assures everyone who reads the book with breathless self-confidence, it was possible to be against capitalism in the nineties, but it was “much harder to have your opinion taken seriously.” Especially “since all the noncapitalist societies seemed to be collapsing or surrendering.”

Maybe this explains the particular golden age of revolution singalongs: art and meaning coexisted peacefully with popularity as long as the artist took it seriously and the work seemed raw, pure, unadulterated. The revolution in the nineties was about being true to yourself first and the system second. If you yelled about hating the system, there was still no contradiction to becoming a millionaire, as all the members of Rage Against the Machine have proven.

The funny part is when a revolution becomes mainstream, flattened by fame and fortune, because that’s a sign that capitalism has eaten anti-capitalism and anti-commercialism. When revolutionary values have a market value, does that render them null and void?

Klosterman leaves us with this impenetrable nugget: “values illustrate what the mass culture wanted, and those values represent what the counterculture wanted to reject.”

But he also leaves us with a question: what’s so bad about making money, if you have a good, fun, original, singalong time doing it? To rebel against commercialism is to join a revolution just by thinking differently. To rebel against capitalism is to fight the inevitable. One revolution will always have hope. One will only have despair.