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...was established that every sociopolitical act of the twenty-first century would now be a numbers game on a binary spectrum. My undefined, uncommitted Gen X worldview was instantaneously worthless. That was over. Now there were only two sides to everything.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (60%)

Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (48%)

The early nineties were the closest New Age dogma ever came to real credibility, simply because it was the only time when those who cared about it most had enough cultural and economic power to force it into being.[*]

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (37%)

Mark Fisher conceded in 2014. “The key technological shifts are with the consumption and distribution of music, rather than in its production. It’s not that the 20th century was an ideal situation for musicians . . . but in retrospect, it’s looking better and better. Because paradoxically, big record companies did insulate some musicians from market pressure.”

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (29%)

What seemed enticing about the seventies was that life experiences were still unscripted, and that no one had figured out how to give the people what they wanted before the people even knew what that was.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (20%)

It epitomized the long-standing complaint that a male artist’s experience is seen as universal while any female experience is inexorably viewed as personal—instead of becoming a song about breakups, it became a song about this specific breakup.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (19%)

The Eagles did not possess the potential to sell out.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (5%)

The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (3%)

For reasons both explicable and debatable, Xers complained less pedantically than the demographic they followed and less vehemently than the demographic that came next. Which is not to say they never complained, because they absolutely did—the vacuous center of Gen X culture was a knee-jerk distaste for Boomer ideology and a fear of invisible market forces that infiltrated everything.

— The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman (3%)