Please, bring back 1990s gatekeeping
Does everyone else idealise a specific decade, or just me?
The Irish musician and podcaster Blindboy, whose eclecticism, verve and mellifluous, mallow-soft Limerick lilt are all major inspirations for this blog, spoke once on his eponymous podcast about what it was like to consume TV in the 1990s. He pointed out that you got to witness things once, and once only – if you missed a specific joke in The Simpsons after school1 because you were too busy calling your friend to say wuzaaaaaapppp!!! over the phone at each other, that was it! You couldn’t rewind, you couldn’t look the clip up online, you couldn’t watch it again on Twitter or YouTube, or indeed on Disney+ or Hulu. If you missed a line in an episode of Beavis and Butt-head or South Park (when it was good) because you were pulling the magenta fur out of your sister’s Furby, that was that; it was gone forever. No replays.
Even if you did see the show, you had to remember what happened in it, what the premise of the plot had been, what the set-ups and punchlines were – and then the closest you could come to revisiting it was to try to recreate with your friends the next day, assuming they had also seen that same episode.
Out of this cultural moment, Blindboy explained, you got a certain privileged class of people (nerds, really) who were really good at recalling this sort of stuff: people who knew the ground, authorities to whom you could turn if you needed to clarify a pop-cultural quibble. These people were essentially gatekeepers. Loremasters. Comic Book Guys. Got a Barenaked Ladies lyric that you can’t place? Recite it to the gatekeeper and be pointed in the right direction at the record store. Don’t know who wrote that funny book about the death cult that hijacks the plane which your buddy recommended ages ago? Sounds like the work of Chuck Palahniuk, my friend. Need to remember who played Ray Liotta’s wife in Goodfellas? No sweat, lads – it was Lorraine Bracco. And she was called Karen. And I can lend you the VHS, if you like.
You get the idea.
Blindboy’s point was that pop culture was different, then, but also quite familiar. There was the massive diversity of books, films and music that we’re used to today – a large enough volume of new media that it was impossible to follow it all, in a way that it might have been in previous decades – but still no way of sorting it or accessing it at will, for free, at home. You were limited to your local library, book shop or video-rental place. Nor could you look stuff up using the device in your own pocket, and if you didn’t know the specifics of the work of art you were looking for, or if you could only remember one or two of those specifics, your best bet was to ask someone clever.2 These people gradually accumulated social status of a sort, because they could be trusted to remember facts, quotes and other minutiae that others couldn’t.
The ultimate expression of this type of encyclopaedic pop-culture guy – and I’m afraid they are and were almost always guys – is, incidentally, Quentin Tarantino, the ultimate problematic fave himself. Don’t just take my word for it. From Chuck Klostermann’s excellent tome The Nineties, published in 2022:
“It would be wrong to claim Quentin Tarantino learned about film history by working at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California (‘I was already a movie expert,’ he explained. ‘That’s how I got hired’). He’d started privately collecting films on videotape in 1978, years before he owned a VCR. As a 16-year-old in 1979, he seemingly saw every film screened in Greater Los Angeles and can still recall in which theater he saw each picture. But Tarantino’s association with the video store ethos (and the imagined iconography of the overbearing video store clerk) defines the archetype. Here was a gangly, ultra-confident person who spoke so fast it seemed as if he was trying to answer questions that had not yet been asked. He knew everything about movies, particularly movies that were considered irrelevant, always expressing his arcane knowledge as if it were somehow obvious and unconditional.
[…]
“‘What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood,’ Tarantino told the BBC in 1994, ‘is that this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good. What to like, what not to like. But here I come. I’m a film geek. My opinion is everything. You can all disagree with me. I don’t care.’”
I was only around for seven years of the 1990s, but it strikes me that they were just better, culturally, as a time to be alive. Gatekeeping was in full swing. There were still subcultures. You had to go to actual, physical places to experience things. But truthfully, a larger part of the reason I think the 1990s appeal is that I think I would have been that guy people asked about the movies. And I think I would have loved it. If that sounds conceited, then I’m sorry – but it’s true.
And maybe some of you would be that guy too, who knows? I know I’m not the only one – every November, it’s now a ritual that people share their Spotify Wrappeds with a zeal bordering on the psychotic. WhatsApp groups are inundated with one-upmanship as to who managed to listen to 90k, 100k, 110,000 minutes of music in a year. There’s definitely still a type of person who obsessively measures and records their cultural consumption, and there’s a certain level of completionism to contemporary pop culture that would have been impossible in the 1990s.3 I personally currently log every film I see on Letterboxd, keep a little notebook of the days on which I finish books dating back to 2016, and often find myself gently anxious if I can’t track down the name of whichever good song I encounter to then add it to whatever ongoing playlist I’m working on.
(For this same reason, the conceit behind the Bill Simmons podcast The Rewatchables fills me with dread. Revisiting the best films to just sit down and keep watching if you happen to flick past them on the TV, already halfway through? I couldn’t start watching a film from anywhere other than the beginning, God forbid. How on earth would I log it on Letterboxd? It would be dishonest!)
Anyway – now that all pop culture is easily and cheaply accessible to everyone, quantity has become its own quality; its own proof of audience engagement. Those amateur critic/collector types that Blindboy once taxonomized have disappeared, largely.
In his latest, Freddie deBoer writes that “The death of the critic as a guide to things you don’t already know is one of the most lamentable elements of the evolution of cultural criticism in the past fifteen years.” He was writing about professional critics, but he’s right. Those same guys who could recall stupid shit like who played drums in the Foo Fighters4 were the same ones who would put you onto new stuff you hadn’t encountered yet. That was a cool thing, and now it’s gone.
As such, I’ve decided to share an album, a film and a book from the 1990s that are not only worth your time, attention and dollars, but which I think to some extent capture the zeitgeist of the decade. (Incidentally, if you want more recommendations like these every fortnight, you can become a paying subscriber to The Chimera.)
Without further ado, then… the chimerical pick of the 1990s.
The album: Look Now Look Again, Rainer Maria (1999)
Look Now Look Again is a 90s emo masterpiece, a scene classic released on Polyvinyl Records, the ultimate incubator label for all things righteous and (musically) Midwestern. But for some reason, Wisconsinite three-piece Rainer Maria are rarely talked about alongside fellow twinkleheads Braid, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Promise Ring or American Football, outside of quite specific emo circles. That’s weird, to me; in many ways, “Breakfast of Champions”, the song I’ve embedded below, is the platonic ideal of second-wave emo. It boasts the full package: vulnerability in the vocals, call-and-response choruses, minimal fuzz or, really, any serious production. Plus a singer more preoccupied with urgency than tune, perhaps, and a DIY-adjacent feel.
Because emo from the 90s was all about feelings. In this case, it’s whatever is evoked when you cycle down quiet suburban streets at twilight in the summer, flanked by pinewoods. It’s “skipping prom to drive up the coast to look at the stars” music, but not in a whiny way. This is earnest music, and you can still hear that earnestness in Rainer Maria’s contemporary third-wave descendants: Camp Cope, Tigers Jaw, The Hotelier, Algernon Cadwallader, and so on.
Perhaps unfittingly for an album imbued with such wistful sadness, Look had a happy ending despite being a little less famous than its scene counterparts: it was reissued in 2018 and, like so many 90s emo bands, Rainer Maria began touring again in the mid-2010s. They’re playing Best Friends Forever Festival in Las Vegas next month which, well, if anyone has a spare thousand dollars they want to send my way…
In a way, there would be nothing more appropriate than falling in love with this sad, searing album before finding out that its makers had broken up and disappeared into the aether, never to play live or record together again. But that’s not the case. Lucky us.
The film: The Daytrippers (1996)
I can’t remember any of the character names in The Daytrippers, which is good as it gives me the perfect opportunity to signpost quite how stacked the 1996 cast of this film was. It goes something like this: Hope Davis, a Long Island thirtysomething, suspects her husband Stanley Tucci of carrying on an affair in New York City, where he works. On the advice of her mother Anne Meara, she decides to confront him in person in the city, and the two of them – along with her father, her acerbic sister Parker Posey and Posey’s hilariously boorish boyfriend Liev Schreiber – drive down into town and proceed to try to track Tucci down over the course of the day and prove whether he is, indeed, dealing dirty.
An archetypical 90s indie, The Daytrippers was Greg Mottola’s debut, before he worked on (among others) Arrested Development and Superbad. Also very 90s is the premise of the affair itself: the family tracks Tucci through downtown New York by asking people at his workplace where he’s gone, and amasses material evidence including photos and (assumed) love letters, before piling back into the station wagon to drive on in their quest for proof. It’s a particularly analogue film, in other words, and refreshingly so. Davis and Tucci would presumably nowadays be in much more constant digital contact than they are in the film. Oh, how it was easier to sleep around back in the day. Sigh.
The book: The Fermata by Nicholson Baker (1994)
On the back cover of my copy of Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, there’s a quotation from Mary Gaitskill. “This book is bursting with sex and beauty,” she says, “wound together profoundly and pornographically. It is bountifully Rabelaisian and intensely refined… I have never read anything quite like it.” Such blurbed praise from Gaitskill, herself a writer not unfamiliar with the perverse and the sexually complex, should not be taken for granted. She’s right: this is a pornographic and devilishly grotesque book, as transgressive as it is ridiculous.
The Fermata is the self-declared autobiography of one Arno Strine, a somewhat wretched temp typist who has discovered that he has the ability to pause time in response to certain stimuli (these will be things like pushing his glasses up his nose, or rubbing the ends of his fingers together). Arno calls this time-pausing process “dropping into the Fold”. And once he’s in the Fold, he does the obvious thing: he wanders around and peels all the clothing off the women he fancies for a curious look – and sometimes more.
Arno is a forerunner to the incel, but what elevates The Fermata from mere exploitative satire is the way Baker develops his voice, which is, for lack of a better word, charming. Arno’s more like a voyeuristic Gen X Humbert Humbert than anything else, arch and brazen and perverted and cowardly, and serially entitled when it comes to his attitude towards the women he mostly encounters by moving from work assignment to temporary work assignment.
It’s not right to ascribe virtue in and of itself to the fact that The Fermata would be very hard to publish in today’s more po-faced publishing climate, but it’s certainly worth keeping that fact in mind, if you do end up reading it. The book is like something that Delicious Tacos would dream up, pitch-black and hyper-cynical. And without wanting to be too on the nose, in the age of Bonnie Blue, how many men can truly claim that if they had the ability to pause time, they wouldn’t at least consider making use of their new talents in exactly the same way Arno does?
Basically, this novel is sick. Sick sick sick! I love it. And did I mention, it’s pretty sick?
Blindboy was born in the mid-1980s, so his frame of reference for the 90s was school, but this could all equally apply – if not apply better – to colleges or workplaces, as well.
The worst-ever fictional example of this is in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a film set in 1991-2 in which the three central characters come across this weird, obscure song from the 70s on the radio and decide it has to be “their” song, and only theirs. They blast it as they drive through a road tunnel, surely forming a lifelong formative memory of youthful hope and promise. But they don’t know the name of the song, nor who it’s by. Eventually, towards the end of the film, they track it down. The song is “Heroes” by David Bowie.
Counter to that: a friend of mine recently told me he had only read two books in the last ten years. He generally just watches what’s on the top of Netflix. I didn’t dare ask how he discovers new music.
Sunny Day Real Estate’s William Goldsmith, since you’re asking, at least in the original line-up.