I had a poster of Dominique Wilkins up in my room. I preferred science fiction movies and dumb action reruns like Magnum, P.I. When we were younger, we argued about toys. Jason’s favorite was the Ultimate Warrior. We argued about professional wrestling-although these arguments were always about which federation was better, the WWF or the NWA. He owned tapes by Big Daddy Kane and Tone Loc. (We both loved Warrant.) We argued about rappers. ![]() He was all about Def Leppard, where I preferred Aerosmith. If the artist didn’t print them on the liner notes, you had to sing along and try to decipher them. We argued about song lyrics, which was really a fool’s game. He could talk classic rock and progressive and hair metal and rap. We both loved music, but he was an otherworldly superfan he was literally reading Billboard Magazine in sixth grade. He moved to Kentucky in 1991, but our friendship in my mind embodies much of the era. One of my best friends was a kid named Jason. The fact that I was right and they were wrong meant absolutely nothing. I told them that, no, he was a notorious womanizer, so much so that the phrase, “in like Flynn” was about him. My friends were all arguing that Flynn was gay. I remember one night, at a bar, I got into an argument over Eroll Flynn. Arguments over facts were common, and usually whatever consensus was reached was considered a settled matter. Klosterman hits on the profound shifts from the ’90s to now. He’s chilly and thoughtful, where I run hot and weird, and he’s a best-selling author and I’m. I’ve read all of his nonfiction, and he informed/inspired bits of The South Never Plays Itself. I have a great affection for Klosterman he’s funny, insightful, and weirdly opinionated about strange things. ![]() I also read Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. I add Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s “Gray Cell Green” to her list. She leans in heavy on alternative and grunge, one-hit wonders and crossover hip hop: Blind Melon, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Sarah McLaughlin, alongside Tupac and Salt ’N Peppa. She makes a playlist of all ’90s music, then challenges me to guess the songs as quickly as I can. For a brief respite-a momentary escape from the succession of existential crises-we traveled back to the 1990s. It’s been a throwback week for us, Beth and me.
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