“The Last Day of the ’90s: An Essay,” Daniel Vollaro.
Decades end, not with a date, but with a feeling. We collectively agree that they are over, and then we argue later about what event marked the finale. When did the decade page finally turn? Historian Arthur Schlesinger, who gave the commencement address at my college graduation on a very hot day in May 1987 wearing a pink bow tie, wrote that the ’50s ended with a bullet fired from the Book Depository in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I grew up hearing from my older cousins that the ’60s ended at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, but the massacre at Kent State happened on May 4, 1970, and Jim Morrison died July 3, 1971, so who can say for sure when the decade ended. Did the ’70s end on January 20, 1981, with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration or on February 4, 1980, when Studio 54 closed its doors? You see my point. “Decades are about cultural perception,” wrote Chuck Klosterman, author of The Nineties, “and culture can’t read a clock.”
For me, the ’90s ended on August 16, 2001, at a Radiohead concert in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, just as the sun was going down and the lights were coming up on the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan across the Hudson River. That was the last day I can remember the feeling of living in the ’90s. It was also the last time I saw the Twin Towers still standing. That night, they were looming over the entire Manhattan skyline as they had for as long as I could remember, like two great pillars holding up the sky. I was thirty-five years old and living in a small town on the Delaware River. In three weeks, I would start a new teaching job at a Catholic high school in Middlesex County, not far from where the concert was being staged that night. I didn’t know this at the time, but in less than a month, the towers would be smoking piles of rubble, and in four months, I would quit my job at the high school because of it.
When I arrived at Liberty State Park, Kid Koala was onstage pumping out beats and channeling the entire history of scratch DJ music. We had just missed the Beta Band, the first opening act, but someone was handing out free Beta Band CDs in the parking lot, a promotional giveaway, I think. I’ve long since lost the CD, but I remember seeing the cardboard sleeve in the palm of my hand and flashing on that iconic scene in High Fidelity when record store owner Rob Gordon, played by John Cusack, spins “Dry the Rain” on a dare to sell five records by the Beta Band. I slipped the CD into my pocket thinking I’ll never listen to this, and I never did. The Beta Band was not my scene.
I met my brother Tom and his college buddy Matt in the parking lot. Matt was fiddling with his minidisc recorder because he was planning to record the concert, which he did, and now, decades later, that recording still lives on in my music ecosystem, a digital time capsule that has been passed down through successive layers of music technology—minidisc to MP3 file stored on my Dell Dimension PC to iTunes to Apple Music.
The stage was a hulking, boxy edifice set against the darkening sky, but you could clearly see the Statue of Liberty behind it. To the left, Manhattan Island. As the sky darkened, the sense of distance between Liberty Island and the sparkling skyline across the river began to dissolve, and it felt as if we had been engulfed by New York City itself, its lights merely the surface manifestation of a pulsing electric organism that was alive with millions of connections, each one little more than a spark, but taken together, they created a beautiful symphony of light. And as we stood before this stage waiting for the band to come on, a pulse began to beat—a dark, ominous counterpoint to the lights of Manhattan—the throb of Colin Greenwood’s bass line at the intro to Radiohead’s song “National Anthem.”
The concert had begun.
Everyone Around Here...is so Near
Onstage, the pulse of that bass line and the crisp high hat–inflected drum beat cut through the night. Then, after a minute, Thom Yorke’s nasally, unsteady voice joined in.
Everyone
Everyone around here
Everyone is so near
It’s holding on
It’s holding on
The song had been rearranged for the stage and stripped of some of its musical complexity, but if you listen to the recorded version of “National Anthem” on Kid A, released a year earlier, you can hear the genius of its composition, the way the song’s simple drum and bass lines gradually dissolve into an ecstatic jazz jam, with flailing trumpets and saxophones crowding out the rock elements of the song. It occurs to me now that the ’90s felt like this, raucous and open-ended and full of possibility, but also dichotomous and unsettling.
The band followed with “Morning Bell,” which cut through the night, a syncopated drum beat overlaid by a simple synthesizer melody. Is it a song about divorce, with its furniture and clothes on the lawn and the lyric about cutting the kids in half à la the wisdom of King Solomon? Or is it, as Yorke said confusingly on a different night, a song about forgetting, and on yet another, a song about parking a car?
Next came “Airbag,” the first track from OK Computer, the Radiohead album that landed like a flying saucer in the mid-’90s music scene, Johnny Greenwood’s guitar twanging ethereally through the song like the soundtrack to a 1950s drive-in sci-fi flick. A song about surviving a car crash.
“Karma Police” was next, the big radio hit from OK Computer, and the crowd came alive hearing those initial piano chords, singing along to the chorus: “For a minute there, I lost myself.” This song—this lyric—captures the feeling I had in the ’90s of being out of sync with my society, “like a detuned radio.” On the surface of life in the ’90s, the postwar structures and expectations were still in place—the unexamined materialism and status consciousness, the overvaluing of marriage and the nuclear family, and the whole suburban enchilada served up on a plate you never actually ordered—but you felt something else too: the way technology was subtly changing the culture. Where once there was only the almighty television set illuminating the inner sanctum of your house or apartment like the Eye of Sauron, now there was a proliferation of screens. I recall a series of digital firsts in the ’90s—first cell phone, first time on the World Wide Web, first time using a search engine. First time posting in a chat room. First song downloaded illegally from the Internet. And baked into these experiences was the creepy panopticon sensation of being watched. The paranoia that fueled so many ’80s stalker movies was now a low-grade psychosis shared by millions of people who were staring at screens and wondering if the screens were staring back.
And there was the cryptic line, “Hitler hairdo/is making me feel ill.” It wasn’t that you had actually ever seen a girl with an Adolf Hitler–style haircut at a party, but you could easily picture it in your mind, because the old taboos were breaking down. In the ’90s, it was just easier to imagine the outrageous and offensive thing—“Stormfront” online white supremacy and weird Internet porn fetishes and murky snuff films making the rounds, always with the question, is this real?
“This is a killer tune about killing and eating people,” joked Yorke as the band rolled into “Knives Out,” from Amnesiac. Another opaque Yorke lyric to be described one hundred different ways by him in one hundred different settings. I am suspicious of the lyricist who appears to have little command of his own word choice, who can’t or won’t own up to a song saying something clearly. It is Bob Dylan insisting that he was just trying to make it rhyme or Kurt Cobain on a tour bus in Dublin admitting that his lyrics are often nonsensical because “I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time” or the kids in a thousand dorm rooms in the ’80s trying to decode Michael Stipe’s mumbled word salad on Fables of the Reconstruction.
Then, in quick succession, “Packd Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Can,” “Exit Music (For a Film),” and “Iron Lung,” the band’s complaint about being trapped by the success of their early ’90s hit “Creep.” In “Packd Like Sardines,” I heard the refrain, “after years of waiting, nothing came,” and I understood its meaning immediately. The millennium date had come and gone with no shattering event worthy of the end of an age. Y2K (the year 2000) fizzled like a dud firecracker, and most of us woke on January 1 with the feeling that the year would not be substantially different from the previous year. Did this feeling perhaps contain a hint of disappointment, because some subterranean part of you hoped that the millennium would end with a decisive break in the dull fabric of civilization? Maybe that was part of the appeal of David Fincher’s cult film Fight Club, released in October 1999. In one memorable scene, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, recites his wistful vision of a future in which they will hunt elk around the ruins of Rockefeller Center after civilization collapses. “You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life,” he opines. “You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.”
Was there some part of you in 2000 that hoped to reset everything back to the year zero?
No Alarm and No Surprises
“This next song is dedicated to the building-monument thing behind us.” The Statue of Liberty loomed nearby, bathed in spotlights. Then came the sweet, bell-like notes of “No Surprises,” from OK Computer. “No alarm and no surprises.” Another Radiohead alienation anthem.
A heart that’s full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won’t heal
You look so tired, unhappy.
I connected to Radiohead in the ’90s for the same reason that Baby Boomers dug Pink Floyd in the ’70s: they were channeling the alienation that runs beneath the entire society. I saw this theme everywhere in popular culture in the ’90s. In Fight Club, for instance, a repressed normie living in an Ikea-decorated apartment meets his doppelgänger, an anarchic destroyer of all things straight and pretty. In The Matrix, a computer hacker realizes that his sense of paranoia and alienation is justified when he takes the red pill and learns that his entire existence is a lie. In Office Space, the world of work is brutally and hilariously satirized as meaningless drudgery worthy of a Franz Kafka novel. Over on the X-Files, Fox Mulder was living in a permanent state of alienation, haunted by his conspiratorial fever dreams. And the music industry was also profiting from the cultural moment. The entire Grunge catalog is basically an extended alienation playlist
The statue reminds me—then and now—of the double valance of the immigrant experience, the millions who passed by her on the way to becoming Americans, including my own family, the great cultural and religious diversity of the world squeezed through the eye of a needle, humbled at the gates and made to surrender all that cannot abide the consumer capitalist consensus. The families like mine who started their American story in Brooklyn and then within a generation or two moved out into the suburbs, abandoning their ethnic one-foot-in-two-worlds cultural anxiety and intergenerational households for the nuclear family American dream.
When I see her, I wonder: What was lost in the passage? What did we all leave behind?
We All Went to Heaven in a Little Rowboat
In my raw memories of the concert, “Pyramid Song” was the band’s finale of the night, but it wasn’t. That is the last song on the minidisc recording, but, in fact, there were more songs afterward that night: “Paranoid Android,” “Idioteque,” “Everything in its Right Place.” And the encores: “Like Spinning Plates,” “Lucky,” “You and Whose Army?” I learned this two decades later when I was reading concert playlists on the Internet. Such is the quality of our memory to forget and invent.
I had no way of knowing it that night, but “Pyramid Song” would worm its way into my brain during that first week of numb shock following the terrorist attacks of September 11—that week of American flags hanging on every overpass and the same three terrible video clips on repeat like some vast continent-wide art installation with millions of television screens connected together and the stories rolling in about people I knew who had been killed or almost killed or saved from certain death by sleeping through an alarm or traumatized by what they saw that day from their morning commute on the Staten Island Ferry.
Of all the possible music, it was “Pyramid Song” that found its way to me that week. How to take in the enormity of such a horrific event, the wave of grief that rolled out through families and friends and acquaintances of victims? In the mid-’90s, my high school students enjoyed a game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Someone would name a movie, and then you would try to connect actors in the film to other actors in other films until you finally reached a film in which Kevin Bacon had appeared. The game tapped into a collective obsession with “degrees of separation”—the awareness that we are all joined in a vast web of global connectivity. I was thinking about this idea the week after 9/11. Many of us were. How many degrees of separation would any American have from someone who had died in the towers that day? For me, it was one.
How do we account for the scope of change after 9/11, the sudden interruption of millions of lives, like a great ripple in time itself? If the flapping of butterfly wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, then what would be the effect of a million tons of steel and glass and plaster and assorted furniture and office equipment suddenly crashing to the ground in Manhattan?
Are there versions of me in other universes that never experienced this trauma, I wondered, with twenty-first-century Manhattan skylines still dominated by those towers? That year, I lived in a small town on the Delaware River, as far west as you can possibly go in New Jersey without crossing into Pennsylvania. To reach my new job at the Catholic high school, I was required to drive east across the entire state. On my first day driving to work, I could see the towers rising from the horizon as I passed the exit for Morristown on Route 78. They were like two enormous obelisks that had been there since ancient times. On the drive home later that day, I could see them in my rearview mirror. My second day on the job was 9/11. They closed the school at noon because so many parents were showing up in a panic to pick up their children. On the drive home that afternoon, I summoned the courage to glance up at the rearview mirror to where I knew the Towers should be, but I saw only a grayish column of smoke slanting into the sky. The column was enormous as if a volcano had suddenly erupted in the middle of Manhattan.
Later that week, the song found its way into me. I would lie in bed, listening to it, trying to decipher its cryptic lyrics.
All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little rowboat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubtIt was comforting somehow to imagine all of us making a crossing together, without fear or doubt. But the crossing we made was subtle and darker, playing out over the next months and years. We would be able to observe its effects only in retrospect—the relationships ended and begun because of it; the vows we quietly made and kept; the things we abandoned because they no longer served the straighter, more stalwart, more hypervigilant person we had become. And there would be other thresholds too, the one we crossed as a country to become less free, more tolerant of casual violence, more bigoted, and more callous. In 1999, most of us could not have imagined the Iraq War, or the post–Hurricane Katrina disaster zone in New Orleans, or the great recession. Another 416 school shootings after the one at Columbine High School in Colorado. Those awful photos from Abu Ghraib and the never-ending shame of Guantanamo Bay military prison. It was as if we had quietly passed into one of those alternate universes without realizing it.
Two days after the attacks, I was standing in the teacher’s lounge listening to two older male teachers talk tough about what America will do to the “towelheads” now. The gloves were coming off, one of them said. One of these men was a Catholic priest who was supposed to be setting a more Christ-like example, but there he was, red-faced and grinning and hurling slurs against all Muslims. Later that day I would hear one of the religion teachers lecture me about how “the problem is Islam itself....” The collective blood was up, and some men over the age of forty had nowhere else to put their rage but in the old familiar places.
I was standing there with my white Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand, frozen in place, feeling my face begin to flush. I was supposed to be sympathetic to their anger, or at least tolerant of it. I was supposed to give them a wide berth. I was supposed to let it go.
Sometimes anger is messy.
I stepped out into the hallway, my heart still beating fast. I looked down to see the crumpled Styrofoam coffee cup in my right hand. The lukewarm coffee was spilling down my arm and dripping onto the floor.
I’m getting out of here as soon as I can, I thought.
And I did.
He’s Like a Detuned Radio
Decades end, and then they are carved like ancient runes into the cultural granite and become the signposts by which we measure the progress of our lives. In my life, the ’90s was unformed and chaotic. You could shed your ideological skin in the ’90s. You had watched video clips of people tearing down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands and breaking it into pieces, and if you were so inclined, you could feel the walls coming down in your own soul. I miss that feeling.
Honestly, I don’t remember much else from that night in Liberty State Park, but I remember the feeling of it, the sense of open-ended possibility and optimism. I recall feeling like I was sharing a secret with the hundreds of other people swaying to the music in that field. I remember marveling at the lights of the Manhattan I knew from the time before the towers fell, that frenetic collage of late-night coffee houses and concerts and comedy shows and long walks in Central Park.
Of all the pleasures of Manhattan in the ’90s, it was the coffee shops and cafes I enjoyed most, the way they proliferated the city, each one an oasis with its own distinctive character. There had been so many nights that ended in a coffee shop, with hours of unbroken conversation trailing off into the early morning hours.
I remember the feeling of being repeatedly surprised in the ’90s. The shiny happy surface of prosperity and upward mobility and techno-utopianism would be periodically shattered by violence. Los Angeles on fire in 1992; the standoffs and sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco; seventy-four black churches burned between January 1995 and July 1996; two clinic workers, five others wounded at an abortion clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts; an abortion doctor murdered in Pensacola, Florida; The Oklahoma City bombing; Columbine. The Battle in Seattle. In the ’90s, you could never shake the feeling that some rough beast was slouching toward Bethlehem, but was it genuine prophecy or the looming end date to the millennium, which seemed to have created a cultural current of its own?
We would all finally cross a threshold together after that awful day in September, which was the final surprise event of the ’90s—the big finale—and though we traveled as one, walking together like shell-shocked refugees moving through a war zone, we were not together for very long. And we lost things along the way. I never referred to myself as a Catholic after that day, not out of any sudden new animosity for the church, but because I had finally exhausted my will to continue to engage meaningfully with it. I’ve only been back to Manhattan once since 9/11, and when I was there, I deliberately stayed north of Canal Street. Over the next year, I could feel doors closing inside of me. But there was a new clarity as well, a sense that I knew who I was, what I wanted, and what I would and would not tolerate. Some of the frivolity and loose ends of my psyche had been burned away without me realizing it.
And after the invasion of Iraq less than two years later, I never felt proud of being an American again.
I recently read that the TV series Friends is now popular with young people who were born in the twenty-first century. I think I understand why. Friends invites you into an alternate universe that is free from the fraught socio-political tensions that now dominate American society. Free also from the claustrophobia of social media and conspiratorial paranoia of our current media ecosystem. In their Manhattan coffee shop, Central Perk, no one is constantly checking their phones, heads bent over little screens. Everyone is engaged in the lively art of conversation, paying full attention to one another. The most vexing problem is that some of your friends make more money than you do or that your celebrity crush has just walked through the door. The humor turns on social faux pas, pranks, and visiting parents. Looking back on it from twenty-five years in the future, there is an innocence to Friends. No single television show can represent the complexity of an entire decade, but watching Friends, I ache to remember how much freer I was then.
Daniel Vollaro is a writer from New Jersey who now lives and works in the Atlanta suburbs. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, and his work has been published in Missouri Review, Rise Up Review, Adbusters, The Smart Set, Fairfield Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Thrice Fiction, and Timber Creek Review, among many others. In 2020, he was listed as a “notable” writer in Best American Essays for his personal essay “The Lookout Tree,” which was published in Michigan Quarterly Review and then again in his 2021 memoir, Reservoir: Tales from the Other Jersey. He teaches writing at Georgia Gwinnett College.