In 2019, the film was already two decades old. This year, the book turns 30.

In 1999 the head of publicity at Twentieth Century Fox had told the director, David Fincher, “You’ve made a movie with so much male nudity that no man will want to see it, and so much blood that no woman will. You’ve made a movie that’s impossible to market.”  Yet here I am laughing away with a middle-aged mother and her son who both came to love the story.

Maybe it’s because the story gave them permission to disregard all of the consumption and status static. “You are not your job.”  “You are not your khakis.”  These were memes before memes, and they flew in the face of a million Gap commercials. Lines like “May I never be perfect and complete” broke the stranglehold of demands the culture put on young people.

Maybe “self-improvement” as dictated by well-meaning cookie-cutter guidance counselors and college advisors never was the answer. Maybe “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” snapped readers out of the self-esteem messages they’d been force fed all their lives. Maybe they saw how such constant reassurances kept them from moving forward, and how emotional handholding came to stink of a lifelong panacea. Maybe “Deliver me from clever art” saved people from drowning in the era’s flood of David Letterman snark and irony and hinted that “clever” wasn’t enough.

National Public Radio once hosted me on a panel discussion where black academics and female academics dismissed Fight Club because it didn’t directly address the lives of racial minorities and women. Yet here I was in a car listening to a mother and her son who loved the story.

Another possibility? Fight Club was one of the few stories that told young people they’re mortal. You’re going to die. And the story didn’t just state that truth the way The Dead Poets Society took a bunch of prep school students and showed them old photos and declared, “These boys are all now food for worms.” No, Fight Club dropped us into the support group world of the Aids era, an age of mass dying, and made that sadness the “meet cute” of an old-school rom-com. The hero and heroine meet at the edge of an open grave, staring death in the face. Not since Harold and Maude had we seen Eros and Thanatos so romantically entwined.

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To put all of this in a larger context: way back in 1949, the mythologist Joseph Campbell had given us the concept of “the hero’s journey”, the blueprint for so many movies, including Star Wars. Among Campbell’s concepts was the “secondary father”, the coach or teacher or boss or drill sergeant. After the first father, who must love and nurture the child, the secondary father can more sternly mentor the child toward greatness. For an example of the secondary mother, just watch The Devil Wears Prada and see how women fulfill the same role.

So Campbell gave us Star Wars and The Karate Kid, and, in 1990, Robert Bly gave us Iron John, the dry, sober seed for so much of the humorless men’s movement. Yet by the mid Nineties, Bly had thrown up his hands in surrender. Men were unruly, as were people in general nowadays, so in 1996 Bly wrote The Sibling Society to explain how all hierarchies of authority had broken down. No one stood above anyone else in the culture, and all teaching was now done peer-to-peer. Mind you, this is still a few years before social media, but Bly was already predicting “influencers” and “looksmaxxing” and the manosphere in general, where the flattened landscape of faceless “likes” does the teaching.

The year 1996 was also when W.W. Norton published Fight Club. It was the world of Maxim and Loaded magazines, football hooligans, Trainspotting and Snatch. So-called “lad culture”. In her 1991 book Backlash, Susan Faludi had described a male pushback against feminism, including a scene where she depicts Robert Bly as a cold tyrant, reinforcing traditional gender roles and abusing an elderly female acolyte of his. In 1996’s Sibling Society, Bly attacked Faludi’s version of events, and a public pissing match was on.

That was Nineties lad culture: the rowdy, moshing Backlash world became the kind of playpen that doesn’t want a stern secondary father. What the uncouth Sibling Society needed was… a trickster. We needed a Loki or Coyote or Hermes or Puck or Pan. And not the androgynous Pan of Disney’s Peter Pan, or a Pan played by tiny Mary Martin, what we needed was a reckless, wild, Dionysian Pan who could scare the pants off of you if you ventured into the forest at nighttime.

Enter Tyler Durden. What my Uber driver and his mom loved was Tyler and his messaging and the knight’s errands of “homework” he assigned. Tyler was a buddy, not a father, and he acted on impulse. He spoke in memes, not the endless lectures of a Campbell or a Bly. Still, he nurtured without “mothering”, and he lived without the world’s approval and endless self-censoring. Tyler’s minions were the nameless “space monkeys” who were tired of aimless lives as atomized self-loving snowflakes. They no longer wanted to each be “beautiful and unique”. What they wanted was to be part of something.

In the Uber, on my way to Alcoholics Anonymous, laughing with the driver and his mom, didn’t I also want to be part of something? Clearly, drinking in my hotel room no longer worked. I wanted to surrender my will to a greater power.

Often, people most love the aspects of a story they can’t articulate. Years ago, for example, I asked the writer Ira Levin if his masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby wasn’t actually a metaphor for the generation of infants born deformed by Thalidomide? Wasn’t the horror people expressed in fact the horror they could not express over how the medical establishment had misled and mis-medicated so many trusting pregnant women? In the book, the baby is even described as having the classic features of a “flid”, as people shaped by Thalidomide often call themselves.

Levin was cagey. How could he answer truthfully? And perhaps he didn’t know what he’d written until after it was in print; often the best writers don’t. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, only a genius can combine the conscious and the subconscious. “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal… that is the genius in the man of genius.”

Which brings us to the oldest trick in the book, so to speak. A trick American readers adore, but only if it can be reinvented. Let’s call it the “martyr-murder-witness” trick. Of three main characters, the most obedient must commit suicide, the most rebellious must be killed, and the witnessing character must reject both those options and leave the scene to begin a new life.  Think of Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, throwing herself in front of Gatsby’s speeding car. Myrtle is Jennifer North in Valley of the Dolls who overdoses, who is Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest who cuts his wrists, who is Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind who knows that birthing another child will kill her but gets pregnant anyway. The Good Boy or Girl always commits suicide. And that includes the doctor’s obedient son in The Dead Poets Society who shoots himself. Or the misled waif Terry Gionoffrio in Rosemary’s Baby, who leaps from a seventh-floor window.

Americans recognize this pattern and love it.

Immediately after the suicide, the most robust character is murdered. Sometimes, particularly when that character is female, she is banished, as Scarlett O’Hara and Neely O’Hara are banished in their stories, and the teacher played by Robin Williams is banished in Dead Poets.  However, in most cases, the rebel, be he Jay Gatsby or Randle Patrick McMurphy or Edward Hutchins — or Tyler Durden — is murdered.

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This leaves the witness to tell the tale. Nick Carraway hightails it back to the Midwest. Big Chief journeys back to his tribe. Rosemary Woodhouse embraces her strange-looking infant. For a heartbeat she weighs the idea of leaping from the window with the newborn, but finally surrenders herself to the cards she’s been dealt.

Whatever the case, Americans love the martyr-murder-witness formula, just so long as you tweak it to keep it fresh. And who can blame Americans? In a two-party political system, you’re either slave or master, so you’d better get accustomed to playing either. Those who can’t adapt to swift changes in power, they either kill themselves or they are killed. The magic in Fight Club was to distill this three-character formula down to a single character. The Good Boy narrator kills himself, thus murdering the Bad Boy, and leaving the fully integrated Witness.

A reconcilement of the external with the internal. The genius in the man of genius.

Maybe it’s that age-old formula — albeit tweaked — that’s made the book and film a classic. Whatever the case, it was a slow climb to the pantheon. Of the original five thousand hardcovers printed in 1996, most hadn’t sold by the time the film premiered in 1999. The film itself had a dismal theatrical run. Then 9/11 happened, and the image of skyscrapers crumbling cut too close to the bone. All puckish pranking and horseplay withered under the watchful eye of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. The transgressive story, be it Fight Club or Trainspotting or The Monkey Wrench Gang, simply fell out of fashion.

Not that Fight Club resonated with everyone. On my first book tour in 1996, live on the radio, a male NPR host asked me, “Having written this book, Fight Club, what can you tell us about the state of the American woman in the world today?”

Color me flabbergasted. I was silent for an eternity in live radio time. What did I know about being female or being black?  My goal had been to write about the common experience of all my friends who were navigating into adulthood without either secondary mothers or fathers. The goal of Fight Club was never to depict an organization that perpetuated its own power. Instead, I wanted to show how this little machine could create stronger individuals before the machine itself imploded. If just one person remained, stronger, more free, more self-determined, that would be worth all the Sturm und Drang.

The book was always about helping the individual. The little machine of Project Mayhem would be the secondary father.

In this world of constant poverty and addiction and injustice, to borrow a phrase, “I don’t think there are any good parts.”

But be that as it may, we can’t surrender to hopelessness or lash out in rage. That night in 2019 there were the three of us, this mother, her son and I, connected by a story. Each of us was doing their best, and we all had an imaginary friend in the form of Tyler Durden.

Maybe trickster Tyler is still around 30 years later to show us we always have options. If you’re reading this, you are still not dead.

Now that the era has passed into the kitsch bricolage of nostalgia, with Zoomers dressed like Kevin the Teenager flocking to see Oasis’ stadium tours alongside nebbish politicians in bucket hats declaring that they’re “mad for it”, it is hard to see the mid-Nineties as anything other than a golden age. Paunchy aging dads — my own demographic, sad to say — fondly remember gelling down the fringes of their Caesar haircuts, donning their knock-off Ben Sherman shirts and drenching themselves in CK One before hitting the town with a tenner in their pocket. Yet it is a measure of Britain’s extended national decline that the mid-Nineties, today remembered as a halcyon era, was at the time experienced rather differently. 

In a 1996 speech, the aspiring prime minister Tony Blair warned that “I see two futures open to this country. In one, Britain’s communities follow the process that has occurred in some places in the US, where the affluent have retreated into fortresses with private security guards, leaving the rest to live in ghettos of low opportunity, crime and insecurity. But the cycle of decay and economic underperformance continues. This is the Blade Runner scenario.” The other scenario, naturally, was for the country to vote New Labour into office. The influential 1997 Demos paper, “Britain”, observed that abroad, “the general perception [is] that the UK, and London in particular, is not a safe place, with people living under the shadow of IRA bombs, homeless on the streets and racial tensions”, while “even the Union Jack has become an ambivalent symbol — at times a racist icon for skinheads and fascists”. Its solution, which we live with today, was to rebrand, and remold, Britain into a young and multicultural country, “the least pure of European countries, more mongrel and better prepared for a world that is continually generating new hybrid forms”. 

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Yet if the flags currently flying on lampposts across England, transforming suburban York and Birmingham into a simulacrum of the Lower Shankill, represent the reaction to this experiment, it is instructive to remember that the era, punctuated by racist murders and the rise of the BNP, witnessed its own contested politics of the flag, and conflicted attitudes to Britishness and Englishness. When, in 1992, the mournful Manchester-Irish troubadour Morrissey draped himself in the Union Jack, in front of a vast image of two skinheads, to perform “The National Front Disco” and caution his fictional “Bengali in Platforms” to “Shelve your Western plans/‘Cause life is hard enough when you belong here”, the response from the music press was not acclamatory. “Flying the flag or flirting with disaster?”, asked a rhetorical NME headline. Yet five years later, when the girl band bawd Geri Halliwell could strut on stage in a sequined Union Jack minidress, the national flag was not only not controversial, it had become ubiquitous in popular culture. What had happened in between was, simply, Britpop.

Was Britpop’s cultural nationalism ironic or sincere? As the brains behind Vanity Fair’s famous “Cool Britannia” cover, Toby Young — now firmly ensconced within the British Right — observed, a new generation had emerged that “had grown up loathing and despising American mass culture” and “felt a kind of nationalistic resentment”. Blur returned from a dismal 1992 tour of small-town America filled with loathing for the imperial hegemon and a conflicted love for England and home. “What is it about home we’re missing?” the group’s drummer Dave Rowntree pondered, “What is it we like and that we don’t like?” They set about working on their second album, Modern Life is Rubbish — its working title was Britain Versus America — which, with its inward-looking cultural references, both mocked and celebrated small-town English life, and defined the Britpop aesthetic. Choosing, as Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon notes, “a Ladybird Books-style painting of the classic Mallard locomotive” for its cover because “nothing could be further from what most people expected of an alternative rock LP”, the album had strangely conservative vibes which belied the group’s profession of Left-wing values. Drawn from the provincial lower-middle-class of Southeast England, the children of teachers, Army bandsmen and a South Coast BnB-owner-turned-rubbish-compactor, the group was shaped by the values of their upbringing. “My family, like most army families, was pretty conservative and patriotic,” Coxon remembers. “It was generally assumed that you supported England in everything it did.” Coxon’s autobiography is infused with the memories of a postwar English childhood, of grubbing for “smutty magazines” inside abandoned pillboxes at a time when “‘Tommies versus Jerries’ were popular pastimes in the school playground”.

Like his cultural distaste for America, Blur’s singer Damon Albarn’s self-professed political radicalism is likewise shot through with a very English conservatism, condemning his Essex peers for their crass Thatcherite materialism and lamenting that “The color and vibrancy of the countryside was destroyed… literally fields I was playing in one year were housing estates the next”. As John Harris observes in his excellent book on the Britpop era, Albarn’s Essex childhood home was in a rural hamlet where “the local accent has an archetypally East Anglian burr; when Albarn enrolled at the local comprehensive school, he rubbed shoulders with the children of agricultural workers”. Coxon remarks of the “Grantchester Meadows” quality of their childhood, “hanging out by the river at the back of [Albarn’s] house in the wilds of Essex”, that “our outlook was a little more bucolic and melancholic… A lot of that English local color flavored the music, right from the start.”

Oasis grew up in quite another England, if the Manchester-Irish milieu can be termed England at all: far from lazy summer afternoons, the group’s first incarnation was simply called “The Rain”. There is a particular recurring strand of Irish literature that focuses on unhappy households, dominated by a superficially charming but overbearing father, in which the devoted mother bears her lot unhappily and the sons plot their escape as revenge. The semi-official biography of Oasis by Paolo Hewitt slots right into the genre. The drunk, abusive Tommy Gallagher, from rural Meath, ruled his Manchester household through fear: divorcing him, against the priest’s advice, the family moved to a council house in suburban Burnage, “where each house has a garden”, and which “lies within walking distance of two golf courses”, as Harris notes with a Daily Mail-style eye for class minutiae wasted on The Guardian. 

The Gallagher brothers were raised in the Irish diaspora milieu of Gaelic football, church social clubs and Irish dancing — and long summer holidays at their mother Peggy Sweeney’s family farm in rural Mayo where Noel Gallagher reminisces about picking blackberries, bringing in the cows for milking and drawing water from the well. Appearing on Gay Byrne’s Late, Late Show — then a staple of both home and diaspora Irish life — the young Noel Gallagher presented himself as a good sensible boy to the avuncular presenter (not least in the knowledge that his mother would be watching) claiming sentimentally that tears would well in his eyes at the scent of burning turf. “If you look at Gaelic bands,” Noel would tell Hewitt, “they always had these rousing, fist-in-the-air choruses. And I suppose it’s also because we have this rootsy, folk feel on some of the other songs which you get subconsciously from your childhood.” Or as Gallagher would correct a reporter at the height of 1995’s Battle of Britpop, “We’re not Britpop, because we’re Irish, for a start.”

Yet when the founder of Creation Records, Alan McGee, first met the group in Manchester, it was with the Union Jack behind them, which the band had painted on the wall of their rehearsal room. “Noel had even written a song called ‘The Red, White and Blue’,” notes Hewitt. “Their fascination with the British flag caused a little consternation among some onlookers… and there were various mutterings about the band’s politics.” The Union Jack, in distorted form, soon made it onto the band’s demo cassette. As Harris notes, “when a passing Creation staff member inquired about the design on the cover of the Oasis demo — the colors of the Union Jack arranged in a vortex, as if being sucked down the plughole — Liam dispensed a snarling reply… ‘It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,’ he said. ‘We’re here to do something about it’.” And so they did: like the RAF roundel, the Union Flag, whether on Noel’s guitar or the PR ephemera of the era, would become ubiquitous, just as the laddish fusion of football culture and Sixties revivalist pop would revive the St George’s Cross in common usage for Euro ‘96. “17 years of hurt never stopped us dreaming,” Blair would declare, “Labour’s coming home.” The world of the Blairite “Britpopper” had been born. It is one which Fabian thinktankers have never left.

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For all its Blairite connotations, the first recorded use of “Cool Britannia” in British Politics was, improbably, by Virginia Bottomley’s Department of Media and Culture. But if the fragile mood of optimism inspired by a buoyant economy, recovering from the recession of the early Nineties, was the product of the Major government, the Conservative Party was in no position to capitalize on it. The attempted Rightward shift of Britain’s political culture, encapsulated in Major’s lyrical evocation of old maids cycling to church through the mist, had been wrecked, in a now familiar pattern, by the corruption, incompetence and sexual deviance of the party’s MPs: rather than being too conservative for the country’s voters, as contemporary accounts assume, the Tories were too libertine. In their wake would come Blair’s revolution, which co-opted Britpop, to gain a sheen of youthful credibility and optimism, with the eager collaboration of the music industry, in which, as Sleeper’s Louise Weber noted, “you could not criticize New Labour, you could not criticize Blair, it was verboten, not allowed”.

The many subsequent hagiographies of Britpop place great emphasis on the Sussex band Suede as the forerunners of the movement, also wrapped in the flag, against their will, by the music industry. It accompanied them on the 1993 Select magazine cover featuring Suede’s singer, Brett Anderson, beneath the title “Yanks Go Home”. Yet even Suede’s then-risqué androgyny and odes to amyl nitrate now seem curiously innocent, more Charles Hawtrey than Rimbaud. Indeed, all the frantic cosmopolitanism of the Nineties today seems quaintly parochial: Albarn’s increasingly cruel “social satires” of the small-town middle classes exude the status anxieties of the provincial FBPE activist, his various accents, careening all over the English class system, a Harry Enfield performance. Blur’s 1993 mockney stomper “Sunday, Sunday” plays with imagery of provincial ennui, Sunday roasts and war veterans, that while mocking, now reads almost as nostalgia for a world that then still existed. Even the Select piece that launched the movement, with its Dad’s Army graphics and declaration of a “Battle of Britain”, are products of that same insular postwar world, in which Noel Gallagher could reminisce about making Airfix models of Hurricanes and Lancasters, and the aging Graham Coxon spends his free time at Tunbridge Wells’ War and Peace Show re-enactments, buying military surplus. The Britpop movement, ultimately, drew from the same cultural wellsprings Reform does today: from Blur’s PR jaunts to what is now Farage’s Clacton seat, to Oasis’s suburban childhood, flanked by golf clubs on the edges of Stockport, the provincial England then invoked half-ironically has now swung sharply to the Right.

For whatever else Britpop was, it was a celebration, if a patronizing one, of England’s white working class, which would be far beyond the cultural pale today. As Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker would later note, “working-class culture was often sneered at as being crude and stuff like that but then people maybe cottoned on to the fact that it was a bit more alive than the supposedly highbrow culture”. Adopting an increasingly parodic cockney accent, in his war against the lower-middle classes that birthed him, Damon Albarn assumed that if there was hope, it lay with the proles. His then-girlfriend, the privately educated Justine Frischmann, likewise mars Elastica’s otherwise standout track Waking Up with the mockney suggestion to “make a cup of tea”, delivered in the tones of someone nervously appeasing a builder. Yet it was only under the Blairite consensus Britpop helped usher in that this very same culture became demonized: the cockney double-glazing salesman persona Albarn assumes in the Parklife video would very soon become Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross-hanging, white-van-driving nemesis.

Indeed, for all that nostalgic hagiographers of the era like Jon Savage can claim, ludicrously, that Oasis’s Some Might Say “captures the mood of the moment” of the Conservative defeat in England’s 1995 local elections, the band themselves were always ultimately an expression of Thatcherite social mobility, of conspicuous consumption and the polished Rolls-Royce in the driveway. The very cover of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, with its stripped floorboards, glass of red wine and paper lampshades, expresses a working-class aspiration towards middle-class aesthetics — the renovated Victorian townhouses of BBC’s This Life — that the band would soon swiftly transcend. Where Blur, 30 years ago, mocked the urge of the newly wealthy to move to “a very big house in the country”, Noel Gallagher rapidly transitioned from playing at a Home Counties country house to buying one, from where he now delivers his recollections of the era on a throne-like wing chair. Blur’s Graham Coxon has retreated to true-blue rural Kent to explore “English indigenous folk traditions” from a barn conversion; Alex James to life as a country landowner and cheesemaker: the lures of Deep England, and of romantic conservatism, always win in the end.

What was Britpop then? Perhaps, in the end, just a confection of the spin doctor era. Like New Labour’s political mood music, it was always empty at its heart: Blur’s lyrics were always less clever than claimed, and Oasis’ less profound. Britpop died in 1997, shortly after Blair came to power: it was as if the movement had outlived its purpose. And just as the original bands of the era brought about a flurry of uninspired imitations, it has been our fate since then to be ruled by a dismal succession of Blair tribute acts.

Blair’s social revolution, his New Britain, buried the cozy postwar England that had birthed the movement, and gave Britain a new aristocracy of judges and NGO activists yet to be dethroned. In reward for its services, the new Blairite order installed a new cultural establishment, the commentators from the Britpop-era music industry who write Guardian thinkpieces, judge books and arts prizes, present BBC radio shows, and feed the stultifying incuriosity of the Radio 6 dad. Instead of evading his threatened Blade Runner future, Blair accelerated it: Oasis’s Don’t Look Back In Anger would soon become the anthem of the British state’s “organized spontaneity” to dissuade Manchester’s white working class from reacting to jihadist mass murder with anything other than the empty, swaying sentimentality of a stadium sing-along. Yet as Noel Gallagher himself observed, “These people have the right to be radicalized. They have rights… That guy who set that bomb off sees the streets of Britain as a battlefield — our leaders don’t see it as a battlefield.”

The insular, homely English culture Britpop both mocked and celebrated was ravaged by the political order it soundtracked. Only in retrospect does John Major’s Britain, then imbued with themes of decline, seem like a vanished golden age, the political horizon, before it all went wrong, of the radicalized Right-wing Zoomer. The era’s nostalgia for the Sixties has been replaced by today’s nostalgia for the country the Boomers destroyed. Once again, the nation is asking “What is it about home we’re missing? What is it we like and that we don’t like?” The Union Flag is omnipresent in England once again, for quite different reasons: the white working class Britpop championed, like the provincial lower-middle class it mocked, is in open revolt against the political and cultural establishment it helped enthrone, and it is the bourgeois Right-wing dancing to their raucous tune.

For those too young to have witnessed the great metrosexual panic of the late Nineties and early 2000s, it’s hard to explain just how worked up we all were by the realisation that there were men out there who conditioned their hair and moisturised their faces and wore clothes that actually fit, and yet who were somehow — and here, the mind boggled — not gay. In 2003, “metrosexual” was Word of the Year; in June, it was subject to a writeup in the New York Times Style, under the winking headline, “Metrosexuals Come Out”. By December, it was showing up in everything from celebrity profiles to book reviews to think pieces pondering whether the metrosexual was definitionally metropolitan, or whether men in the suburbs could get in on this new brand of masculinity too. Threaded through it all was a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop: the metrosexuals were into women, or so they said, but they obviously weren’t straight in the same sense as the cowboys, lumberjacks and plumbers of the world.

Like many Style-section pieces, the struggle to define the boundaries of metrosexuality was ultimately more about marketing than identity: “Along with terms like ‘PoMosexual,’ ‘just gay enough’ and ‘flaming heterosexuals,’ the word metrosexual is now gaining currency among American marketers who are fumbling for a term to describe this new type of feminized man,” wrote the New York Times. Then, as now, we weren’t quite sure how men should be; the metrosexual was an early hint that one possible answer was: more like women.

Today, metrosexuals are recognisable as an early prototype of affinity-based identities, the kind that describe how you present yourself instead of what you do (see: the straight-married women in their thirties who have never slept with a woman but self-identify as “queer“). Although some metrosexuals of the early 2000s dabbled in gender nonconformity — with painted nails and skirts and such — in a way that might now be referred to as “queerbaiting”, metrosexuality wasn’t ever really about who these men wanted to have sex with. It was about masculinity, and what that was supposed to look like, and particularly about how this new breed of man would be received by women.

As for this, feelings were mixed. For some women, perhaps the kind who perk up at the phrase “couples spa trip”, a metrosexual boyfriend represented the best of both worlds; for others, these men invited comparisons that tended to make us feel, if not unfeminine, then at least like slobs. In my early twenties, at the peak of the Metrosexual Discourse, I won a trip for two to a ranch in Texas after entering an essay contest in which entrants were asked to describe why their metrosexual boyfriends needed lessons in manliness. I gamely joked about how my boyfriend’s predilection for pink shirts and casual use of the phrase “mani-pedi” were becoming relationship dealbreakers, but looking back, what strikes me is that this was less about masculinity than a bad match. The poor guy didn’t need manliness lessons; he just needed a different girlfriend, ideally one who shared his interest in nail care.

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But the is-he-or-isn’t-he jokes among women also masked a quiet sense of desperation. Most straight men had come to approach matters of grooming and culture with an aggressive indifference: an approach that flew in the face of historical norms. It wasn’t just that the metrosexual had an obvious precursor in the fashionable dandy of yore; being mannered and being marriageable had always gone hand in hand. Jane Austen’s eligible bachelors dressed for an occasion, and even the hyper-masculine James Bond was fussy about the cut of his tuxedo. But sometime in the mid-20th century, those associations began to shift, perhaps fuelled by a Sixties protest culture that recast civilised norms — things like haircuts and suits — as tools of oppression. The masculine ideal morphed from Cary Grant in North by Northwest to something far scruffier, unshaven and untucked.

And once caring about your appearance became square, it was only a matter of time before it also became (homo)sexually suspect, culminating in the Nineties nadir wherein every sitcom couple included a schlubby man paired with an impossibly hot wife. Straight men asserted their straightness via a sort of peacocking in reverse: whoever wore the worst outfit was probably the most heterosexual. Not even the sexiest man alive could make these terrible clothes look good.

One can detect a confluence of factors at play here, including the downstream effects of tech replacing finance as the nexus of male power and influence. Suddenly, the biggest boss in the room wasn’t a Wall Street VP in a three-piece suit, but a gawky geek who had never been interested in clothes nor looked especially good in them. For these guys, disentangling basic male fashion and grooming standards from male sex appeal may have functioned as a sort of revenge — not just against the preppy bullies and jocks of high school, but against the oppressive notion that appearances should matter at all. At the same time, the increased visibility of gay men in elite cultural spaces — art, fashion, food — combined with the casual homophobia of the era to create a visceral sense that culture itself was “gay”, a word that became synonymous with “uncool”.

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And so the heterosexual man of the moment was identifiable not only by his Seinfeldian pairing of ill-fitting jeans and chunky white basketball shoes, but by an adolescent distaste for anything more highbrow than a Die Hard movie. These guys didn’t dance, didn’t cook, and definitely didn’t care about art or films or music. If metrosexuality was about straight men who didn’t mind seeming a little bit swishy, it was arguably an overdue response to straightness having become synonymous with having the sartorial and cultural tastes of a five-year-old. At a moment when raunch culture was on its last legs but the soft boy had not yet made his debut, metrosexuals were like a gateway drug to a new, more mature, sensitivity-trained brand of masculinity.

And once men started to care what they looked like, a massive vibe shift ensued: more stylish clothing, for instance, meant slimmer silhouettes, which meant more time at the gym, which meant that metrosexuals were targets for not just fashion and grooming but fitness and nutrition products as well. We think of them as a sociological phenomenon, but as the New York Times pointed out: they were a marketing demographic first. You can practically see the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of a marketing executive quoted in the original writeup on this emerging category of man: ”The guy who drinks Grey Goose is willing to pay extra,” he said. ”He does it in all things in his life. He doesn’t buy green beans, he buys haricots verts.”

First you make a person believe that spending $40 on shampoo isn’t vain or frivolous; then, you convince him that actually, the shampoo is a form of self-care. This is the logic that has long persuaded women to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year on skincare, makeup and beauty treatments; but it’s also a logic that persuades men to adopt the same neuroses women have long struggled with around fashion, aging, and physical fitness.

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And persuaded they are: men are now seeking out tweakments in record numbers, and suffering from body dysmorphia at greater rates than ever before. TikTok “looksmaxxers” trade tips on proper skincare; Twitter accounts scold men for sartorial crimes like improperly matching a formal tie with a rugged sport coat. Caring about how you look has been fully recoded from a niche, suspicious twist on traditional masculinity to an obligation, as it has always been for women. The sexual suspicion surrounding men being effeminately preoccupied with their faces has disappeared. Indeed, a key tenet of looksmaxxing is that the young men who do it make themselves more attractive to women — and why not, when there’s no perceived paradox between wanting to be desired by women and wanting to behave more like them?

The past 10 years have not only encouraged men to adopt the same neuroses as women about what other people think of their skin and hair and bodies, but to constitutionally reorient themselves toward the feminine. Consider how often are men instructed that they need to be more feelings-oriented, less assertive, more empathic, less status-seeking — or how male sexuality, or even just sexual interest, is increasingly understood as inherently predatory and dangerous. Consider the 2018 American Psychological Association press release which declared that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful”, and all but announced the profession’s intent to wage war on manhood, one 50-minute therapy session at a time. Consider the summer blockbuster Barbie, in which the previously effeminate Ken’s newfound masculinity is presented as both a profoundly malevolent force and an absurd punchline.

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Replacing old-school masculinity with metrosexuality may be the least objectionable way in which our concept of ideal manhood keeps tipping incrementally toward the feminine. Certainly, as a straight woman, I’m in no hurry to return to a time when men proved their heterosexual bona fides by competing to see who could dress (and sometimes smell) the most like literal garbage. But if boys and men are in crisis, as we are repeatedly and reliably assured they are, I’m also not persuaded that recalibrating the entire world toward a more feminine baseline is the best way to avoid that outcome.

The arc of the metrosexual holds lessons here: we have seen the backlash to a world in which being a man becomes synonymous with being a boor, but we have also seen what happens when that backlash curdles into a sense that masculinity and boorishness cannot be disentangled, and hence should both be rejected wholesale. In a culture that can’t conceive of healthy masculinity — a culture that instructs men that the best way to be is more like a woman — some men will conform. But others, finding nothing they can emulate and nothing to aspire to, will revolt — and it will be ugly.

Neo fights his way free of the membrane. He sits bolt upright, slime sluicing from his bald skull, and stares in horror. Facing him is an endless vista of identical pods, each containing a dreaming human, plugged by metal tubes into a simulation while their bodies are tapped for energy as living batteries.

A machine disconnects him from the tubes. A hatch opens, and Neo is flushed, screaming, into the start of his new life.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Its cultural impact is so profound it coined a whole political vocabulary: the ‘pill’, a revelation that destroys your worldview but awakens you to a new truth.

Offered a choice between a ‘blue pill’ that will deliver blissful ignorance in a comforting lie, or a ‘red pill’ that will awaken him to grim reality, Neo takes the red one. He wakes up from the simulation, to the horror of his true existence as living energy source for a world of machines.

What would have happened to Neo, had he taken the blue pill? I like to think he’d have spent the rest of his life in the world of the classic sitcom Friends, whose cast are reunited today for a much-trailed reunion.

First aired in 1994, Friends ran for a decade. It was wildly popular, with some episodes attracting 50 million or more viewers, and in 2019 was still the most watched show on Netflix. Even for my Home Counties teenage years, thousands of miles from the sitcom’s Manhattan setting, its quirky storylines became short-hand for a whole worldview.

We knew it wasn’t real. The apartments were too big, and no one could possibly have that much time to sit around drinking coffee. But we talked about what we’d do ‘if we lived in Friends world’. It was a shared imaginary, a picture of how we’d love life to be.

In Friends world, we might be free of all obligations except the ones we’d chosen. Where parents were domineering (especially Ross and Monica’s mum), social life, was opt-in. People drifted in and out of the Central Perk café, and events were driven by happenstance and whim.

And yet the bonds of this elective ‘family’ were unshakeable. Neurotic men like Ross were not exhausting fun-sponges but lovably vulnerable. Naïvete in the style of Joey or Phoebe made you not abused and exploited but charming. On-off relationships like Ross and Rachel’s were not destroyed but cemented by having a baby. You could be mean, capricious or spiteful, and it was a foible your friends loved and forgave, not something that got you ostracised.

In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.

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Around the time Ross and Rachel were getting amusingly married in Vegas while drunk, and The Matrix was featuring heavily in stoned conversations about the nature of reality, I was at university reading Walter J Ong. This Jesuit literary theorist argued in a seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, that writing and reading are not simply a technology but radically consciousness-altering.

Literacy, Ong suggested, profoundly changes a culture. In societies that don’t use writing to store knowledge, ancestral memory is retained and relayed using song, spoken storytelling, pictures and artefacts. And this in turn, Ong pointed out, shapes the things that can be remembered.

“Try to imagine,” he suggests, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” Even the idea of objectivity, Ong argues, is inseparable from the act of writing things down so they stay unchanged over time.

Boomers David Crane and Marta Kauffman created ten series’ worth of maximal connection plus maximal freedom in Friends. But as they did so, new digital media were turning the “open” values that suffused the show — its open friendships and ambiguous love-affairs, its whimsical open-mindedness, sometimes neurotic open-heartedness — into something new. That transformation has been as profound, and perhaps as irreversible, as the shift Ong described between oral and literate cultures.

Because making the jump from a print-and-TV culture to our networked, interactive, digital one doesn’t just give us more ways of reading the same stuff. It changes if, how and what we read, and even how we think about reality itself.

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To illustrate, consider Alan Partridge, another cultural icon of 1990s Britain – and also the subject of a relatively recent nostalgia reboot. Partridge was funny in 1997 because he was stuck in a timewarp. With his brown slacks and leatherette driving gloves, he was a petit-bourgeois Eighties hold-out desperately trying to stay afloat in a world he found increasingly incomprehensible.

Today, the digital networking of culture has also homogenised us. The kind of backwater where people can exist in a timewarp, Partridge-like, is increasingly difficult to find. And when you do stumble upon one, chances are someone with a MacBook is already there, Instagramming the colourful locals and tweeting about his “digital nomad” lifestyle.

So as a 21^st-century TV host, Alan Partridge falls flat. It’s simply not plausible that someone could be as adrift from prevailing cultural currents as he is, and still have a job in TV. So instead of being deliciously cringe, what you get is a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter.

And with the homogenisation that has de-Partridged even our backwaters has come a sea-change in our ways of interacting, thinking, even understanding what reality is. Friends aired its last episode four months after the launch of another type of “friends”: the virtual, networked kind mapped by Facebook.

The shift from “Friends world” to “Facebook friends world” started out as a way of mapping aspects of our social worlds that were already there. To begin with, we added “friends” we actually knew. But over time, it came increasingly to stand in for those social worlds, as we’ve increasingly swapped real-life meetups for messenger groups. Now, accelerated still further by lockdowns, much of social life has withdrawn from IRL altogether for an online-only mulch of infighting and memes.

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This in turn has taken the boomers’ “open” values in strange new directions. Whereas I spent my pre-internet teens poking around in arcane subcultures, today everything is “open” – or at least, it’s online in the public domain. You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, like in Friends world, which means they’re also opt-out again.

Against that backdrop, it’s nigh-on impossible to create the kind of boredom and insularity that forges teenage subcultures. Instead, less-than-model-perfect girls like I was (which is to say, nearly all girls) spend their time ‘perfecting’ selfies with Facetune for public consumption. In the process, many grow terrified of meeting people in the flesh and revealing their less-than-perfect real selves.

And this has ridden on the coat-tails of a more general withering of ‘IRL’ social life. We don’t hang out in cafes any more in the expectation of bumping into friends. It’s been rude to phone someone out of the blue since 2011. Often, we don’t make IRL friends at all: in a 2019 poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends.

None of this is to lament the passing of the Nineties, a decade I loathed. For me personally, life is much nicer now. Nor was I even much for Friends in the Nineties. It felt too twee and feelgood for a sullen adolescent as I was, with Tipp-Ex slogans on my Doc Martens and a predilection for Nietzsche and pirate radio. I scorned its upbeat and gregarious vision, preferring the world sketched out in the subscription of Green Anarchist I devoured (wholly without irony) in my parents’ leafy commuter-belt home.

I longed to grow dreadlocks and run away from home in a caravan of crusties, or live in a tree to protest the Newbury bypass. I didn’t. But Spiral Tribe, whose open-air raves triggered legislation to ban unlicensed dance parties the year Friends launched, were close to the truth when they sang: “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future”.

Friends was the party; it was the blue pill. And it did stop. But the future didn’t. There was a time we all believed, with Tony Blair, that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and that being more open — with our friendships, our emotions, our everything — was the royal road there. But it turned out that the flimsy, pastiche-laden, ironic Nineties of Tory sleaze, illegal raves, Britpop, football, and Princess Di really was as good as the End of History was ever going to get.

Now we’re through the looking glass. In this new post-literate world, along with the red pill you can have a black one, a white one, a pink, purple or even chaste pill. The only pill you can’t have is the blue one: the comfort blanket of Friends world, where “openness” never made life worse, the party never stopped, and the future never arrived.

That one is no longer available, except in obsolete formats that don’t work on modern screens.

Liam Gallagher recently headlined Knebworth twice, with more than half his set devoted to Oasis songs. There are new books about the period, too: Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That, an oral history by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, and Verse, Chorus, Monster, a memoir from Blur’s Graham Coxon. It’s slightly insulting to lump these artists together as Britpop when it was just a three or four-year slice of their careers, but it was the slice that made everything else possible.

Why can’t we let Britpop go? It certainly helps that the generation currently running the media grew up with it, and that, unlike the extraordinarily unfortunate grunge scene, all the key players are still with us. Aside from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (whose influence is audible in this year’s sardonic indie sensations Wet Leg), they are all still making music. The best songs endure. Beyond the music, it is a great yarn, with a tight-knit cast of characters and a full menu of drama: sex, drugs, money, hubris, vengeance and bitter rivalry.

Britpop is usually remembered as the musical component of a time when British culture was exploding with energy and optimism: in art, fashion, cinema, football, comedy, television, magazines, literature and politics. But the scene itself was full of rancour, gleefully stoked by the music weeklies. Oasis famously set themselves against Blur but so did Pulp and Suede. “It felt like whenever a new English guitar-based band arrived on the scene, the press would pit Blur against them, even when it wasn’t really appropriate,” Coxon glumly recalls in his book. And thanks to the warring Gallaghers, Oasis also hated Oasis. Music became a contact sport.

Britpop is still worth fighting about. When Blur tickets went on sale, one friend tweeted a savage (and simplistic) assessment by Suede’s Brett Anderson: a band “who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass”. This opinion wasn’t expressed in the NME in the heat of 1994; it appeared in Anderson’s 2019 memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn. Old feuds die hard. People still argue about who was the best band. They argue about whether Britpop was guilty of legitimising flag-waving and misogyny. They even argue about Oasis’s grand folly, Be Here Now, which many fans like rather more than Noel Gallagher does. Most of all, they argue about whether it deserves to loom so large, then and now. Was it really so special?

Britpop was an idea and an attitude rather than a genre, and it was born out of confrontation. The milestone April 1993 issue of Select magazine (“Yanks go home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain”) was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to sullen post-Nirvana rock and American cultural imperialism in general, against which it championed homegrown “glamour, wit and irony”. The Young British Artists had a similar sense of outsider ambition, greeting the post-Thatcher, post-Cold War Nineties with a determination to come roaring out of the sidelines and rewrite mainstream culture.

“Like it or not, we were Thatcher’s children,” Steve McQueen says in Faster Than a Cannonball. “When you realise there’s no safety net… people just tried to get on with it.” For the most part, these were not children of privilege (Blur’s Damon Albarn, the son of a university lecturer from Essex, somehow became the “posh” one) and they were reaching out to take what they had been denied. In Daniel Rachel’s oral history Don’t Look Back in Anger, radio DJ Steve Lamacq recalls his thoughts when playing Pulp’s 1995 hit Common People: “This is our victory; we’ve come from nothing and we’ve won.”

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Right from the start, though, there were sceptics. “One of Suede’s many achievements,” responded Keith Cameron in NME that same month, “has been to inspire some of the most outrageous examples of self-aggrandising tommyrot the British music press has ever seen fit to print… This is a small country, bedevilled with delusions of grandeur — not least of which that we invented pop music.” Suede and Pulp both hated the Union flag on the Select cover. Everybody hated the word Britpop, which didn’t actually appear in Select but soon became ubiquitous. “Nobody liked it,” Frischmann once said. “We knew it was trouble.”

This early definition of Britpop was a spiky, arty affair. “I was thinking of Philip Larkin not Phil Daniels,” Stuart Maconie, who wrote the lead essay in Select, told me a few years ago. “It was bedsits and being on the dole: a sort of pasty-faced underdog strangeness.” But that eccentricity did not survive the million-selling success of Parklife and Definitely Maybe in 1994, two albums which collapsed the wall between indie-rock and mainstream pop. The new generation in charge of Radio 1, Top of the Pops and tabloid showbiz columns was as keen as the weeklies to cheerlead the new breed, and that rolled into a bigger narrative (embarrassing in hindsight) about the branding exercise known as Cool Britannia.

In rejecting the political earnestness and low commercial horizons of alternative culture in the Eighties, Britpop overcorrected. The music industry and media, more than the bands themselves, became obsessed with size and success, to the detriment of many careers. When outsiders become insiders, values change and the initial blast of subversion fades into assimilation. The same story played out simultaneously across British culture. Chris Evans, Loaded and the Spice Girls have become looped into the Britpop story while the Manic Street Preachers, Tricky and Radiohead have not.

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As a synecdoche for Britain in the Nineties, Britpop’s reputation rises and falls with that of the decade in general. When, in 2003, John Harris published The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, a tale gradually swamped by cocaine, heroin, depression and disappointment, he struck an elegiac note: “Britpop is as uncool as could be imagined.” Britpop’s key bands broke up or lost momentum in tandem with the decline of New Labour and the YBAs, and they were all bundled together into a metaphor for squandered promise, arrogance, excess, conformity and apolitical escapism: what were we thinking? Britpop was also blamed for hogging the narrative and occluding other developments in British music, such as trip hop and drum’n’bass, which were more futuristic, more anxious, and less white. Come 2016, when the roots of Right-wing populism were traced back to Nineties Third-Way complacency, some people even blamed Britpop for Brexit — an absurd idea but a briefly popular one.

I sometimes feel like Britpop has to be either the best or worst thing that ever happened. The generation that grew up with simplistic received wisdom about the Sixties and punk rock has lived long enough to see its own youth culture reduced to a cartoon. That’s karma, I suppose. But Britpop had an unfortunate talent for self-caricature, producing images that did it no favours: Noel Gallagher at Number 10; Jarvis Cocker waggling his bum at Michael Jackson; the gruesome video for Blur’s “Country House”, directed by Damien Hirst in the style of Loaded. Such tabloid moments enabled Brett Anderson to dismiss Britpop as a “cheap, beery, graceless cartoon bereft of passion or rage which cravenly hid feeling behind a brittle mask of irony”.

Needless to say, the music was more complicated than that. “Common People”, for example, is neither jaunty social comedy nor a straightforward anthem of working-class pride but a mounting howl of rage and panic from someone who feels himself to be stranded between classes. Parklife’s studies of British life are satirical or elegiac rather than affirming, and the ghastly sitcom oom-pah of “Country House” has that ghostly cry for help in the middle eight. And even Oasis’s give-me-everything confidence was laced with apprehensions of loss: “Slide Away”, “Fade Away”, “Half a World Away”. Perhaps the only example of undiluted youthful vim is “Alright” by Supergrass. But narrative beats close listening every time. “I was singing out my slightly dystopian vision of the future, of the country, and everyone was going, ‘This is brilliant! It’s great!’,” Damon Albarn says in Don’t Look Back in Anger. “It became a nightmare. I suffered profound anxiety for years after as a result.”

These musicians were also more curious than they were given credit for. “Ultimately, Britpop was a reaction against new ideas; it was against rave, hip hop and R&B, wrapped in a Beatles/Stones comfort blanket,” alleges Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. But Noel Gallagher, a former Hacienda clubber, made records with the Chemical Brothers and Goldie, remixes abounded, and it’s hard to find a British musician less parochial than Albarn, from Gorillaz to Africa Express.

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I always feel drawn to these wrinkles in the Britpop story but Faster Than a Cannonball leans into the myth with gusto. Whether the choice of interviewees dictates the story or vice versa, it is a robustly anti-revisionist amen to the mid-Nineties. We get rosy memories from those, such as Noel Gallagher and Blur’s Alex James, who had a spectacularly good time but not people like Graham Coxon, who found much of it unbearable. The “Country House” video, he writes in his memoir, “seemed to confirm what I was afraid of — that Nineties culture had become tacky and cheap. For me, the decade wasn’t as golden and beautiful as my idea of the Sixties were like — which, of course, would have been very different to the reality.”

Ah, the Sixties. At first, Britpop seemed to owe far more to the seedy glamour of the Seventies (“it was a bit off, a bit eccentric, a bit wrong”, explained Jarvis Cocker) but Dylan Jones argues that “the Nineties chimed with the Sixties in being a decade that was almost uniquely British”. Blur vs Oasis harked back to the Beatles vs the Stones and Euro ’96 to England ’66. Swinging London characters such as Michael Caine, Ray Davies and John Barry become icons all over again. “London Swings! Again!” shouted Vanity Fair. Driven too hard, the comparison ended up making all the excitement about British culture feel second-hand: an echo of the real thing. “With Austin Powers the decade was already lampooning itself as a kind of shit Sixties,” the usually upbeat Alex James complains in Jones’s book.

Faster Than a Cannonball is too bullishly celebratory for my taste but perhaps it is well-timed. While the 30-year-olds I know are likely to regard Britpop and the Nineties with disdain, the teenagers are enthralled by the last great music scene before the internet was everything. It speaks to the lost centrality of pop music in British life, when it could pull together art, sport, fashion, cinema and even politics. Britain still has great rock bands, fascinating pop stars and thriving scenes but not that same unignorable convergence of all three. We certainly don’t have that sense, overblown and self-congratulatory though it may have been, of national rejuvenation and positive movement. Britannia doesn’t feel very cool right now, does it?  The music industry feels more sombre, too. Now that we are acutely aware of the psychological and financial strains on musicians, perhaps the misleading notion that it was all non-stop fun in the mid-Nineties is more attractive than the messy reality.

So is it any wonder that the myth of Britpop continues to exert such fascination? Even if the hard-earned optimism of the early Nineties soon gave way to boorish triumphalism, the memory of that enviable optimism still appears to burn bright. Faster Than a Cannonball suggests that you had to be there but I wonder if it is, in fact, easier to see that time as simply “golden and beautiful” if you weren’t.

Well, with the gift of hindsight, the collapse of a vast, ideologically-driven nuclear superpower into social, economic and moral anarchy might have concentrated more western minds than it did. “Nyebyezopasnost” is the word Russians (and Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc…) often use to describe their Nineties, usually translated as “insecurity” — though “never-without-danger” is closer to its actual sense. For the ordinary Russians whose voices were collected by the Belarussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich in Second-hand Time (2015), her remarkable oral history of the Soviet collapse, it was a period of chaos, anger and despair. Through her polyphony of voices, Alexievich sounds the void that is left when both security and meaning are removed from a society overnight.

This is pretty much what happened in the Russia of the Boris Yeltsin era, as “Capitalist Shock Therapy” was imposed under the Washington Consensus, criminals flourished, savings evaporated with hyper-inflations, as many as seven million people died what would later be termed “Deaths of Despair“, and the Economics Minister, Yegor Gaidar, appeared on Russian TV, trying to teach a dazed nation how to sell mineral water. Nothing that counted before counted anymore. “For twenty, thirty years, people were on the waiting list for an apartment,” complains Marina, a 63-year-old Belarusian woman, interviewed by Alexievich. “Then, one day, Gaidar comes and laughs in our faces: Go ahead and buy one! With what money?…We spent our whole lives believing that one day, we would all live well. It was a lie! A great big lie!”

Notwithstanding the evils in the Soviet experiment and the cynicism and dysfunction that characterised its Eighties iteration, it is just never a good idea to leave such a void untended. You don’t know what will come to fill it, though in retrospect, Putin’s construction of a “military Disneyland” for children; his Orthodox-Death Star Cathedral of the Armed Forces; his “Eternal Regiment” marching at the annual Victory Parade day parade — all this should really have rung a few alarm bells. In her introduction, Alexievich gives plenty of warning. “Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea,” she writes:

“This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else — hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarised. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognise their own slavery — they even liked being slaves.”

Alexievich, born in Ukraine in 1948, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her “documentary novels”, which occupy a contested zone between journalism and artistic endeavour. Her 1985 book The Unwomanly Face of War, which related the Great Patriotic War (as Russians label World War Two) through the voices of women, sold over two million copies in the USSR. She has also written about the Soviet-Afghan war, Chernobyl, and the epidemic of suicide in the former USSR — and, inevitably, incurred the displeasure of the Alexander Lukashenko regime in Belarus, though she remains in Minsk, where she has spoken out against the war. “Those people who were brought up by their Soviet parents, taught by Soviet teachers on Soviet textbooks, are now Soviet people…The romanticism of slavery is still living in the people who do not have anything, who are victims themselves, talk about the pain they are in, but still are confident that ‘we used to be great’. That is what lives in them.” It will take a long time “to squeeze the Soviet slave” from the national character.

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Alexievich would know: she is, self-confessedly, a sovok. This is a disparaging term both for the USSR itself (it literally means “dustpan”) and for the individuals shaped by it. Alexievich is interested in how history plays out within this “miniature expense” of the human individual. “It’s where everything really happens,” she writes. Of course, it’s where it happens for presidents and his siloviki too — and Putin (born 1952) would also be a sovok. In fact, you can almost imagine the Nineties Putin among the anonymous chorus of voices in Second-hand Time, complaining that he now has to drive a taxi, his secret service income isn’t enough to live by, muttering darkly about the great betrayal.

Alexievich’s subjects range across the former USSR and across the decades. There are dissidents and true believers, exiles, émigrés, victims of sectarian violence in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Tajikistan, and ordinary consumers, too, sincerely delighted at finally being able to get hold of western appliances, as colourful as possible, as everything used to be so grey. (“There’s loads of everything. You want to spoil yourself, indulge. It’s therapeutic. We’re all so sick”.)

But almost everyone is bewildered. “The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb,” says one interviewee. The idea of being poor didn’t really exist in the USSR; the common man had status, however theoretical it might have been. An unrepentant communist laments the fact that in the Soviet era, the streets had names like Metallurgists Avenue and Proletariat Street. Now, everything is being renamed Noble Street and Merchants Quarter. “Not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth,” she says. She sincerely believed she was striving for freedom.

And yet, those who opposed communism were also at a loss — especially the intelligentsia who gathered in kitchens to discuss banned literature and tell jokes about the party. One describes the pleasure of “external migration of the mind” that was possible under communism. He managed to secure a demotion from engineer to janitor, which meant 30 less roubles a month but who cares? There was nothing to buy anyway and more time to read. One of the first things that happened, post-1991 was that the second hand shops began to fill with books — now utterly useless.

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But curiously, it is those who had suffered the cruellest excesses of Soviet ideology who appear the most anguished. The Nineties was the decade of realising that any sacrifices made in the name of the Motherland had been meaningless. If there is anything worse than spending years performing hard labour in Siberia, using your fist for a pillow, feeling your teeth come loose with scurvy, it is discovering that you did all that for nothing. “I spent my life building a great nation. That’s what they told us,” laments Marina the Belarussian, recalling her years working on the Abakan-Taishet railway (singing komsomolsongs all the while). “I don’t want any German biscuits or sweets. Where are my just desserts? The fruits of my labour?” Her neighbour, Sashenka, has recently covered his head in acetate and set himself on fire on the plot that he had defended from the Nazis decades earlier.

Amid the crime, disorder, murder, terrorism, despair, suicide, pornography and paranoia there is a sense, above all, of promise unfulfilled. “What did we want?” says one who had cheered on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. “Gentle socialism, humane socialism.” And what did we get?…Bloodthirsty capitalism.” Time and again, people complain that they weren’t consulted. History was something that was done to them. What they wanted was equality and freedom. Not this.

As a westerner, it is hard to read all this without squirming. Was no one aware what would happen? Where the hell was everyone looking?

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There are omissions in Alexievich’s narrative. She has, it becomes clear, her own version of events. I suspect much of this is, in fact, crafted for western ears (there are surprisingly few criticisms of the West) and I can’t help wonder about the voices she omitted or embroidered. More concerning: some of the accounts in Second-hand Time have appeared in earlier books, with certain details migrating from one story to another. However, the same accusations could be levelled at Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago — which is no less forceful for being a bit unscrupulously sourced.

My deeper criticism is that it tends to reinforce the idea of Russia as some great live, literary epic — a stage for tragic, meaningful suffering. This is an idea that is at once sentimental and incredibly dangerous. (All those deaths have to mean something.) But then again, one of Alexievich’s repeated themes, actually, is how you can’t really trust books. “We lived in a world of mirages,” says the anguished dissident whose reading has proved useless. “The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.”

Did our leaders really expect that a functioning civil society could grow out of these ruins? Was Russia left to its fate through naïveté — or cruelty? Was it “just desserts” for what Ronald Regan termed the “evil empire”? But think: after the Second World War, the Allies pumped money into West Germany, and held its hand as it came to terms with its past. No American president went to Russia and declared: “I am a Muscovite!” There was no Nuremberg for those who upheld Stalin’s many Terrors. Only a vast avant-garde neoliberal experiment, which produced accelerated versions of all the rampant inequalities, deaths of despair, and information wars that would soon consume the West.

Ultimately, Second-hand Time leaves an impression of two monsters co-habiting the Kremlin. There was the grey monolith of communism itself — a drab, totalising creature that smothered lives and yet which did, in some important respects, impart meaning and free people from other tyrannies. But there was also the dark monster of Russian autocracy, resident since the days of Ivan the Terrible. Inscrutable. Cruel. Unpredictable. Even as it changes form. “Our country has a Tsarist mentality,” says a former secret-service agent in one of the most telling interviews. “Everyone needs a Tsar. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel…we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president it has to be a Tsar!”

The mistake was assuming that killing the first monster would smother the former. They killed the wrong monster. Whatever Russia emerges from this nightmare, we can’t make that mistake again.

MTV was still a thing back then. It was the twilight era of appointment TV viewing. People would say to themselves, “I am going to turn on my television and watch rock videos for an hour”, and proceed to do so. And MTV was central to the tone and feel of the early 1990s. Until the 1991 arrival of grunge, the world felt a bit as though culture had exhausted itself, and it was never again going to be possible for an era to feel like an era. The Eighties were the last era we were ever going to get. And then kaboom! The Nineties happened and it was like a drug kicking in.

Around 7pm two friends and I showed up at Sony studios over on the west side of Midtown to learn we would be in the fourth row directly in front of Kurt Cobain. We sat down and quickly noticed that there were five Sony staffers walking through the audience with men’s XXL black T-shirts: if you were wearing anything with visible branding on it, you had to wear one — but more terrifyingly, if they thought your outfit was too unhip, you had to wear one, too. Imagine the stress inside everybody’s heads as the shirt bearers drew nearer. Some guy with a tie had to wear one (I mean, what was he thinking?) but when they came to our row, we were declared hip enough and were spared The Shirt. Phew.

The room was tense and bristled with the sense of energy that comes from the realisation that you may well be attending your generation’s Woodstock. Everyone there knew they were going to see something that would and could never happen again. And by then pretty much everyone knew of Cobain’s drug issues and the discomfort he experienced being in any form of limelight. There was a very clear sense that Cobain was reaching a tipping point, and it couldn’t be good.

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Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

Cobain walked onstage in a peak-grunge sage green mohair-Lycra cardigan, old jeans and a T-shirt. As he and the other musicians came on, we could tell something was off. The vibe was like having friends arrive at your front door for dinner having had a screaming match in their car a minute before. There were no smiles or hellos, just the music. It was kind of brutal but it was totally on brand; if Cobain had smiled and done hellos, it probably would have wrecked the experience. Are there any sullen stars these days? I doubt it. Our culture of likes and likability is about as far away from the early 1990s as is possible.

For me the highlight was when the band played David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. Somewhere in the tenth to fifteenth seconds, my brain realised: Oh my God, they’re playing The Man Who Sold the World. I thought I was the only person on earth who loved that song! The evening’s final song, Where Did You Sleep Last Night was astonishing in a gut punch way — and then the show was over. Boom. Of course, everyone wanted an encore, but I could see Cobain near the studio’s exit door talking, in what appeared to be a very blunt manner, with MTV’s Director, and the moment I saw Cobain walk out that door, any possibility of an encore left with him.

It was the opposite of right now, when everything drags on forever. Marshall McLuhan said that when one medium makes another obsolete, it frees up that previous medium to become an art form — which is what happened with the internet eclipsing TV. Around the early 2000s you had the Sopranos and other long-form TV programming emerge, shows which could genuinely be considered art. Recently there’s a new Soprano’s show based on Tony Soprano’s early life, The Many Saints of Newark. If they announced that next month the Muppets were doing a Soprano’s variant, I wouldn’t be surprised. As I said, everything goes on forever these days, sprawling out into seasons of episodes and spawning relentless new iterations. Kurt knew how to make an exit.

But in October of 2019 the sage green cardigan worn by Kurt Cobain during the taping of Nirvana Unplugged — unwashed since the taping, missing one button and sporting two cigarette burns — sold in New York at Julien’s Auctions for $334,000. In June of 2020, the left-handed 1959 Martin D-18E used by Cobain on Unplugged sold at a Beverly Hills Julien’s auction for over $6,010,000.

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We can't be Friends any more

By Mary Harrington

This conclusion is simultaneously thrilling, horrifying and validating. If the 1990s were about anything, they were about “not selling out”. Nobody ever really knew what selling out actually meant, but basically, if you were successful, you were a sellout. Don’t sell out man. That band sold out years ago. So-and-so used to be great until they sold out. Selling out was the getting cancelled of 1993. Cancellation, too, is the wholesale negation of fame. Just as the woke lie in wait to pounce on pronoun infractions, everyone in a flannel shirt was astonishingly attuned to even the most microscopic evidence of success, eager to declare a sell-out.

Kurt was the king not selling out, his own death being the ultimate repudiation of fame and success. As I sit writing these words, I realise that in playing The Man Who Sold the World, he was telegraphing the core more of the day, an era that now, nearly 28 years later, feels as far away as does WWII. I can only imagine what he would have thought of the sale price of his cardigan.

But the Nineties actually came in two halves: the first half were the dark nineties, and the second half was the happy Nineties: Spice Girls! Windows 95! The first episode of Friends aired on 22 September 1994, a few months after Cobain’s death. We’ve all seen at least some of the show, so there’s no need to describe its structure other than to note that here in 2022 it is one of the most popular TV shows on Earth courtesy of streaming and translation. Indonesian sweatshop workers watch it on their breaks. People in caves watch it on their iPhones. It transcends all languages, ages and ideologies, and it appeals especially to the young, who have no living memory of the show in its prime, or of the 1990s at all.

Friends’ appeal is its undeniably good writing, but I suspect, much more importantly, that the show functions as a potent mode of time travel porn. Travel back in time to a magic lost world called the 1990s, a world free of 9/11, communism, Covid and an internet that turned nasty on us. Friends was, in hindsight, the gesamtkunstwerk of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. All scores were settled and the rest of history was going to be a trip to Walmart followed by an Olive Garden dinner followed by nonprocreative sex.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

I do think that deep down, nobody was really surprised by 9/11. In some ways the 1990s were too good to last. By 1998, daily life began feeling like visiting a department store to buy a shirt and realising your Visa card is likely to be declined, and the darkness of the early nineties began to re-emerge. In 2000 the Spice Girls, who may as well have been named The AntiKurt, disbanded and, when tech crashed later that year, a lot of people lost a lot of money — but nobody, to be honest, was the least bit surprised. And then came 9/11.

The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated. Chuck Klosterman says that young people always glamorise and grow nostalgic for the world that existed 20 years before them. I remember wondering how great the 1950s must have been like. And the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence. In the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.

But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.

A machine disconnects him from the tubes. A hatch opens, and Neo is flushed, screaming, into the start of his new life.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Its cultural impact is so profound it coined a whole political vocabulary: the ‘pill’, a revelation that destroys your worldview but awakens you to a new truth.

Offered a choice between a ‘blue pill’ that will deliver blissful ignorance in a comforting lie, or a ‘red pill’ that will awaken him to grim reality, Neo takes the red one. He wakes up from the simulation, to the horror of his true existence as living energy source for a world of machines.

What would have happened to Neo, had he taken the blue pill? I like to think he’d have spent the rest of his life in the world of the classic sitcom Friends, whose cast are reunited today for a much-trailed reunion.

First aired in 1994, Friends ran for a decade. It was wildly popular, with some episodes attracting 50 million or more viewers, and in 2019 was still the most watched show on Netflix. Even for my Home Counties teenage years, thousands of miles from the sitcom’s Manhattan setting, its quirky storylines became short-hand for a whole worldview.

We knew it wasn’t real. The apartments were too big, and no one could possibly have that much time to sit around drinking coffee. But we talked about what we’d do ‘if we lived in Friends world’. It was a shared imaginary, a picture of how we’d love life to be.

In Friends world, we might be free of all obligations except the ones we’d chosen. Where parents were domineering (especially Ross and Monica’s mum), social life, was opt-in. People drifted in and out of the Central Perk café, and events were driven by happenstance and whim.

And yet the bonds of this elective ‘family’ were unshakeable. Neurotic men like Ross were not exhausting fun-sponges but lovably vulnerable. Naïvete in the style of Joey or Phoebe made you not abused and exploited but charming. On-off relationships like Ross and Rachel’s were not destroyed but cemented by having a baby. You could be mean, capricious or spiteful, and it was a foible your friends loved and forgave, not something that got you ostracised.

In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.

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In defence of the Woke Left

By Mary Harrington

Around the time Ross and Rachel were getting amusingly married in Vegas while drunk, and The Matrix was featuring heavily in stoned conversations about the nature of reality, I was at university reading Walter J Ong. This Jesuit literary theorist argued in a seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, that writing and reading are not simply a technology but radically consciousness-altering.

Literacy, Ong suggested, profoundly changes a culture. In societies that don’t use writing to store knowledge, ancestral memory is retained and relayed using song, spoken storytelling, pictures and artefacts. And this in turn, Ong pointed out, shapes the things that can be remembered.

“Try to imagine,” he suggests, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” Even the idea of objectivity, Ong argues, is inseparable from the act of writing things down so they stay unchanged over time.

Boomers David Crane and Marta Kauffman created ten series’ worth of maximal connection plus maximal freedom in Friends. But as they did so, new digital media were turning the “open” values that suffused the show — its open friendships and ambiguous love-affairs, its whimsical open-mindedness, sometimes neurotic open-heartedness — into something new. That transformation has been as profound, and perhaps as irreversible, as the shift Ong described between oral and literate cultures.

Because making the jump from a print-and-TV culture to our networked, interactive, digital one doesn’t just give us more ways of reading the same stuff. It changes if, how and what we read, and even how we think about reality itself.

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To illustrate, consider Alan Partridge, another cultural icon of 1990s Britain – and also the subject of a relatively recent nostalgia reboot. Partridge was funny in 1997 because he was stuck in a timewarp. With his brown slacks and leatherette driving gloves, he was a petit-bourgeois Eighties hold-out desperately trying to stay afloat in a world he found increasingly incomprehensible.

Today, the digital networking of culture has also homogenised us. The kind of backwater where people can exist in a timewarp, Partridge-like, is increasingly difficult to find. And when you do stumble upon one, chances are someone with a MacBook is already there, Instagramming the colourful locals and tweeting about his “digital nomad” lifestyle.

So as a 21^st-century TV host, Alan Partridge falls flat. It’s simply not plausible that someone could be as adrift from prevailing cultural currents as he is, and still have a job in TV. So instead of being deliciously cringe, what you get is a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter.

And with the homogenisation that has de-Partridged even our backwaters has come a sea-change in our ways of interacting, thinking, even understanding what reality is. Friends aired its last episode four months after the launch of another type of “friends”: the virtual, networked kind mapped by Facebook.

The shift from “Friends world” to “Facebook friends world” started out as a way of mapping aspects of our social worlds that were already there. To begin with, we added “friends” we actually knew. But over time, it came increasingly to stand in for those social worlds, as we’ve increasingly swapped real-life meetups for messenger groups. Now, accelerated still further by lockdowns, much of social life has withdrawn from IRL altogether for an online-only mulch of infighting and memes.

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This in turn has taken the boomers’ “open” values in strange new directions. Whereas I spent my pre-internet teens poking around in arcane subcultures, today everything is “open” – or at least, it’s online in the public domain. You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, like in Friends world, which means they’re also opt-out again.

Against that backdrop, it’s nigh-on impossible to create the kind of boredom and insularity that forges teenage subcultures. Instead, less-than-model-perfect girls like I was (which is to say, nearly all girls) spend their time ‘perfecting’ selfies with Facetune for public consumption. In the process, many grow terrified of meeting people in the flesh and revealing their less-than-perfect real selves.

And this has ridden on the coat-tails of a more general withering of ‘IRL’ social life. We don’t hang out in cafes any more in the expectation of bumping into friends. It’s been rude to phone someone out of the blue since 2011. Often, we don’t make IRL friends at all: in a 2019 poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends.

None of this is to lament the passing of the Nineties, a decade I loathed. For me personally, life is much nicer now. Nor was I even much for Friends in the Nineties. It felt too twee and feelgood for a sullen adolescent as I was, with Tipp-Ex slogans on my Doc Martens and a predilection for Nietzsche and pirate radio. I scorned its upbeat and gregarious vision, preferring the world sketched out in the subscription of Green Anarchist I devoured (wholly without irony) in my parents’ leafy commuter-belt home.

I longed to grow dreadlocks and run away from home in a caravan of crusties, or live in a tree to protest the Newbury bypass. I didn’t. But Spiral Tribe, whose open-air raves triggered legislation to ban unlicensed dance parties the year Friends launched, were close to the truth when they sang: “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future”.

Friends was the party; it was the blue pill. And it did stop. But the future didn’t. There was a time we all believed, with Tony Blair, that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and that being more open — with our friendships, our emotions, our everything — was the royal road there. But it turned out that the flimsy, pastiche-laden, ironic Nineties of Tory sleaze, illegal raves, Britpop, football, and Princess Di really was as good as the End of History was ever going to get.

Now we’re through the looking glass. In this new post-literate world, along with the red pill you can have a black one, a white one, a pink, purple or even chaste pill. The only pill you can’t have is the blue one: the comfort blanket of Friends world, where “openness” never made life worse, the party never stopped, and the future never arrived.

That one is no longer available, except in obsolete formats that don’t work on modern screens.