So is David Grossman’s formulation correct? Is Hootie the soundtrack of the uncomplicated phase of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, the peak of liberal confidence and American power and post-ideological relaxation?
I’m not so sure, since I’m not sure there’s zero tension or spiritual disquiet in those kinds of songs. Shouldn’t a pure “it’s the end of ideological conflict, and I feel fine” work of art be a little bit less angsty, a little sunnier than Darius Rucker singing, “Let her cry, if the tears fall down like rain/Let her sing, if it eases all her pain”? Or Adam Duritz crooning mournfully, “It’s raining in Baltimore, baby/But everything else is the same”? If we’re being technical, isn’t the theme song from “Friends” — arguably the most Fukuyama-core work of popular art ever — or something from the boy-band and early Britney Spears era closer to the true music of the post-Cold War age?
Still, when I look back on this music, there’s something about Grossman’s analysis that rings true. It’s not joy at the end of history, exactly, that defines the Hootie-DMB-Counting Crows aesthetic, but maybe it’s what you might call a sense that ordinary life suffices (a key stabilizing sentiment for a liberal society). That you can have a rich human experience, full of joys and sorrows, without the extreme premodern or 20th-century stuff, war and God and utopia and all the rest. (And without racial division, too: The multiracial makeup of the Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish is also important here.) That you can be a fulfilled human person just through the highs and lows of normal-seeming suburban American life. That tropes of early-adult male heterosexual experience like “the yearning to be famous” or “the awesome girl who lets you down” or just “hanging out with your friends and feeling a little sorry for yourself” are all sufficient as grist for the strong feelings that make up an interesting life. And that when those feelings get you down, you can be depressed in a way that’s personal rather than existential, that’s just about you rather than about everything that’s wrong with life under late capitalism or whatever.
In which case, the subsequent negative shift in American culture shouldn’t be understood simply as a shift from joy to angst, happiness to unhappiness — though that’s clearly there, in song lyrics especially. It’s been a shift away from the sense that the average American life in both its joys and its sorrows supplies enough meaning to be worth embracing and celebrating. In its place is a sense that American normalcy in any form — whether that normal means capitalism or liberalism or secularism or heterosexuality or whiteness or something else — is inadequate or destructive or foredoomed and that even in their sorrows, the singers of the 1990s weren’t awake to just how bleak things really are.
Having stretched a bit to vindicate a link between Hootie and the end of history, let’s retreat to safer ground and close with a question better suited to my cultural interests: Namely, which 1990s movies count as Fukuyama-core? Not, interestingly, the best movies of the best late-modern year in movies, 1999. As I wrote in a column a few years ago, that year’s offerings actually anticipated all our present discontents:
We should have seen the bad days coming. The filmmakers of 1999 did, as Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker noted when The Ringer’s top-100 list came out. “Election,” “The Matrix,” “Fight Club,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Office Space,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” even (God help us) “The Phantom Menace” … it’s all there, everything that followed, class anxiety and workplace alienation, end-of-history discontents and internet-fueled hoaxes, disputed elections and virtual-reality prisons, plus a tottering republic waiting for its Palpatine.
The very best films of the ’90s, then, weren’t end-of-history films. Which movies were? The Clinton-era spate of teen romances and sex comedies, definitely — from “Clueless” to “Can’t Hardly Wait” to “American Pie” — pure celebrations of affluent suburban folkways, with carnality and romantic sweetness walking hand in hand. “Forrest Gump,” arguably — maybe a little bit too right wing but basically a celebration of steering your way blithely through ideological storms and coming out rich and blessed on the other side. “Good Will Hunting,” maybe — blue-collar genius starts out as a jaded semi-radical but goes through therapy and ultimately ditches class warfare and joins the meritocracy, albeit on his own distinctive terms, with his (future Trump-voting) best friend’s blessing. “Austin Powers,” definitely — a romp through a post-Cold War world in which the revolutions of the past have yielded an ideal synthesis, freedom and responsibility, a very groovy combination.