Klosterf*ck

Intentionally upside down, btw.

But What If We're Wrong? (2016) by Chuck Klosterman: Chuck Klosterman started his public life as an iconoclastic music critic and reporter before branching out into memoirs, novels, and non-music-related essays. He's still best at music, sub-category rock, though. Here, he tries to branch out into futurism (seriously) and cultural criticism (yes, seriously). The results are fun and awful.

Klosterman's central point would be better suited to a book of essays by various experts on the fields he tackles. The overall question in the book is, what will be proven wrong in the future based on how we've been wrong in the past about the future, and what things will survive? 

Impressively enough, Klosterman attempts to answer this question in relation to various fields of human endeavour without once referring to any major predictive (right or usually wrong) written works of science fiction or, for that matter, very many futurists. His construction of how we were wrong in the past is mostly a collection of general assertions, I'm assuming because specific examples would require research time that Chuck clearly had no intention of spending on this book. Or any book, now that I think of it.

When Klosterman stays on music (and, to be fair, sports) , the book's flaws are minimized. Even then, Klosterman's vagueness and indecision about what it is exactly that he's assessing -- popularity or critical 'goodness'? rightness or longevity? -- causes problems. 

To wit: because the general population only 'knows' a handful of classical composers now, Klosterman believes the population will only know of one rock musician a few hundred years from now. Or maybe more. A problem develops in Klosterman's reasoning in this section when he consults an expert on classical music, who sub-divides the classical composers the general public 'knows' into centuries and movements. OK, BUT, the general public doesn't remember any of these composers by century or movement. It just knows classical music as the names of a handful of composers.

OK, BUT, the general public really also knows classical music by familiar pieces and snippets of pieces used in popular works -- ads, movies, and Warner Brothers cartoons. Klosterman doesn't assess the music this way, however. And in treating rock music as if it were one of those classical-music subsets -- 19th-century classical, or Baroque, or whatever -- he's reduced himself to thinking about what one rock musician will still be known by name in 500 years rather than assessing a handful AND a second assemblage of pieces and snippets. So the argument doesn't really hold together.

And this is the best part of the book.

When Klosterman rambles into The World's Most-Remembered Writer and Great American Novels, the results are dire and ill-researched and absolutely blind to genre (Klosterman may have been born a rock critic, but he's a snob when it comes to literature even though he admits to have never finished a work by several major American authors, and even though much of his argument suggests that he may have never finished reading a novel by anybody since he was in high school). 

When he ventures into science, diligently reporting that Neil DeGrasse Tyson seems to be really pissy with him, one wonders the Tyson didn't punch him. In this section, Klosterman sets up a false dichotomy between what Tyson's talking about and what another scientist is talking about. I'll leave it to you to figure that one out. 

Later in the book, Klosterman  notes that he's not going to go on at length about global warming. So he does for three pages instead, glibly and infuriatingly. At one point, Klosterman's discussion of what he thinks will happen with global warming suggests that Klosterman, raised in North Dakota, remains unaware of the Canadian province due North of North Dakota and what its principal crops are.

So it goes. Klosterman reveals in the acknowledgements section that he was unaware hedgehogs weren't native to North America until the book had already been typeset, thus making his anecdote about watching a hedgehog in his yard in Illinois (or maybe Brooklyn) seem a bit... unlikely. Maybe it was a woodchuck, Klosterman notes. OK. This all ties into Klosterman's recurring riff on the old saying that the hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox many small things. Or maybe the woodchuck knows one large thing. Maybe Klosterman needs better editors and fact-checkers. Maybe the hedgehog doesn't know anything at all.

Klosterman also hilariously uses the term "third rail" as if it were a synonym for "happy medium" during his discussion of global warming. What? Does Chuck Klosterman actually know anything? Did anyone copy-edit or just plan edit this book? Should someone tell Chuck to go back to music and the occasional sports piece? Do repeated references to Citizen Kane imply that the Citizen Kane Film 101 class was the only class Klosterman attended in college?  Only recommended for Klosterman completists.

Robert Plant Does Not Like Heavy Metal

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman (2006): Hilarious and thoughtful collection of essays, mostly on pop-cultural issues, by the almost always engaging Klosterman. He manages to come up with sharp analysis without being (too much) of a pretentious bastard. His notes on the pieces, which span ten years of his writing, are often refreshingly candid about what he thinks succeeds and fails in hindsight.

Klosterman's weaknesses could be described as a love of over-generalization and an occasional bout of a sort of odd political futilitarianism masquerading as hard-won cynicism. When he lurches into politics, the results are often intellectually embarrassing. So thank heavens he doesn't do so very often.

There are a lot of high points here. The two I'd pick as most representative of Klosterman's charms are a hilariously cranky interview with Robert Plant (cranky on Plant's part, that is, the crankiness mostly aimed at people other than Klosterman except when Plant decides that Chuck's theories on Led Zeppelin are full of crap) and a ridiculously useful column explaining the differences between one's Nemesis and one's Arch-Enemy ("If your Arch-Enemy decided to kill you, your Nemesis would try to stop him."

Other great pieces include a profile of (The Smiths') Morrissey's largest American fan-base (Los Angeles-area Latinos, apparently), the annual Goth pilgrimage to Disneyland, and Klosterman's bizarre visit with Val Kilmer. Recommended.

Road Trip

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman (2005): Klosterman's second full-length non-fiction look at rock and roll sees him travel across America in a Ford Taurus (which he dubs "the Tauntaun") to visit the deathplaces of an assortment of rockers, musing on his own troubled love life all the while. He also gets in a lot of fascinating observations about celebrity culture, rock and roll, and assorted bands major and minor along the way.

The major problems here are two-fold. The relationship material started to wear on me after awhile, as funny and rueful as some of Klosterman's observations may be. Like a lot of writers, Klosterman spends a lot of time inside his own head, but not everything going inside that head works all that well on the printed page. He may be self-puncturing and self-deprecating, but he's also self-obsessed. Self-obsessed, and intensely self-aware that he's self-obsessed.

Klosterman's second problem, his tendency to generalize from personal experience, sometimes runs out of control herein. It can be quite fascinating and thought-provoking, but generalizing that, say, every man in history has at one time or another thought Led Zeppelin was the greatest band doesn't actually ring true. I can think of a lot of men for whom it isn't and never was, and I can think of a lot of women for whom it is or was. Is Klosterman self-fashioning what manhood really is around the question of Led Zep's greatness? I'm not sure. I think he's just making a sweeping generalization. On the other hand, Klosterman passive-aggressively pushes his heterosexual cred throughout, like a teenager worried someone's going to call him gay because he reads and writes too much.

If you're going to enjoy Klosterman, you're going to have to put up with the generalizations. You're also going to have to put up with a relentlessly intelligent writer whose aversion to the 'highbrow' and to 'high culture' often leaves him over-analyzing and over-emphasizing the merits of pop culture. I'd be interested in seeing Klosterman analyze something challenging, but I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon. He's got a great brain, but all that brain wants to chew on is the popular and the junky. Sometimes this results in fascinating, populist musings about the importance of Kiss; sometimes this results in over-intellectualized wankery about, well, the importance of Kiss. I'm not sure any music critic has ever worked so hard to justify the musical tastes of his youth.

Nonetheless, there are brilliant observations and some very funny stuff here. If you're like me, you'll nod in recognition at the rewriting of critical and popular taste that occurred just after Kurt Cobain's death, as In Utero went from interesting but off-putting semi-failure to signature artistic statement. You may even laugh out loud as Klosterman discusses his deep-seated disappointment at discovering that while he likes blues-based rock, he can't stand the actual blues. Recommended.

Appetite for Deconstruction

Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman (revised 2001 edition): Chuck Klosterman has carved out a niche for himself as an iconoclastic cultural critic. He began as a music and entertainment journalist in America's Midwest in the early 1990's, first as a college student and then as a professional. Before that, he was a kid growing up in the 1980's in the tiny North Dakota town of Wyndmere, where he developed a love for heavy metal -- and, more particularly, 'glam metal' or 'hair metal', perhaps the most dominant musical genre in North America by the late 1980's. But then grunge swept it away. Here, in his first book, he tried to bring it back -- or at least provide a counter-narrative to the standard 'Hair metal sucks!'

Klosterman's musings begin with Motley Crue and end, pretty much, with the disintegration of Guns 'n' Roses in the early 1990's. He makes a great revisionist case for the artistic merit of a lot of metal songs, albums and bands, all while remaining uncomfortable with the idea of critical praise (in part because critics don't tend to praise the bands he's praising).

I think you'll probably find yourself mentally arguing with a lot of his conclusions, which is great -- that's part of what makes the book fun. Klosterman's great weakness -- a tendency to generalize or even universalize based solely on his personal preferences and experiences -- is also his great strength. He can get you mad -- or happy when you agree with him.

It helps that he's both killingly funny and gifted at presenting fresh, involving autobiographical detail, whether that detail comes in the chapter in which he introduces his 1990's alcoholism, or in imagining his teenaged self listening to Motley Crue for the first time. He evokes small, small-town life in telling detail (as he notes at one point, the small town of John Mellencamp's "Small Town" would be a city to the residents of Wyndmere) without condescending to rural residents. Also, he invented and named his own drink (The Witty Chuck, a mix of brandy and ginger ale).

But it's the musical contextualization and appraisal that makes the book really appealing. You'll probably want to check out at least a few tunes that you haven't heard for years (or at all), and the argument he makes for GNR's Appetite for Destruction as one of the ten best albums ever is pretty fascinating and. depending on your taste, compelling. But the most interesting thing he observes about GNR is how truly real Axl Rose's existential anger was, and how central it was to the band's early success: once it was gone (or at least partially dissipated), Rose couldn't fake it or replicate it, leaving Chinese Democracy in limbo for 15 years.

The great weakness of the book is its title, one that Klosterman notes himself he isn't all that crazy about (he suggested Appetite for Deconstruction, which would have been hilarious). Oh well. All this and you also find out that Klosterman hates hippies almost as much as Eric Cartman does. A great, contentious book for any fan of popular music in the late 20th century. Highly recommended.