Chuck Klosterman - Chuck Klosterman on Rock: A Collection of Previously Published Essays

A Collection of Previously Published Essays

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Essays in this work were previously published in Fargo Rock City copyright 2001 by Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs copyright 2003, 2004 by Chuck Klosterman, and Chuck Klosterman IV copyright 2006, 2007 by Chuck Klosterman.

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First Scribner ebook edition September 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-4516-2449-6

Portions of this work originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, SPIN magazine, and the Fargo Forum

From Fargo Rock City

From Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

From Chuck Klosterman IV

From Eating the Dinosaur

Heavy metals finest hour:
The three best-selling records on the planet
are Bon Jovis New Jersey, Guns N Roses
Appetite for Destruction, and Def Leppards
Hysteria.

Every time I invite a hipster over to my house (and this happens far more often than Id like to admit), I put myself in a precarious position.

At some point in the evening, the visiting hipster is going to look at my CD collectionthe single quickest way to assert any individuals coolness quotient. I do the same thing anytime Im in another persons home. My problem is that (obviously) I am an 80s metal fan, and that devastates my indie rock cred. Since Im not a musician, Im not sure why this should matter; it certainly seems ridiculous that private citizens should need indie rock cred. But it always seems important, especially if Im trying to sleep with the aforementioned hipster. And CD collections dont lie: No matter how many times you mention Matador Records, you cannot consistently explain why Poison is nestled between Pizzicato Five and Polara.

Of course, this situation can be played to ones advantage. You can out-hip a hipster by taking things to the next levelyou can promote yourself as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, the Jedi Knight among trendy rock fans. Being an Ironic Contrarian Hipster is rather complicated; it forces you to own over a thousand CDs, and you have to hate all of them. In fact, the only things you can openly advocate are artists like the Insane Clown Posse and Britney Spears.

Once you get the reputation as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, youll suddenly have a lot of freedom. You can sit around and watch Roadhouse and Footloose all day, and you can eat at buffet restaurants and wear stupid clothes and smoke pot before work because its wacky to be a bad employee. Most importantly, you can throw away all your cool records by Stereolab and Built to Spill and listen to stuff thats actually good. This mostly equates to classic rock, new wave groups with female vocalists, Fleetwood Mac, any band from Sweden, and hair metal. If questioned about these choices, you simply scoff and smile condescendingly at your accusers. It also might be a good idea to tell them they need to think outside the box (or something like that), but you must say it in a way that indicates you would never actually use that phrase in a real conversation, despite the fact that you always do.

Unfortunately, there will be a point where someone will call your bluff. There will come a day when someone will say, Hey man, I dont care how far outside the box you thinkthere is nothing cool about owning Iron Maidens Best of the Beast. And if they are serious and if you are not stoned, you will be forced to host a serious argument about the musical merits of heavy metal.

Arguing for the aesthetics of hair metal probably seems like an impossible task. There are no respected sources to provide support, and you cant simply suggest that the sonics are too complicated for the average listener to understand. There is no high road. You can tell people they just dont get it, but thats really a self-defeating argument. Opponents will inevitably insist theres nothing to get, and theyre not going to feel any regrets about missing the nothing that you are apparently getting and making it into something. In other words, they will pretty much have you over a barrel, and your only recourse will be insisting that Ani DiFranco is trying a little too hard to look ugly, which really isnt that compelling of a point in most musical debates.

Usually, the fundamental strategy in prometal arguments hinges on an insistence that most metal is horrible. In order to seem rational, the metal advocate is constantly saying things like, Yeah, I agree that most of those bands did suck, but..., and then they try to build a larger point out of the ashes of a seemingly negative confession. They admit that hair metal did not succeed in a macro sense, but it was sometimes brilliant in a micro sense. This is the only way to seem like a sensible person (its the same philosophy one uses when trying to support the Libertarian Party).

Whats so frustrating is that this kind of statement actually applies to every genre of music (metal included). Thats the reality of rock n roll: Just about every band is absolute shit. Listen to the Sub Pop 200. Listen to any disco compilation or punk retrospective. Listen to 98 percent of the ska bands that emerged in the mid-1990s (or most of the originals, for that matter). The overwhelming majority of what youll hear will be wretched. And it generally seems that fans know this, even though they might not feel comfortable admitting it. Few people listen to entire albums, even when theyre released by their so-called favorite band. The single biggest force driving the compact disc revolution was not sound quality, nor was it durability: It was the convenience of being able to hear a specific track instantaneously, and then being able to move to another track as soon as the previous one got boring (usually, about two minutes and thirty seconds into a tune). Record reviewers spend way too much time analyzing albums in their entirety; this is because most rock writers have a problemthey like music way too much, often to the point of idiocy. Its very common to see an album panned because theres not much beyond the single. I dont think that kind of logic matters. For example, Tubthumping by Chumbawamba has proven to be a more important album than Bob Dylans Grammy Award-winning Time Out of Mind, simply because Chumbawambas disc offered one great song that defined the moment of its popularity. I dont think theres any question about which of those two LPs will be more fun to find in a jukebox twenty years from now.

OKAY... so weve established that all popular music is basically crap. If your opponent agrees with that assertion, I suppose it essentially makes the rest of the argument moot, but arguments never end this way. You will inevitably keep talking and arguing and loudly scoffing and telling the other person to shut the hell up, and (at some point) you will need to explain what was good about heavy metal in a musical sense. And this