The Cult of Klosterman

By Vince Darcangelo (editorial@boulderweekly.com)

Chuck Klosterman is having an existential crisis. He's considering the deaths of two members of the Allman Brothers Band when his thoughts meander toward more pressing issues, like the state of music criticism in the age of cheaply produced promotional CDs.

"Right now, most rock journalism is just mild criticism with a Q&A attached," he writes.

This is potentially dangerous territory to tread for someone who makes his living as a rock critic. And he's only on page 91 of Killing Yourself to Live, his third and most-recent book.

Killing Yourself to Live—released last July and published in paperback last week—is ostensibly about the role of death in the rock 'n' roll pantheon and how, for many musicians, the greatest career move they could have made was to exit stage left. But that's not the real story here. The book is in actuality a road-trip romance with a hard rock soundtrack and an undercurrent of pop-culture philosophizing. As with his first two books, Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman dissects popular culture with the razor edge of Derrida and the self-awareness of Eggers. Along the way he explains why Radiohead's Kid A might very well have predicted 9/11, but mostly he works through his relationship issues with three women—and, of course, measures the worth of rock journalism.

Which brings us back to the existential crisis. What is the value of modern-day rock criticism when writers simply "make a living reviewing [their] mail"? Admittedly, my own editions of his books are advance promotional copies. If you want to understand the significance of this... well, you'll just have to read Klosterman yourself.

What you need to know now is that Chuck Klosterman is coming to Boulder, discussing and signing Killing Yourself to Live on Wednesday, June 14, at the Boulder Book Store. He's got a new book, Chuck Klosterman IV, due out in September, and he's currently working on his first novel.

Klosterman just might be the most important writer of our generation, mining a deeper-than-expected meaning from the seemingly disposable Gen X culture crush of MTV, '70s reruns and The Real World. Humorous and insightful, significant and temporal, his writings will make you laugh, think, reconsider G'n'R tribute bands and make you hunger for sugary breakfast cereal. Most likely, you'll swear that he's writing about your life, because Chuck Klosterman may very well be writing all our memoirs, whether he realizes it or not.

Boulder Weekly: Is it strange for you doing tours and interviews, coming from the other side as a journalist?

Chuck Klosterman: I really enjoy the actual reading and meeting with the book buyers. That's fun and interesting. I'm always nervous no one is going to come, so whenever anybody does I'm always pleasantly surprised. The traveling drives me crazy. I don't like to travel. I really don't. I'm a stationary person. I hate to complain about it because I should be happy, I guess, that I get to do it, but the thing is everything really does sort of become exactly the same, which is the cliché thing people say whenever they do tours. But it's weird, you go to cities and you talk to the reporter from the daily newspaper there and they ask the questions all the daily reporters ask, then you talk to the alternative newspaper person and they ask all the questions all the alternative people ask. Then you're in the hotel room and you're waiting around and the hotels are all vaguely similar. You walk to the nearest restaurant, and they're exactly like all the restaurants that happen to be near hotels. Then you go to the reading and people ask the same questions. Then you go to the bar afterward and it's the same kind of people who want to hang out with you. It's kind of amazing how similar life becomes.

BW: Do you feel that doing these tours and doing these interviews has helped you with your interviewing skills when you're done touring and go back to the office?

CK: Oh, absolutely. There's something that I realized through being interviewed that now I will implement in my own interviewing. It makes me sound like a jerk, but it's true: The person interviewing you a lot of times tries to relate to you by telling you an anecdote from their life that they felt was spurred on by the book. When people interviewed me about Fargo Rock City, they would often be like, "Well, here are my heavy metal memories," and tell me about going to a Whitesnake show in '86. The thing is, when that happens, I don't even know what I'm supposed to do really. I realize that they're just trying to show that they relate to me or whatever, but it's not really a question. I could say like, "That's awesome." One thing now, whenever I interview people I'm very cognizant to never ever tell them things about my life because I realize they never care.

BW: One thing that makes it hard for people is that you're a very personal writer. You really put yourself out there. I think it's kind of difficult to not impose yourself into the experience.

CK: I interviewed Richard Linklater once, and one of the things he told me—when he said this I knew what he meant—he said people don't come up to me and tell me that, "God, your film blew my mind," they come up to me and say, "I could have made that film. If I was a filmmaker I could do that." That's not really true, but I understand what he means. A lot of people watch Dazed and Confused and think to themselves, "If I made a movie, that's what it would look like." A lot of people will say, "I feel like if I wrote a book it would be exactly like yours." People don't view me as an inaccessible writer. I'll get into an elevator somewhere and someone will just call me Chuck. It's like they know me. That's cool, I'm happy about that, but if I got into an elevator with Douglas Copeland, whom I've never met before, I'd at least say his full name, you know.

I guess that's good. If people feel comfortable with me, that's probably why they like reading my books. They see me as somebody who is similar to them who just happens to be the person who gets to write about it.

BW: Do you think this is a Gen X thing?

CK: And what would the result of that be?

BW: This sense of, "Well, I could do that too." We have so much reality television. There's no distinction anymore. There's no fourth wall anymore.

CK: This has really happened over the last 10 years. Suddenly a lot of things that were previously impossible are still difficult but they are possible. Memoir writing became pretty much the biggest extension of nonfiction writing. But what is a memoir? A memoir is an autobiography about somebody who's not famous. I think a lot of people are like, "Well, I can write my autobiography. I have interesting anecdotes. I fucking listen to records and they engage my view of romance." They think it could happen. Sometimes some blogger gets a book deal, right, so bloggers think, "Well, maybe I could get a book deal." Kevin Smith makes Clerks for $10,000. People go, "Well, jeez, I don't really know how to do this, but I bet I could find $10,000."

If it was 1974 and you wanted to be on television, you would be like, "How is this ever going to happen?" There's no way I could ever possibly be on television. I'd have to move to Los Angeles. I'd have to take acting lessons. I'd have to get a break. I'd have to sleep with a bunch of people I didn't like. But how it is now, getting on television now is probably easier than being a lawyer. It's true. I think if you're a 19-year-old kid and you're trying to figure out what you're trying to do with your life. Maybe I'd like to be a federal prosecutor, or maybe I'd like to be on television. I definitely think that getting on television would be easier.

BW: And now people are famous just for being reality stars.

CK: Although that's a weird kind of fame. The thing is, there's so many of them now that even people who watch reality television have a hard time remembering who was who. When I watch The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, a lot of times they'll bring somebody on the show and I'm like "Wow." It's amazing. If I don't know this person, how can anybody? I'm supposed to know who these people are, right? And they have that weird life where it's just a sliver of what being a celebrity used to mean. It used to be being a celebrity meant people recognized you, you were wealthy, and you had this kind of dream life. People respected you even though all you'd really done is moved yourself into a different tier of society. Now, you're only famous. No one respects you. You have no money. Those people are broke. The only people they're having sex with are other reality stars.

BW: Do you think we've reached a saturation point where there's going to be a change in some direction other than just another Survivor or another Real World?

CK: Those saturation points are harder to reach now. There was a time when there were three channels on television, and the only radio was the FM station in your town. Not many movies came out, and a limited number of records came out. Now they keep expanding and expanding and expanding it. If people don't like reality television, it's not like they have to watch it. I get something like 270 channels or something. I could easily go a year without watching reality television, even though it's sort of the most universal form of programming. If you're talking about saturation from a scientific sense, they just keep getting a bigger and bigger swimming pool. You can't really saturate it. It will eventually be a lake and then an ocean.

BW: They're getting ready for Real World Denver.

CK: Yeah, I know. Could Minneapolis be far behind?

BW: What would you suggest we do to help make the Denver one the best one ever?

CK: That's interesting. That program took a really huge aesthetic change around the year it was set in Las Vegas. It's so weird, but it's been going on now for more than a decade. In the early Real Worlds, there was very little drinking. That was very rare. And the hope was always that, "I wonder if any of these cast members will hook up with each other or with anyone?" It was not until the Hawaii year that two cast members ever really got together. But now that's the normative condition. It usually happens right away. The show sort of shifted. Now they're almost feeding those kids booze and demanding them to go to the worst bars in town.

I thought the Austin cast was funny. Austin is an awesome town, a really cool place. Probably one of my favorite cities in the country. And the Real World kids managed to find the one bar in Austin that's terrible. It doesn't seem anything like the rest of the town. All of the hipsters in that town must have despised that show. So whatever is the worst bar in Denver, that's where the Real World kids will be going.

But to be the best year ever? It would be interesting if this was the first cast that got heavily involved in narcotics dealing. I think that would be interesting. If it became Miami Vice, sort of, where Glenn Frey is doing coke in the Real World house, I think that would be cool. But MTV seems wary of that. Anything but that. Somebody can have sex with 15 people in one night, and they love it. But nobody can smoke pot on The Real World.

BW: What is Chuck Klosterman IV going to be about?

CK: Some of the people who read my books are really young; they're like high school kids or they're in college. They had no idea who I was before these books came out. When they found out that I worked in newspapers for eight years and I worked at magazines, they wondered if there was a way they could read some of the stories. That's interesting. I think anybody who is a journalist or a writer likes the idea of an anthology. So I gingerly brought this up to Scribner, thinking let's put this out solely in softcover so it's really cheap and it will be like a collection of things I've written. They liked the idea and wanted it to be a real book. Now it's coming out in hardcover. It's basically three parts. The first part is trends and profile pieces I've done over the years, kind of the real journalism. The second is columns I've done, first-person things—things that aren't really journalism, just kind of first-person writing. The third part is a novella I wrote in the year 2000. So it's fiction. It's things that are true, things that might be true, and something that's not remotely true.

BW: Do you have any thoughts about a book beyond that?

CK: I'm writing a novel now. I'm trying to write a novel. That would be the fifth book. In an ideal world I would write this novel then write another nonfiction book after that. I think that I'll always be primarily a nonfiction writer, but I just wanted to see if I could write a novel. I'm still figuring out if I can. It's different. I've never done it before, so I'm just trying.

BW: Would you say that was your original goal, to become a fiction writer?

CK: No, no, no. When I got out of college in 1994, my goal was that if I worked hard and I caught some breaks and I became a better writer, someday, maybe, I might be able to work at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That was the totality of my goal, to work at a major metro newspaper, and it seemed like the best chance, coming from North Dakota, would be Minneapolis. Of course I thought maybe it would be nice to write a book someday, but I didn't even own a computer. I didn't even have an idea how a book got published. It's really weird. What do you do when your real life completely usurps your dreams? That's exactly what's happened. I can't believe that I have a fourth book coming out. I never thought I would have one.

Then it's also weird how life gets normal. Now it just seems like this is what I do. It's really weird. I'm still getting used to it. Five years ago, before Fargo Rock City came out, nobody cared about me. No one fucking cared about what I wrote or thought about anything. I was completely unknown. It kind of blows my mind I'm doing this interview right now. I'm still getting used to this. Things just change—maybe too fast.

BW: You wrote at length about Saved by the Bell in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. What are your thoughts on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and their growing role as a Gen X pop-culture depository, in particular their experimentation with Saved by the Bell, having a live-action show on at night?

CK: Adult Swim is showing Saved by the Bell now?

BW: They ran two week's worth of episodes in April.

CK: The Adult Swim stuff, I think it's really cool. It's great, but it's stoner TV. The fact that Saved by the Bell was on there is not the least bit surprising. It's not for kids. The humor is too weird and too sophisticated for children. If there are little kids who are actually watching Adult Swim and appreciating it, the next generation of adults is going to be amazing. They're all going to be like Charlie Kaufman.

BW: Do you think it's fair to look at Adult Swim as the depository for Gen Xers, like how Nick at Nite is for classic sit-coms?

CK: It's sort of an interesting time. I'm a writer who covers pop culture. I'm assuming you're a pop-culture journalist as well if you're doing this interview. But most of the people our age are exiting that world. Most of my collegiate friends who did not specifically go into journalism, they're engineers or doctors now. Their engagement with culture is taking the natural arc. They don't buy records anymore. They go to four movies a year. They watch Lost, and that's the hippest element of their life. Maybe it's the depository for the Gen Xers who still think about this stuff, because many of them don't. One of my best friends in college was a huge Smiths fan. He had a fucking Morrissey poster above his bed. He had really strong ideas about all their music and about Morrissey iconography. I remember when Maladjusted came out in '98 or '97 or whatever, I call him up about a month later. I'm like, "OK, I have to ask you this. What do you think of the new Morrissey record?" He's like, "Morrissey has a new record?" I couldn't believe it. We'd been out of school for just three years. But he was married; he had a kid. His life was different.

It's sort of a luxury for us to be able to think about this stuff, to worry about what Saved by the Bell's re-airing means. It's a lot better than working.

BW: Do you think it's something unique to our generation? Did generations before us have this luxury?

CK: Well, I think it was definitely less acceptable. There are just so many more media-centric jobs now. I think this is probably really an extension of consumerism. There's so much more emphasis on the idea of what's cool about culture. I don't know if Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs would have been a successful book in 1978. Obviously I would have been writing about totally different things, but what would the marketing have been for that? I think the reason some of these things are popular now is because people are looking for the elements of their life that unify culture, because as culture splinters, those are less and less.

I often use this example. The Simple Life or The Osbournes or Desperate Housewives, people will say, "Oh, this show is so huge. Everybody's watching it. It's the biggest show on television." But in truth, any given episode of Three's Company or Laverne and Shirley had more viewers because there were only three networks at the time. If you were watching television you were watching one of three things. As a result, people had all these shared experiences. If you're a 34-year-old guy and you meet a 33-year-old girl, in all likelihood you probably watched some of the same syndicated programming after school. You'd be like, "I used to watch Diff'rent Strokes at 4." She'd be like, "Oh yeah, it was on at 3 where I was because it was a different time zone." But you're actually kind of watching the same experience.

That's so rare now, because there are so many channels and there's so much music and there are so many ideas and there's the Internet. And the Internet, its vastness is almost unfathomable. So anytime people feel like they find a book or something and they're like, "Wow, this guy is talking about this specific record that I liked and my four friends liked. I guess there were more than the four of us." There's almost a need for it.

BW: What is the role of MP3s in this? In Killing Yourself to Live you talk about the transfer from cassettes to CDs. How about from CDs to MP3s?

CK: I think it's probably going to move the music industry back to the model they were using in the '50s, where it's singles based. The downside to that is that there are certain kinds of music that are more geared toward the singles medium, like pop and Neptune-produced hip-hop. It's going to be bad for bands who want to be like Radiohead or Wilco.

It's going to change rock criticism more than it's going to change music. The first time I heard about Pavement I read about it in Spin. I didn't have the record. There wasn't even a place where I could get it at the time. I had to read the review. The guy had to explain what it sounded like and what kind of people would like it and what it means. I had to make a decision on my interest based on what I read. Now if I read that, it would be sitting next to an MP3 on a computer screen, so I could hear the music immediately. The idea of a critic telling people what's cool or isn't cool, or good or bad, that era is going to end. But on the upside, it's interesting when culture becomes free. It's interesting when everything is immediate and anybody can have it; that will change its meaning. I'm kind of interested to see. I don't know. I have a lot of CDs. I wonder if they are all going to be artifacts in 10 years, just things I have to move.

BW: In the closing paragraphs of Killing Yourself to Live you address the potential for the book to be considered a nonfiction High Fidelity, then you pose the possibility that by discussing this you could potentially defuse this comparison. Would you say that's almost the literary equivalent of modern-day hip-hop and club culture where DJs and producers use other people's material but it's alright so long as they give reference to the source?

CK: That's a really interesting theory. I've never thought of it like that. The way I've thought of it, I don't feel like I write that much like Nick Hornby, and I definitely feel like our musical interests are vastly different. However, I realize that any time there's a white guy talking about how pop music helps him understand ex-girlfriends, people are going to say it's like High Fidelity because High Fidelity was a very good book and it was kind of the definition of that idea. I review things for a living, so I know if I was reviewing that book, that's what I would think.

Some people don't like self-aware writing. Obviously one of the things that I am most criticized for—particularly in Killing Yourself to Live—is the degree of self-awareness in the text. Some people don't like that. But to me, self-aware writing is smart writing. I never forget I'm reading a book. I'm never reading a book and transported into Narnia and forgot where I was. I always know it's words on a page. So I'm not going to try to pretend that the person who reads my book isn't going to be as smart as I am or is basically going to give themselves up to whatever concept I might be proposing.

It's weird because by doing that it actually made people bring it up more. There are probably 10 people who reviewed that book who then made reference to that passage or Nick Hornby in general. That's definitely one mistake I probably made in Killing Yourself to Live. Early on in Killing Yourself to Live I'm like, well, I'm taking this story I did for Spin and I'm adding my own life to it. It's going to be really solipsistic and really narcissistic, and I know that. What I'm going to do is make that very clear. I'm going to say that up front. This way people will go, "OK, these are the parameters he's setting. I'm going to experience the book with that understanding." But of course that was idiotic of me to think. All it did was make a lot of people only notice that. I helped people remember why they should maybe hate the book. But that's life. That book has flaws, but I loved writing it. It was fun. I'm glad it exists.

BW: Do you feel that Chuck Klosterman IV is going to be drastically different from your other books?

CK: Chuck Klosterman IV and the novel are going to be different. Look at it this way: Man, I'm 33 and I've written three memoirs. That's one memoir for each 11 years I'm alive. I've got to live more. There's nothing else to write about. There really isn't. Plus, I have this Esquire column, and I do first-person stuff for the New York Times Magazine sometimes. There's not much about my life that's undiscovered. The things that people don't know about me now, they're never gonna know. I've probably played those chips. Those chips are gone. Something else has to happen to me. I need to go blind or something.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com