Title: X
Rating: 2 Stars
I’ve mentioned a couple of times here my challenge with Chuck Klosterman. He’s a prolific essayist on popular culture. He specializes in music and sports. He interviews interesting and/or usually publicity shy celebrities. He focuses on specific cultural moments and attempts to deconstruct them to come to a deeper understanding.
Here’s the thing. I enjoy reading essays. I enjoy music. I enjoy reading about sports. I enjoy learning about celebrities that are usually out of the spotlight. I’m interested in trying to find deeper meanings behind seemingly shallow cultural moments. Klosterman is a bit younger than me but the subjects that he writes about are ones that I’m at least aware of, if not actively interested in. He’s written for magazines like Spin and Esquire. He was one of the original contributors to Grantland. Klosterman’s essays should be right up my alley.
But.
I just don’t click with his essays. I’m not sure exactly why. Perhaps some of his writings just read too much like short magazine pieces to me. Perhaps some of the artists and subjects that he’s interested in just don’t jibe with my interests.
Whatever the reason, this is the fifth collection of his essays that I’ve read. The highest rating that I’ve ever given him is 3 stars. Having finished X, that rating is still unchallenged.
I wanted to like it. I even started liking it. The first essay, Three-Man Weave, is a compelling story of an inconsequential tournament basketball game in North Dakota that Klosterman witnessed decades ago as a young man. One team had only five players. In the last minute or so of a very close game, two of their players fouled out. This should have been lights out for the team. A basketball team that can only field three players should have no chance in a close game. Instead, they managed to hang on to win. Describing the excitement of watching the game first hand along with interviewing players from both teams decades later made for an interesting story.
If only all of the essays were of this ilk. Some were. Another essay, My Zombie, Myself, made the point that zombie movies have become popular because the mindless drudgery of killing zombies is similar to the ennui of working in an office dealing with an never ending onslaught of e-mails and meeting invites.
The celebrity interviews were the weakest link. Interviews with Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen seemed to reveal nothing more than their discomfort with being interviewed. This was especially true of Tom Brady, in which we learned absolutely nothing but that Brady can be churlish, showed up late, and terminated the interview when he didn’t like the questions about Deflategate.
His essays on pop culture of the moment inadvertently reveal the truth of pop culture essays. They simply don’t age well. This collection was published in 2017 and was gathered from essays dating as far back as the early 2000s.
Essays that must have seemed relevant in 2004 or 2008 or 2011 just don’t matter anymore. Do I really need a deconstruction of Hannah Montana? Do I need to try to get into the mind of Danger Mouse? There was a whole article about Royce White, who if I ever heard of, he’s way out of my mind now.
Such topical essays seemed like they refer to events from the Victorian Age. In fifty years, they might as well be written in Sanskrit. I’ve written about this before, but I keep being reminded of that witty and perceptive Elizabethan theater critic that wrote in such contemporary Elizabethan slang and colloquialism that he’s now considered unreadable. I fear that Klosterman will suffer the same fate.
Finally, there is KISS. Klosterman is a huge fan of the band. The largest essay in the collection is Advertising Worked On Me. It’s a 10,000 word essay (~35 pages) on KISS. If he was saying something innovative about the band, that’d be one thing. Instead, a significant chunk of it is dedicated to an album by album review of KISS’ entire oeuvre. I’m not just talking about the early records. I’m talking about each record. I’m talking about each members’ solo records. He discusses each one and gives it a grade. I’m guessing that he reviews around thirty records. Why?
He does make points about whether or not KISS belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He discusses what it means to be a devoted fan of a band that appears to be only interested in milking every last possible cent from their fans (he claims to have paid for some fifteen different versions of Rock and Roll All Nite). All of which was interesting but, holy cow, so many album reviews.
He closes with a couple of meditations on death. Having just spent some four hundred pages discussing such topics as whether or not Creed and Nickelback suck, suddenly discussing how his feelings of death have changed as he moved from his thirties to his forties with small children brought about a case of serious cognitive dissonance.
Having said all of that, two stars might be a little unfair. Until I hit the KISS essay, it was a begrudging three stars.
So Chuck, I gave you more than a fair shot. I have read five of your collections. I think that I’m done with you.
It’s not me, it’s you.
dorkenstein 