Chuck Klosterman is the most important cultural writer of our time. And I don’t feel this way because we once spent an hour discussing Radiohead in a hotel room. It’s because Chuck Klosterman is the only writer who’s truly evolved from writing about postmodernity and the cultural ramifications of Reality TV. He’s advanced (more about that later), and this anthology Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, proves that he’s the guy who understands our cultural climate here in the zero’s.
Take, for example, his feature about Britney Spears. While Klosterman grills the former Mouseketeer on the subject of her iconography (particularly for the “Baby One More Time” video), Spears demurs, stating that her song “I’m a Slave 4 U” is “just about being a slave to the music.” Spears, Klosterman explains, is culturally interesting because of her own lack of self-awareness. A feature on Val Kilmer (so crazy it’s amazing) addresses similar themes. Not only are famous people more fucked up, they’re also less perceptive. It’s these very pontifications, previously discussed in his earlier works Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and the neo-New Journalism book Killing Yourself to Live that make Klosterman a post-postmodernist thinker. He really does want to know why Britney Spears is interesting, what makes Paris Hilton famous, and in one piece written for a Fargo, ND paper, what happens if you eat nothing but chicken nuggets for a week. These things are vital.
A series of introductions and glorious footnotes help the reader get acquainted with the now self-conscious Klosterman who debates the merits of his past work and berates his lack of literary prowess. Yet, the broad spectrum of work makes this anthology exciting. Not only do you get his greatest hits (his famous Radiohead interview, the zaniest columns, and why he hates the Olympics) but also B-sides and rarities.
Klosterman has no high/low culture distinction, which is an admirable quality for a pop-cultural journalist. In an interview with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy the day before he entered rehab, Chuck off-handedly comments on Tweedy’s 10-year-old son doing Jet covers in his grade school band. Tweedy responds with the observation “Well, you like rock music, don’t you?” Klosterman instantly regrets his mistake. Jet truly represents everything that rock music has ever been. A song like “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” sounds like rock music ought to sound. It just so happens that popular culture has forcibly made Jet unbearably lame. Klosterman realizes his bluff, and in a later column, articulates the fact that there are no guilty pleasures, only cultural occasions. We love the things we do because they’re worth loving.
But perhaps the most seminal piece is Klosterman’s article on the theory of advancement. Advancement is “a cultural condition where an Advanced Individual-a true genius-creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives is bad.” (Lou Reed, of course, is a premiere example.) To prove his point, Klosterman states that if Radiohead released an album of mechanized droning (I can think of a bunch of bands who do this all the time, proving that droning is now pretty de rigueur) that would be predictable. If they released a glam record, that would be overt. But if Radiohead released an album of blues standards, they would advance. Advancement is a condition of music today. So many bands are trying to advance by becoming the most unlikely combination of everything, that they’re actually just overt. Advancement is a complicated theory (Klosterman states that even he’s confused) but totally necessary to our post-post modern age. We’re even advancing as I write.
