Chuck Klosterman X Read online

  Praise for X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

  “Infectious . . . Though Klosterman may be pigeonholed as a guy who thinks too much about Kiss, his tenth book shows he’s something else: a philosopher.”

  —Justin Wm. Moyer, The Washington Post

  “Often imitated and rarely replicated, the writing style of Chuck Klosterman has proven rather influential in all manner of twenty-first century writing. From news stories to critical reviews to artist profiles, Klosterman’s often irreverent, self-deprecating, footnote happy, smart/funny observations make for highly entertaining reading.”

  —John Paul, PopMatters

  “Klosterman is a master of the high-low. . . . He injects a level of intellectual rigor into subjects that receive precious little. . . . [X proves] that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us. . . . Each of his essays is a love letter to a moment.”

  —B. David Zarley, Paste

  “Chuck Klosterman has become a cultural observer of our time. Klosterman roams the junk drawer we call popular culture, providing shockingly keen insight into how our absorption of culture reflects on us.”

  —Jim McLauchlin, Los Angeles Times

  “A hilarious new essay collection . . . His great gift as a writer is his ability to take the ‘inflexibly personal’ and make it true.”

  —Ann Levin, Associated Press

  “Highly entertaining . . . Honest, unpredictable, and fun . . . Addictively readable . . . Surprisingly poignant.”

  —June Sawyers, Booklist

  “A collection of journalistic pieces that remain provocative . . . Offers insight into the relations among artist, art, and audience that goes considerably deeper [and] will leave readers with fresh appreciation for both the subjects and the journalist.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Chuck Klosterman

  NONFICTION

  Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

  Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

  Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

  Eating the Dinosaur

  I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)

  But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

  FICTION

  Downtown Owl

  The Visible Man

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in the United States of America by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017

  Published in Penguin Books 2018

  Copyright © 2017 by Chuck Klosterman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  This page constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  ISBN 9780399184161 (paperback)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Title: Chuck Klosterman X : a highly specific, defiantly incomplete history of the early 21st century / Chuck Klosterman.

  Other titles: Chuck Klosterman 10 | Chuck Klosterman ten

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017004695 (print) | LCCN 2017020783 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399184178 (EPub) | ISBN 9780399184154 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Civilization—1970– | Popular culture—United States. | History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC E169.12 (ebook) | LCC E169.12 .K55485 2017 (print) | DDC 909.83/12—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004695

  Cover design: Rachel Willey and Jason Booher

  Version_3

  Contents

  Praise for X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

  Also by Chuck Klosterman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  THREE-MAN WEAVE

  MY ZOMBIE, MYSELF

  THAT’S NOT HOW IT HAPPENED

  THE LIGHT WHO HAS LIGHTED THE WORLD

  THERE’S SOMETHING PECULIAR ABOUT LYING IN A DARK ROOM. YOU CAN’T SEE ANYTHING.

  LIQUID FOOD

  C’MON DAVE, GIMME A BREAK

  WHERE WERE YOU WHILE WE WERE GETTING HIGH?

  I’M ASSUMING IT’S GOING TO BE FUN

  I NEED TO BE ALIVE (IN ORDER TO WATCH TV)

  I WILL CHOOSE FREE WILL (CANADIAN READER’S NOTE: THIS IS NOT ABOUT RUSH)

  EVERYBODY’S HAPPY WHEN THE WIZARD WALKS BY (OR MAYBE NOT? MAYBE THEY HATE IT? HARD TO SAY, REALLY)

  SPEED KILLS (UNTIL IT DOESN’T)

  NOT A NUTZO GIRL, NOT YET A NUTZO WOMAN (MILEY CYRUS, 2008)

  WHEN GIANTS WALKED THE EARTH (AND ARGUED ABOUT CHINA)

  USE YOUR ILLUSION (BUT DON’T BENCH GINÓBILI)

  THE DRUGS DON’T WORK (ACTUALLY, THEY WORK GREAT)

  THE CITY THAT TIME REMEMBERED (TULSA, OKLAHOMA)

  BUT WHAT IF WE’RE WRONG? (DRINK THE ACID, SWALLOW THE MOUSE)

  OWNER OF A LONELY HEART

  THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS PROBABLY JUST ANOTHER ENEMY

  A ROAD SELDOM TRAVELED BY THE MULTITUDES

  BROWN WOULD BE THE COLOR (IF I HAD A HEART)

  I HEAR THAT YOU AND YOUR BAND HAVE SOLD YOUR GUITARS

  WHITE’S SHADOW

  HOUSE MOUSE IN THE MOUSE HOUSE

  THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

  THE OPPOSITE OF BEYONCÉ

  LIKE REGULAR MUSIC, EXCEPT GOOD

  NON-SUPPRESSIVE SLACKER

  DEMOCRACY NOW!

  METAL MACHINE “MUSIC”

  2 + 2 = 5

  ADVERTISING WORKED ON ME

  HERO IN BLACK

  VILLAIN IN WHITE

  (1928–2013)

  SOMETHING ELSE

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Credits

  About the Author

  The book you are about to read is a collection of stories I’ve published in various media outlets over the past ten years. I like these stories and wouldn’t republish them if I didn’t. But I certainly hope you like them more than I do. The process of compiling old articles is not difficult, but it also isn’t pleasant. It’s just not enjoyable to reread things you’ve written in the not-so-distant past (I think this is true for most writers, discounting those real crazy motherfuckers who believe the world would be radically different if they weren’t involved). Every positive memory is coated with the ooze of regret: You want to delete every semicolon and alter every joke. Moments that once seemed revelatory now seem banal. You’re forcibly reminded how rapidly society evolves, and it’s disheartening to revisit an arbitrary event from five years ago that suddenly feels like a factoid from 1958. It’s the worst kind of time machine.

  Yet I must admit something else here, even though it will make me seem like a megalomaniac: I love r
eading the index to any book I publish. It’s always my favorite part. Exploring the index from a book you created is like having someone split your head open with an axe so that you can peruse the contents of your brain. It’s the alphabetizing of your consciousness. Sometimes I will pick up one of my old books and sing a random section of the index to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” purely for pleasure. (Actually, I’m lying. I don’t “sometimes” do this. I did this once, just now, simply to see if it would work, solely for the purposes of writing this introduction. There was no pleasure involved and I’ll never do it again. I don’t even like making this joke. But the experiment was successful, so feel free to try this at your leisure. In fact, try it a hundred times, even if you don’t really remember the original song. I’m sure all the people in your life will love it.)

  I only note this indexical preoccupation as a warning to you, the consumer: This book is deceptive. It is not as panoramic as it appears. Taken at face value, its index suggests an anthology about many divergent topics (wizards, chemical weapons, Donald Trump, Thai sandwiches, et al.). And—technically—that diversity is real. Those references do exist. There are stories in this collection about literature and zombies and postmodern television and the essentialism of Charlie Brown and the capricious nature of our illusionary universe. One could even argue that the only reason any interesting story is “interesting” is because it’s not actually about whatever it superficially appears to suggest, and that the only significant purpose of text is to provide a superstructure for subtext (which always matters more). All of that is true. But here’s the deal—I wrote these stories. I know what these stories are about. And almost all of them are about one of two things: music or sports. Consumed in aggregate, this omnibus equates to a short book about music, a short book about sports, and a short book about everything else that could possibly exist.

  It is not a portrait of what the world is, or of what the world could be.

  It is a portrait of my interior life: I watch games, I listen to music, and I daydream about the rest of reality.

  When I started as a reporter in the early nineties, there was an incontrovertible firewall between music culture and sports culture, spawned (I suspect) from dark memories various members of the music community still carried from high school. There was this ingrained Reagan-era belief that “jocks” and “meatheads” terrorized “punks” and “goths” and “miscellaneous longhairs,” and that the type of alienated teenager who liked art had a condescending view of the type of teenager who liked football. Now, I’m sure some of that social derision was authentic. I’m sure that negative experience did happen to somebody, and it was certainly baked into every teen movie of the era. But nothing like that ever happened to me. I was obsessed with music and I was obsessed with sports, and the synthesis never seemed uncomfortable. I suppose it’s possible my hometown was just too small to have stereotypical cliques. It’s also possible I was so emotionally engaged with both concepts that I couldn’t feel anything else. Maybe the estrangement went over my head. Maybe I was just too dumb to care. Still, I knew this conflict existed for other people, even if I didn’t relate to it or understand why. I knew that people who wrote about music rarely wrote about sports, unless they weren’t especially serious about either. It seemed like you had to choose one or the other. I went to college in 1990 and started my career as a sportswriter. One of the first beats assigned to me was collegiate wrestling, a subject I knew nothing about. I didn’t even fully understand the scoring system, so I just described every match like a correspondent for National Geographic. Every single story included the phrase “catlike quickness.” My only memory of covering wrestling is comparing humans to animals.

  In 1994, craving the facade of legitimacy (and maybe the potential access to drugs), I switched over to culture journalism. I wanted to generate theories about why the guys in Anthrax wore shorts, and this was the only way. Once I made the switch, I didn’t write another sports story for five years. I’m not sure any traditional newspaper editor would have let me—the fact that I was interested in Radiohead somehow annihilated the possibility that I could be equally informed about Scottie Pippen.

  But this imaginary war eventually ended, at least for me. At some point, I stopped caring about this nonproblematic problem. I just started writing about sports and music at the same time, occasionally in the same article. I haphazardly jammed them together, even when they barely fit. And to my mild surprise, everyone else decided this was okay. As it turns out, the divide between music and sports had dissolved during the nineties, so slowly and incrementally that no one even noticed.1 Pearl Jam named their first album after NBA point guard Mookie Blaylock’s jersey number. Power pitcher Randy Johnson became an arena rock photographer. Members of Pavement and Sleater-Kinney joined fantasy leagues with members of Quasi and Built to Spill. Master P played in the CBA. Public Enemy’s liner notes made reference to Pooh Richardson. Drew Bledsoe jumped off the stage at an Everclear concert and injured a female spectator. All the coked-up Britpop dudes refused to shut up about Manchester United. Or was it Man City? I’ve already forgotten. But by the time the twenty-first century started, the notion of being a rock critic and a sportswriter was no longer awkward (or even contentious), which nicely coincided with the period of my life when I tried to earn a living by doing so. Which is what this book is, more or less. The surgery was a success and the patient is resting comfortably. I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough), but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened. Which, from my limited perspective, is a dream I could not anticipate.

  Please enjoy this collection of nonfiction dreams.

  Like Sands Through the Hourglass, So Are the Days of Our Lives

  “Three-Man Weave” is the best story I’ve ever published, or at least my personal favorite. My emotional investment was high. It took a long time to complete and the research was unorthodox. The presentation is straightforward and traditional. It ran on the very first day the website Grantland came into existence, so it felt significant (simply due to how maniacally obsessed the rest of the Internet was with the idea of Bill Simmons launching a website). I also think the socioeconomic underpinnings of the narrative are slightly more meaningful than the sociocultural underpinnings of the various celebrity-driven pieces I’ve written, even though those stories inevitably get more attention.

  My personal relationship with Grantland was complicated. I still have conflicted emotions over what Grantland was, how it operated, and how it ended, even though my direct involvement with the publication had become virtually nonexistent by the time ESPN shuttered the site in 2015. But the fact that I was able to write this story in 2011 is enough to make me retrospectively pleased with the entire enterprise. Grantland was the only place I’ve ever worked where you could say, “I want to write about something kooky that happened twenty-three years ago that nobody cares about except me,” and the response from everyone working there would be, “Well, of course.” Concepts like time and space were not relevant issues. There was a real commitment to not being like the rest of the Internet. But the Internet was where it lived, so that goal was impossible.

  Three-Man Weave

  It was 1988. It was a very good year, assuming your name was George Bush or Melanie Griffith. Miami Vice was on television, Guns N’ Roses and George Michael were on the radio, and gas cost 91 cents a gallon. But none of those things matter to the story I’m about to describe. The story I am about to describe happened in the geographic equivalent of a vacuum. A flat, frozen, fatalistic vacuum.

  The abstract details seem boring on purpose: A pair of low-profile junior college basketball teams played a forgotten game on a neutral floor in southeast North Dakota. The favored team was a school best known for its two-year forestry program. The underdog was a minuscule all–N
ative American college whose campus is located outside the Bismarck, N.D., airport. You’ve (probably) never heard of either school, and—in all likelihood—you will (probably) never hear of either one again. And if you remember this game at all, you (probably) played in it.

  Games described as forgotten typically earn that classification because they deserve to disappear; it’s a modifier historians employ to marginalize or dismiss a given event, often for dramatic effect. But this game is “forgotten” in a non-negotiable context. There’s almost no record of its existence. Fewer than five hundred people saw it happen. It was not televised and there’s no videotape. It wasn’t broadcast on the radio. No official box score was compiled (statistics were kept, but most have been lost over time). Only a couple of small-circulation newspapers made mention of what transpired, and—because it happened before the Internet—googling the game’s particulars is like searching for a glossy photograph of Genghis Khan. The contest has disappeared from the world’s consciousness, buried by time and devoid of nostalgia. This (of course) is not abnormal. Junior college basketball games from 1988 are not historic landmarks. We are conditioned to forget who won or lost the opening round of the North Dakota state JUCO tournament because those are moments society does not need to remember. They don’t even qualify as trivia.

  But something crazy happened in this particular game.

  In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a “metaphorical” victory or a “moral” victory: They literally won the game, 84–81, finishing the final sixty-six seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win, and there was no deception—they won by playing precisely how you’d expect. The crazy part is that it worked.

  The only reason I know about this game is because I saw it happen, totally by chance: I was a tenth-grader, and my older brother and I drove to this JUCO tournament because we had passing interest in the second game of that night’s doubleheader (it was also a Sunday evening and we didn’t have cable, so there was nothing else to do). The tournament’s opening game was between the United Tribes Technical College and North Dakota State University at Bottineau—the Thunderbirds vs. the Lumberjacks. In the years that have passed, I’ve sometimes wondered if the game I thought I saw actually happened. I’ve wondered if maybe I’d imagined the circumstances or unconsciously exaggerated the details. Whenever I found myself talking about the game to other people, the scenario I heard myself describing struck me as increasingly implausible. Like Wilt Chamberlain’s untelevised, scarcely witnessed 100-point game in Hershey, Pa., it seems like a story someone made up for mythological impact. But this happened. And the game that occurred in reality is even weirder than the game I’d reconstructed in my mind.