Classic or Dud: Chuck Klosterman

"oh noes the dude known for saved by the bell riffs didnt use the catergorical imperative in an advice column about sick cats, emmanual kant is spinning in his FUCKING GRAVE!!!!"

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/06/10/magazine/10ethicist/10ethicist-articleInline.jpg

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mordy otm

i guess i dont read enough newspaper columns where randos tell me how to live my life to know if this is terrible or not

everyone's very aware of yr aversion to reading

frightening to think that klosterman got this gig off of that ridiculous at the time even more hilarious in retrospect 'breaking bad is better than the wire cuz the wire is liberal and breaking bad is serious moral show cuz good guy turns out to be bad guy' grantland piece.

You can’t love someone out of guilt.

sizable portion of the NYT readership will beg to differ

http://rgr-static1.tangentlabs.co.uk/images/bau/97815986/9781598693416/0/0/plain/portable-jewish-mother-guilt-food-and-when-are-you-giving-me-grandchildren.jpg

frightening to think that klosterman got this gig off of that ridiculous at the time even more hilarious in retrospect 'breaking bad is better than the wire cuz the wire is liberal and breaking bad is serious moral show cuz good guy turns out to be bad guy' grantland piece.

― balls, Sunday, June 10, 2012 11:25 AM (23 minutes ago)

oh my god, had never read this

It makes sense that they would hire Klosterman, because they need young readers, and young people love Klosterman. He is very in tune with young people, so will speak to them. And they will listen, because it is Klosterman, voice of a generation, who will be familiar to everyone of that generation, which is young and likes young things and especially young people telling them the best ways to go about doing young things and solving young problems in a voice they understand, because they are young and generally don't listen unless someone is speaking to them in a language they understand. Plus there was the time he reviewed "Chinese Democracy."

Was Joel Stein too busy?

in that ethicist column a guy asks if he should be welcoming to his disliked half-sister because of her loneliness and need for companionship -- he explicitly says "does someone else’s desire for connection .. outweigh my personal preference?" -- and chuck spends three paragraphs explaining why the guy does not need to be welcoming to his half-sister merely because she is related to him.

i actually thought that was the least bad of the 3

well yeah it did not include the part where he explains that the way you know it's ok to own a pet but not ok to own a human is that it is currently socially acceptable to give away a pet. ethics!

okay, this is pretty weird

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8624514/chuck-klosterman-david-petraeus-scandal-living-cia-conspiracy-theory

looks like it's just a coincidence but still, what if....what if....

It's a sign of something.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/chuck-klosterman-corners-guy-at-party-wearing-dio,33615/

I had a funny exchange with my dad a few weeks ago. He said, "Who's this terrible guy they have writing the Ethicist column now? It was always kind of bad, not now it's awful!" He'd never heard of Chuck Klosterman, so I gave him an abbreviated spiel on Klosterman and his crimes. He said, "OK, but that doesn't explain why they gave him this column." I had to agree.

The Onion article about Klosterman/Dio is utter genius.

Listening to him on Bill Simmon’s podcast this week, and his tales are mostly so...dated.

I’ll never forget him being on Simmons pod back in fall 2015 and predicting Trump’s popularity would peak in Feb 2016 and then it’d be downhill after that. In fairness at the time I thought he was actually overestimating Trump’s prospects.

the new podcast looks dire

was there ever a more certain "dud"

this should've been a defend the indefensible thread

The episode of I Don't Even Own a Television on him a while back was good, though it made me embarrased for ever having read and enjoyed any of his stuff way back when--though admittedly it was just the one Billy Joel piece I liked (and not the one that Billy himself was pissed about).

Came across this, took me back to an earlier ILM era

Perhaps the best insight into the world’s fascination with the band came in a Chuck Klosterman 2002 Spin magazine article. First of all, he pointed out that they were no novelty band. In fact, their music was genuinely revelatory. He wrote, “The White Stripes have done what great rock bands are supposed to do — they’ve reinvented the blues with contemporary instincts.”

He's mentioned a few times in Sanneh's "Major Labels" book, and I kept thinking, who gives a shit what Chuck Klosterman thinks about anything? Just because he likes Motley Crue or something?

The episode of I Don't Even Own a Television on him a while back was good

Klosterman is terrible but I wouldn't subject my worst enemy to this podcast, either as subject or listener

In a nostalgic tour through the decade, Klosterman defends Gen X as today’s “least annoying” generation.

dud

I saw the little excerpt from the interview everyone is retweeting on twitter, and now I'm reveling in everyone dunking on him

This Chuck Klosterman take feels true to me, but is that just because I grew up in the 90s. If you didn't does this feel true to you? https://t.co/wQOClHqPWm pic.twitter.com/FDhkM35tSa

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 8, 2022

I dunno, the lack of smartphones makes for a pretty obvious time distinction and somewhat less casual homophobia in general.

I know I'm but it does seem like time has slowed-- I mean this is the 3rd decade in which we're paying attention to Bieber, Drake, Taylor Swift, Kanye, Gaga, Miley, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Coldplay etc.

I'm old

that's why Lil Nas X was so refreshing, it felt like this era was getting its own little Lou Bega. but now he's a megastar too. I like him, so good for him. but still.

I think there has been some slowing of time with some types of music and music pop culture - the gap between Beatlemania and the Sex Pistols being the equivalent of 2008 to today is kind of an easy way to lay that out - but Klosterman/Klein aren't going to find a good argument for that in films and absolutely not in TV.

dud

Nah, the obvious explanations are that those, like Klosterman, who experienced the 90s as formative years mean that they loom large. As you slide through your 30s and 40s, you're generally a little less-self-centered and obsessive about cultural phenomena. Klosterman probably sees a huge distinction between hair metal from 1987 and a Pavement album from 1994. But he probably can't identify the same huge stylistic swing between a Game album in 2006 and Young Thug's Stoner in 2013.

In general, he has the vibe of the beer-breath guy at trivia night at the bar you're wanting to escape from.

if you read the whole interview, which I did despite the fact I'm now irritated about CK once again, it's clear the interviewer disagrees with the premise of his book. Klosterman's asides where he entertains the idea that, hey, maybe he left out some essential things, only to quickly dismiss the idea is pretty much his m.o.

I'd argue that Klosterman's formative years ended by 1992ish and he both claims a slice of the 90s as his, while also dismissing the weight of any of it

Klosterman/Klein aren't going to find a good argument for that in films and absolutely not in TV.

The MCU started in 2008

he's a hair metal guy at the end of the day, i feel like he's now pretending that he liked 90s stuff that he didn't actually like

the blurb for this new book is insufferable
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557048/the-nineties-by-chuck-klosterman/

xxp - Steadicam was introduced in the middle of his 1960-1990 timeline and represented a massive shift in visual language.

Films made in 2005 vs. 2022 are going to look different (multiple generations of digital video improvement) but the technology visible on-screen has seen rapid change (smartphones, social media).

jesus christ, Ezra Klein is younger than me and still thinks like that

that view makes some sense for people who aren't culture/music beat reporters, in that at some point you get locked into a career, having kids, or some other stable system where your interest in popular culture becomes more fleeting

Klosterman has no good excuse

I think globalization and the internet has kind of smoothed culture out a little bit to where everything is kind of a house of mirrors that reflects all eras and all places at once. Like we don't have really stark swings like "everyone wears bellbottoms for five years" or "everyone uses gated drums for five years" like we used to. It's not an especially profound observation and it sucks that there's always a huge market for framing things as if they were

Like it's absolutely undeniable that the last 10 years in music (Future's 2012 to Lil Baby's 2022) is equally as stark and different as the change between, say, Chuck Berry's 1957 to Sly Stone's 1967. It has nothing to do with "paying attention" and is not exactly something to write a book about or worth setting the internet ABLAZE

Nah, the obvious explanations are that those, like Klosterman, who experienced the 90s as formative years mean that they loom large. As you slide through your 30s and 40s, you're generally a little less-self-centered and obsessive about cultural phenomena. Klosterman probably sees a huge distinction between hair metal from 1987 and a Pavement album from 1994. But he probably can't identify the same huge stylistic swing between a Game album in 2006 and Young Thug's Stoner in 2013.

― paulhw, Wednesday, February 9, 2022 3:23 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

pretty much. I've thought a lot about my formative memories and the times I was "with it" up until like, I dunno, 2007, and realizing all the shit that occupies so much mental space for me are things that I probably wouldn't pay any attention to at all. like one thing I remember growing up was The Lion King, it was all anyone talked about in school for like a solid month, and if you didn't see it you felt like an outcast. nowadays that would be like what, the Spiderman movie? I dunno. I haven't seen it.

even then, these are specific things that aren't happening at the individual level and cataloguing all the micro-trends and groups that are interested in them, by age and geography, would be a herculean task

that's different from looking around and saying "oh this is all the same thing as fifteen years ago"

reminds me of my dad finally buying new jeans a while ago and realizing that pants that have a lower rise meant he bought a smaller size despite having gained weight, just a funny coincidence marking the fact that he'd probably been wearing the same jeans (or at least style of them) for 20 years regardless of trend. it's easy to say "oh, style hasn't changed" when in fact, it's you not buying new pants

If anything culture has slowed in like WAU RAPIDLY CHANGING SIGNIFIERS but the BUSINESS of culture has sped up rapidly through constantly evolving means of distribution (cf. Napster -> iPod -> Myspace -> Facebook -> Twitter -> Spotify -> Vine -> TikTok -> NFT)