Classic or Dud: Chuck Klosterman

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)

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.

how about say, 1969-1981? feel like there was more change & evolution in any given 3-year period there than you've had between 2012 and now

I think that's debatable!

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

― Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note I'm (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, February 9, 2022 3:37 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think part of it also that 20th-century mass culture did a good job of reducing decades to easily digestible caricatures, like the Jazz Age, the Me Decade, the slacker/grunge era (even as those labels actually described only a narrow band of what was happening at the time). I think there are lots of ways in which the culture of the 2000s is distinct from today's, but there doesn't seem to be a media caricature of it. A few years ago, I would've said we needed more distance from it to see it clearly, but now I think it's more likely that general media/cultural fragmentation has made it harder for attempts at encapsulation to stick.

x-post. the problem with the comparison is that the "story" of, say, musical change was a mass culture one (e.g. of disco in 1976 giving way to post-punk in 1980). However, now we tend to compare styles within a smaller genre pool, having given up on the idea of mass culture. The stylistic changes within disco over 20 years are less striking, same with post-punk.

I mean, yes and no... I think there still are moments like that, like, say autotune vocals and trap drums, but then it just stays that way forever as opposed to going "out of fashion"

Like, I guess pop music sounding like big tent EDM is out of fashion, but you can still fill a field with EDM fans as opposed to, say, a club playing straight disco in 1992

I think a lot of this branding is based on an extremely reductive hegemonic view written by whoever has power when an era is defined

I think culture can change more quickly in some periods and more slowly in others though. For example, when you see interviews of aging Hollywood stars in the early 1970s they're all very aware that the culture had just changed radically over the previous ten years. And the general public seemed to recognize this as well. You wouldn't find nearly as many people saying that about the last ten years.

But there's a certain irony in what Klosterman is saying, on one hand "the 1990s was the last decade with a fully formed culture," and yet things aren't like they used to be in some profound way - the latter which would suggest we live in a different culture today.

xxxp - probably, obviously I've missed a ton of what's gone on the last decade, these ILX year end countdowns are sometimes the only way I keep up with things. but thinking of the stuff I have from 69-81 it is comprised very heavily of records that could not have existed 5 years prior; entire scenes broke big and collapsed in the time it takes most bands to record a new album today

cf. the entire recorded catalog of the Beatles spanned... nine years

Anyway this is an insanely stupid argument and it makes sense that the dude literally makes money selling insanely stupid arguments

https://www.chuckklostermanauthor.com/books/hypertheticals-nt

cf. the entire recorded catalog of the Beatles spanned... nine years

It’s so hard for me to wrap my head around this, and watching that doc series just brought it to the fore…

I guess it comes back somehow to that Zappa clip where he's talking about the times when old A&R dudes would just go "hmm, interesting, go throw some money at that" rather than try to dictate the culture as they understood it. the two periods I think of where there was just an overwhelming amount of movement happening was the mid-70s and early-90s which were both boom eras for the music industry leading to bands like Ween and Boredoms getting big major label deals. idk if anything quite like that has happened since, especially not since Clear Channel took over everything

I mean, look at some of the albums that sold 8 figures during the mid-70s: Tubular Bells, Oxygene, The Six Wives of Henry VIII...I can only imagine some teenager puzzling over how that shit got so popular

The Beatles recordings people know are really from about seven years, no? Summer '62 to Summer '69 (w/ mostly touch-ups afterward)

the Beatles only recorded for less than a decade, but most of the band had been on the grind doing shows for five years before that

surely they'd have had a soundcloud much earlier if they started now

By comparison, here are some artists who released their first album 9 years ago (2013): Ariana Grande, Lorde, Run the Jewels, Haim, CHVRCHES

the first two are just making adult contemporary now, RTJ were always old, Haim and chvrches probably doing ok within their niches

(yes, I'm being purposefully cynical)

The New Yorker had some words
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/07/chuck-klosterman-brings-back-the-nineties

brief excerpt of the extended tear-down

His response to the recent progressive vilification of Bill Clinton’s Presidency is delivered in two thudding single-sentence paragraphs that encapsulate his attitude toward those with a darker story to offer: “But you know, it didn’t seem that way at the time. It really did not.” He has no patience for partisan rashness, for passionate convictions that would break upon his ghostly solitude.

obviously I take great issue w/them calling him the sharpest music writer of his generation when I've been on ilm for long enough to know much better

his shtick definitely affected writing styles overall, no doubt

also, lol that I missed this

its more difficult to tell the difference between a 2005 and 2020 film than a 1965 and 1995 film because one time period is twice as long as the other

He didn't say that. He compared 1965/1995 to 1990/today. He said it was hard to sense that 2005 was 16 years ago.

musical change was a mass culture one (e.g. of disco in 1976 giving way to post-punk in 1980).

except in 1980, mass culture wasn't post-punk - it was Pink Floyd, Billy Joel, Bob Seger, Queen, Kenny Rogers, etc