Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck KlostermanMy review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I think Chuck Klosterman has become slyly brilliant as he progressed as a writer since this, honing his "It's one thing, but really it's something else entirely" shtick into an occasional scalpel, but the references and concerns here seem so dated that it feels like reading old issues of Spin, which is, I guess, what this is.
He is a guy that gets thrown under the bus a lot because he is cast in a position of authority by expressing his Everyman-ity at every turn. Like every other snob, I don't think he has very enlightened tastes in music, but he has a way of making really brilliant things out of his observations. Like this:
The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me (2004):
You will like this album if you used to like AC/DC but now you just read a lot.
or his notion expressed in a reprinted article collected in Chuck Klosterman IV that the first Van Halen album is the most average record of all time, and if you like a record more than it, its a good record; less, and its a bad record.
Things like this seem to be tossed out for a laugh and they are, but there is something penetrating here, something that digs a little deeper than you thought there was ground under the subjects he peruses.
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This is the book that I read last year and decided that you were a better Klosterman than Klosterman. Kind of like Guy Ritchie's early films were better Tarantino films than Tarantino's later films (Lock, Stock vs. Jackie Brown). I've since revised that theory based on strong empirical evidence (both Kill Bills vs. Swept Away). I stand by my Cook vs. Klosterman comparison, however.
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