As someone who makes his living writing about famous people, Chuck Klosterman is studiedly anonymous. With his configuration of facial hair – full beard, bangs over his eyebrows – and thick framed eyeglasses, it’s impossible to say just what he looks like. Chuck Klosterman IV, a collection of essays with a mock-self-aggrandizing title, has a cover gag about how easy he is to miss. On the back we see a full-length shot of Klosterman standing alone on a street corner, hands on his pockets. On the front we glimpse his face nearly lost amidst a stream of pedestrians. There he is, the camouflaged hunter, sniping at the famous from the cover of a crowded sidewalk. As a business model this has worked great, and he’ll soon be launching a joint-venture with Bill Simmons, his blue-collar counterpart in culture criticism.
Who is Chuck Klosterman? Klosterman is either a brainier Bill Simmons or a less intelligent David Foster Wallace. Klosterman maintains a slight inferiority complex about his fellow Midwesterner; while covering a cruise which features Journey and Styx for musical acts, he describes the challenges in writing the story.
The first is that the definitive cruise story has already been written by David Foster Wallace, who published the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in 1995; this is evidently the most popular essay ever produced, as roughly six thousand people have mentioned it to me during the forty-eight hours prior to this trip.
Klosterman probably hates being compared to DFW, but he’d be smart to emulate him. The essays in this book read like the work of a culture critic fooled about his true subject. Wallace never forgot that culture criticism must be about the culture consumer, and not the producer. Celebrity is a quickly revolving door, and the people who come through it are ultimately interchangeable; the long-term, universal interest in any celebrity (aside from whatever artistic contribution they’ve left) is how we relate to them, and how they are validated by the faceless masses who create them.
Chuck Klosterman IV does ask these questions – just not frequently enough. There’s a nice essay about cultural betrayal, and quite a few pieces about the sociology of fan groups: why young Latinos almost exclusively comprise Morrissey’s LA fan base, for instance. But the first section is rife with disposable artist portraits done for Spin Magazine. Fine for a monthly publication, but it’s still ephemera and nobody goes looking for a compilation of the Tribune’s greatest hits just to marvel at the craftsmanship. Of course there’s the debased and musty pop culture analogies to The Matrix or Friends; more problematic are simply outdated stories. A piece on the radical ambiguity of Britney Spears, for instance, seems irrelevant in 2011.
If Britney Spears has nothing to say (she doesn’t), we can only pay attention to Klosterman’s approach. As a commentator, he methodically demolishes the glamor of fame. His journalism reads like the behind-the-scenes commentary to some more outward facing piece we never read. He details the circumstances between the Q & A, like what Thom Yorke has for a meal, or what Jeff Tweedy’s naked 4yo screams as he races about the house. In these everyday circumstances the super-famous are humanized; which is nice, but Klosterman is nobody’s publicist: most of the profiled come off like assholes.
Val Kilmer is an effusive man unable to realize his epileptic brother’s death was likely caused by his family’s belief in Christian Science. Also, he owns a bunch of bison. Thom Yorke “was twenty minutes late for our interview, explaining that he had to run home and do some yoga because he was ‘feeling a bit weird.’” Jeff Tweedy “can’t remember if his wife’s name is spelled Suzy or Susie, so he begs me to refer to her simply as Sue if I mention her in the article (apparently, he’s gotten in trouble for this before).” The self-righteous scorning of people more successful than you is a satisfying transfiguration of jealousy — but I’m not that interested in Charlie Sheen.
Better than the passive-aggressive ridicule of celebrities is Klosterman’s undisguised vitriol towards hipsters. Before participating in criticism, each critic has to decide for themselves just how subjective taste really is. There are three possibilities:
1.) Objective taste. These are critics who believe in Platonic aesthetics. They get worked up about IMDB’s Top 250, box office returns, and are generally pretty annoying.
2.) Subjective taste. Live and let live aesthetics. Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla – it’s all a matter of personal preference. These people shrug when arguments start over Oscar nominees. (No writer fits this category, by the way.)
3.) Compatibilism. A mixture of 1 & 2. Here, taste is subjective – to a point. Preferring The Wire to The Sopranos is your right as a clear-thinking HBO subscriber. Claiming Twilight is the best book of all time only proves you know nothing about books and should not be trusted on any other matter of taste.
Fitting Klosterman into one of these three categories is difficult. We know he’s not an objectivist:
The only people who believe in some kind of ‘universal taste’ – in other words, a consensual demarcation between what’s artistically good and what’s artistically bad – are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.
But he’s not totally subjective, either, because there’s an article about correctly rated bands, which are neither overrated nor underrated – all meaningless concepts unless we believe in some objective hierarchy.
So he’s #3, then. Nope. He has an essay about the concept of a “guilty pleasure” in which he criticizes people for having so little self-respect and confidence in their taste that they let other people dictate what’s acceptable to enjoy. At the end of this he proudly declares himself a faithful viewer of The Ashlee Simpson Show, the kind of horseshit even #3s won’t defend.
Which I guess just means he’s a culture critic, someone less interested in singular cultural artifacts than the overarching system which draws them into relation with one another. And David “The Broom” Foster Wallace always discussed that system with more insight and engagement.
