August 22, 2005

To be honest, this would more appropriately be filed under "es fairly bueno." But that doesn't fit with the established guidelines for the site, so we'll just shoehorn it in.

Because here's the thing: when he's on his game, Chuck Klosterman is probably the most engaging rock writer active today. He's great because he's unpretentious and open-minded and (best of all) overtly subjective. He likes what he likes, with no shame. The guy listens to a lot of music, reacts to it, and then writes about his reaction with much intelligence and wit. For instance:

The single greatest male singing voice of the rock era belongs to Rod Stewart. Nobody at SPIN believes me when I make this argument, and many of my coworkers assume I am trying to be ironic when I insist that Rod Stewart's whiskey-soaked throat is more moving than Sinatra's. Here again, I find myself confused: Why would I want other people to think I like someone I do not actually like? What possible purpose would that serve? Why would anyone pretend to like things they actually hate? These are the questions that haunt me every time I listen to the Rod Stewart box set Storyteller...

As far as I'm concerned, that is exactly what rock criticism should be, and I would happily read pages and pages of Klosterman talking about the good and bad points of the four KISS solo albums, or riffing on the weird synchronicity between Kid A and September 11th.

This book, then, should be stellar- it's basically a travelogue about Klosterman's cross-country trip to visit various notorious rock and roll death sites (the Skynyrd crash site, the road where a couple of Allman brothers died in motorcycle accidents, the place where Buddy Holly's plane went down, Kurt Cobain's house, etc.). You'd expect this to generate lots of good rock-writing material, and you'd be right. The travelogue elements are also generally fun (my favorite moment being when Klosterman checks into a remote hotel to find out that a gang of teens have booked the room across from his for an evening of partying).

Unfortunately, this material is interwoven with an ongoing plotline about Chuck's love life. And, while I have a pretty high regard for the guy as a music critic and even as a writer in general, it's just not that interesting. He loves one woman and might love another and there's a third floating around there and they all have their own sets of feelings about him and blah blah blah. I don't mean to belittle the guy's emotional state- I'm sure that, on the inside of his situation, it's very intense. But if you're not the person experiencing it, it just reads like another youngish guy's dating life. Doesn't really fit in with the music and travel themes of the book, and the whole emotional/relationship angle frankly doesn't play to Klosterman's strengths as a writer. So you'll be cruising along, enjoying his riff on why Eric Clapton was never really that cool, and suddenly you're stuck in the middle of an extended fantasy sequence where all of the women in Chuck's life are in the car with him, arguing.

Which kills the momentum pretty badly.

Still, the good outweighs the bad by a fairly wide margin. I wish his editor would've axed or at least de-emphasized the romantic subplot, but you can always just skim when you hit them.

--Keith Pille

BONUS: Since it's the subjective rock criticism that we admire in Klosterman, American Nerd would like to see more of it. Therefore, we announce a contest. Write up a bit of subjective rock criticism (600 words max) and email it to editor@americannerdmag.com (put "Criticism contest" in the subject line) by September 5. One randomly-selected entry will garner the writer a signed (by Chuck Klosterman, even, not some AmNerd goon) copy of Killing Yourself to Live.