IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
by Chuck Klosterman, Scribner, 2007

      When I was nine years old, I loved KISS. I bought all the band’s albums, plastered my bedroom walls with their posters and dreamed about one day seeing their spectacular live show first-hand. Then I grew up. By the time I was in junior high KISS seemed pretty stupid, and by the time I was in college I was reluctant to admit that I had ever owned a KISS album. Driven by nostalgia, I attended a concert on the first of the band’s many reunion tours, and I was disappointed by the show. I could tell these guys had been doing the same things over and over again for 25 years, and we were all tired of it. But the final straw came a couple of weeks ago, when I got one volume of Kissology, a newly released three-part collection of old KISS video stuff, from Netflix. After watching the disc, which contained the entirety of two nearly identical concerts and a couple of ridiculous vintage TV appearances, I was astounded not that I had ever liked KISS – I was only nine at the time, after all – but that any adult had ever approached the band with a straight face, much less granted them the stature of a cultural phenomenon.

      What does this have to do with Chuck Klosterman’s new book? Well, this KISS-related revelation made it clear to me that any adult who still likes KISS is not to be taken seriously. Not only does Klosterman like KISS, but he actually, on occasion, tries to use his love of KISS to make other points about American pop culture. This cannot stand.

      Chuck Klosterman IV is primarily a collection of the author’s essays and celebrity profile pieces that have been previously published in magazines such as Spin and Esquire. The last section of the book is a short story that is included here, one presumes, because if you’re an established nonfiction writer who can get a book deal you might as well use the opportunity to stick in any fiction you’ve been working on in your spare time. If nothing else, it makes your book longer and, therefore, more impressive-looking.

      Klosterman’s celebrity profiles show off some of his greatest strengths and weaknesses, and they all flow from the same source. Despite the fact that Klosterman has been writing for big national publications for years (and living in NYC to boot), he still comes to celebrity interviewing with the air of the small-town kid in the big city. He just can’t believe that he’s behind the scenes at a Britney Spears photo shoot or riding around Dublin in a car with Bono at the wheel. He gee-whizzes and isn’t-this-cools through each piece, and a good portion of each interview is about what it’s like to interview a superstar. That gives his interviews a freshness and an honesty that is rare in celebrity journalism.

      On the other hand, Klosterman’s inability to get past the perspective of a starstruck kid limits the depth of his profiles – or rather, it tends to send him toward potentially inaccurate conclusions. He is stuck on the idea of fame as a self-serving construct, and nearly all of the interviews imply that their subjects are inscrutable facades, individuals whose sole purpose is to build an image of a superstar at the cost of real humanity. Or, if that’s not the case, then they’re real people after all, and the facade is not just a facade. Either way, the subject is always celebrity for its own sake, and Klosterman rarely looks further for any journalistic meat.

      When Klosterman’s writing is weak it is very weak, and it doesn’t get weaker than when he is writing about Led Zeppelin. An interview with Robert Plant does nothing more than suggest that Plant is an egotistical jerk, and “In the Beginning, There was Zoso” is one of Klosterman’s trademarks: an inept attempt to make a pop culture trifle seem significant; in an earlier essay, he tried to pitch Radiohead’s Kid A as a soundtrack for 9/11, and here he promotes Led Zeppelin IV as the ancestor of all rock music.

      Oh yes, all of Klosterman’s other annoying authorial tics are here, too. Almost every piece includes at least one statement featuring an (a)/(b) multiple choice, his version of Gary Coleman’s “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” from "Diff’rent Strokes." And silly references abound; see the book’s title and the above-mentioned Zeppelin album for an example.

      My overarching complaint with the book (and all of Klosterman’s writing) is its delusion of grandeur. Klosterman tackles his interviews like a psychoanalyst, as if he, an uneducated pop culture writer from North Dakota, is able to dive into the psyches of people he only knows from their albums and TV shows and come up with not only what makes them tick but the answers to all their problems as well. The problem is Klosterman isn’t up to the task. His range of experience is so narrow that it’s hard to believe that he has anything important to tell us about our culture. I mean, he uses KISS and Star Wars to illustrate points, and he thinks particular rock albums have something beyond momentary significance. All that would be forgivable if he were nine years old, but he’s not.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.