Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

What the parallel deaths of Ramone and Crosby prove is that it really doesn’t matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are. Ratt was profoundly uncool (read: populist) and the Ramones were profoundly significant (read: interesting to rock critics). Consequently, it has become totally acceptable to say that the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” changed your life; in fact, saying that would define you as part of a generation that became disenfranchised with the soullessness of suburbia, only to rediscover salvation through the integrity of simplicity. However, it is laughable to admit (without irony) that Ratt’s “I Want a Woman” was your favorite song in 1989; that would mean you were stupid, and that your teenage experience meant nothing, and that you probably had a tragic haircut.

Bunim started her career making soap operas; she was the executive producer for daytime series like As The World Turns and Santa Barbara. The plan for The Real World was to craft soap opera storylines with actual people; though shot in a documentary style, the motivation was different than traditional documentary filmmaking. The twentysomethings cast on The Real World were not complex subjects meant to be uncovered and examined; they were supposed to be archetypes of youth culture, and they were supposed to make the melodramatic choices (and exhibit the melodramatic behavior) that would drive a serial TV program. They were supposed to be hyperreal versions of who they already were. What they did, ultimately, was unknowingly embody the same aesthetic Spalding Gray invented when he first became a monologist. “I became a kind of inverted Method Actor,” Gray wrote. “I was using myself to play myself. [It was] a kind of creative narcissism.” There is no better description of what it means to appear on reality TV than those two sentences.

John, Paul, George, and Ringo shall always be the Fab Four. And because that number is so important (and so finite), pop historians have spent the last thirty-five years trying to decide who deserves classification as Beatle Number Five. Pete Best was the group’s original drummer, so he usually gets to be the Fifth Beatle. Producer George Martin had almost as much sonic impact as the guys in the band, so he warrants credit as the Sixth Beatle. Stuart Sutcliffe played bass with Long John and the Silver Beatles in 1960, influenced the group’s fashion aesthetic, and even had a movie made about his tragic life (1994’s Backbeat); he’s the Seventh Beatle. Journeyman musician Billy Preston is credited on some studio albums and performs live with the band in the documentary Let It Be, so he’s (at worst) Beatle Number Eight. When Ringo Starr had tonsillitis in 1964, he was temporarily replaced by the Ninth Beatle, an easygoing fellow named Jimmy Nichol. Which brings us to Eric Griffiths, a man with the curious legacy of being “The Tenth Beatle.”

“Johnny Carson” was, almost in totality, the entire construction of watching television late at night. Everybody knew this, even if they didn’t own a television. It was a specific piece of knowledge that all Americans had in common. Obviously, that could never happen today. There will never again be “cultural knowledge” that everybody knows, mostly because there is simply too much culture to know about. A few years ago, the OutKast song “Hey Ya!” was wildly popular, and it seemed to have an uncommon social reach; white people liked it, black people liked it, advertisers liked it, communists liked it, kite enthusiasts liked it, etc. etc. etc. I recall having a conversation with a bunch of rock critics who kept referring to this as “The ‘Hey Ya!’ Moment,” when everyone alive seemed to be simultaneously connected through a pop single. However, I can think of fifty people I know personally who have never heard of OutKast or listened to “Hey Ya!” nor could they recognize what this tune sounds like or have even a rudimentary conversation about its popularity. “Hey Ya!” was the most universally appreciated song of the past ten years, but it was still a niche phenomenon; in order to know about OutKast, you had to care about music. This was not the case with Carson. To care about “Johnny Carson,” all you had to do was be alive. There was nothing else to know about it.

In 2002, I interviewed Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler about drugs and groupies, and he said something along the lines of, “Having sex with the same woman a thousand times is way more interesting than having a thousand one-night stands with a thousand different women, because those one-night stands are all the same.” This is the kind of platitude rock stars say all the time; in fact, I am forced to paraphrase it from memory, because that sentiment was too clichéd to include in the article. Every aging rock god (except maybe Gene Simmons) eventually comes to this same conclusion; in fact, anyone (famous or not) who decides to get married is unknowingly agreeing with Steven Tyler. At some point, most people decide that sleeping with the same person improves the quality of their life, even though it eliminates romantic choice. We all unconsciously understand this. However, nobody consciously believes this is true until after the fact. If you ask any single man if he’d prefer to (a) have sex with a thousand different women or (b) have sex with one woman a thousand times, he will always take option “a,” even though he knows this decision is virtually guaranteed to make him feel awkward and alone. In the present tense, we always want as much individual choice as possible; once that present has passed, we’re happier if we’ve experienced the same limited options as everyone else.

FARGO ROCK CITY, FOR REAL I am including the following story for two reasons, neither of which is, “Because it’s good.” In many ways (in fact, in most ways), this story is horrible. It was my attempt to explain the Fargo, North Dakota, “rock scene” when I was twenty-three years old. In retrospect, it now reads like a satire of daily newspaper entertainment reporting, which was certainly not my intention at the time. But that’s also what’s kind of cool about it; the description of all the 1995 bands in Fargo (and its sister city, Moorhead, Minnesota) is probably pretty close to the rock scene of every small-market town in 1995.

Orange 1722: The most popular local act in town, especially among junior high kids. They seem to have a sense of humor (they ended last Monday’s set with “Smokin’ in the Boys Room”), and many people think their vocalist looks like Kurt Cobain.

In 1998, Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sammy Sosa clubbed 66. McGwire looked like a bipedal Clydesdale swinging an elm tree; he was (somehow) far stronger at the age of thirty-five than he had been ten years before. Sosa was only thirty in ’98, which seemed slightly more reasonable; of course, he happened to be a thirty-year-old man with acne, so that was a little weird. But people loved these jovial manimals, and people wanted to see (the never beloved) Roger Maris erased from the record books, and people casually wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the actual baseballs. Americans tend to be conspiracy theorists, but they’re not particularly skeptical.

“It is not what you know,” they say, “it is who you know.” We have all heard this sentiment, and we all reflexively agree with it. This is because “they” are hard to debate, especially since “they” never seem to be in the room whenever anyone makes reference to “them.” We all concede that “they” rule “us.” But here is the secret shame of that amorphous entity that makes us all cower in shame: they are losers. They are failures. They don’t realize that life is—almost without exception—an absolute meritocracy, and everyone who succeeds completely deserves it.1 The only people who disagree with this are people who will never succeed at anything. You see, they want you to believe the passageway to power is all about cultivating allies, so they spend all their time trying to make friends and influence people. This is why they fail. It rarely matters who is on your side; what matters is who is against you.

Now, I know what you’re asking yourself: How do I know the difference between my nemesis and my archenemy? Here is the short answer: You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. You will always have drinks with your nemesis. You would attend the funeral of your nemesis, and—privately—you might shed a tear over his or her passing. However, you would never choose to have a cocktail with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike the gin with arsenic. If you were to perish, your archenemy would dance on your grave, and then he’d burn down your house and molest your children. You hate your archenemy so much that you keep your hatred secret, because you do not want your archenemy to have the satisfaction of being hated.

If this distinction seems confusing, just ask your girlfriend to explain it in detail; women have always understood the nemesis-archenemy dichotomy. Every woman I’ve ever known has at least one close friend whose only purpose in life is to criticize their actions, compete for men’s attention, and drive them insane; very often, this is a woman’s best friend. Consequently, females are always able to find the ideal nemesis (usually without even trying). Meanwhile, every woman also has a former friend (usually someone from high school with large breasts) whom she has loathed for years and whom she will continue to loath with the intensity of a thousand suns, even if she only sees her once every ten years. This is her archenemy. Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can’t hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don’t see the big picture.

In 1991, Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe challenged Axl Rose to a public fistfight, and Vince probably considered Axl to be his archenemy. However, Vince was merely Axl’s nemesis; Axl’s archenemy was Kurt Cobain, which is why Guns n’ Roses never recovered from Cobain’s 1994 suicide. J. R. Ewing was at war with nemesis-brother Bobby for twelve seasons (thirteen if you count the year Victoria Principal dreamed he was dead), but Cliff Barnes was the true Minotaur of Southfork.

The Joker was Batman’s nemesis, but—ironically—his archenemy was Superman, since Superman made Batman entirely mortal and generally nonessential. Nobody likes to admit this, but Batman fucking hated Superman; Superman is the reason Batman became an alcoholic.3 Clearly, you need a nemesis. Clearly, you need an archenemy. And it’s possible you already have both of these entities in your life; perhaps you just don’t realize it (or maybe you can’t tell them apart).

RECOGNIZING YOUR ARCHENEMY • Every time you talk to this person, you lie. • If you meet someone who has the same first name as this person, you immediately like them less. • This person has done at least two (2) things that would be classified as “unforgivable.” • The satisfaction you feel from your own success pales in comparison to the despair you feel from this person’s personal triumphs, even if those triumphs are completely unrelated to your life. • If this person slept with your girlfriend, she would never be attractive to you again. • Even if this person’s girlfriend was a hateful bitch, you would sleep with her out of spite.

I realize there are those who don’t think it’s necessary (or even wise) to consciously create adversaries; Will Rogers claimed that he never met a man he didn’t like. But what is Will Rogers famous for, really? For telling jokes that don’t have punch lines? For wearing a bandana like an ascot? Who wants that for a legacy? There is a reason they say, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.” They don’t know what they’re talking about, but sometimes they get lucky, you know? —Esquire, 2004

David Byrne’s cover of Whitney Houston’s “I Want to Dance with Somebody” is profoundly Advanced, as was the David Bowie–Mick Jagger cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The most Advanced hard-rock album ever made was (Music from) The Elder by KISS, the soundtrack for a movie that does not exist; The Elder also includes several songs cowritten by Lou Reed, which obviously helps.

WHO IS NOT ADVANCED? Almost everybody else. Neil Young is not Advanced; his career is built on the premise that he follows no rules, so he cannot Advance beyond his nature. None of the Beatles were Advanced, although Paul McCartney is close. Bob Dylan only flirts with Advancement; in fact, appearing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial might be his most Advanced move ever (Dylan selling bras = Advancement). The Beastie Boys are completely unAdvanced, as are the Killers. However, this does not mean these people can never Advance; that’s always possible. For example, if Radiohead released an album of wordless, mechanized droning, that would be predictable. If Radiohead made a glam record, that would be overt. But if Radiohead recorded an album of blues standards, they would Advance.

Some pundits find Advancement’s circular logic both dogmatic and reductive. “I find that Advancement scholars do not foster a spirit of inquiry,” says Rob Sheffield, a six-foot-five-inch writer for Rolling Stone and the owner of many lush sweaters. “It’s really just a way for Advancement theorists to appreciate shitty music by people they consider to be non-shitty. It allows you to engage with Lou Reed’s music from the 1980s, but not the Hooters or the Outfield. This entire theory is shackled by the Heisenberg principle of self-consciousness.” This is a valid point, possibly. Even Hartley is sometimes stymied by his own discipline. “I find Sting unlistenable,” admits Hartley. “But I know that Sting is Advanced. He must be super-Advanced, and I just don’t understand him. It’s kind of like when Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity—there were still parts of that theory that even Einstein could not understand. Those concepts were left for future generations.”

It was during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles when I realized how ridiculous casual sports fans tend to be, and how most people’s opinion of what they care about has nothing to do with thinking. I realized this when Zola Budd collided with Mary Decker Slaney during the 3,000 meters. This—as you may remember—was a huge controversy. And while I was following the controversy on my beanbag in front of our twenty-one-inch Zenith, something occurred to me: Why the fuck is everyone in this country suddenly concerned with women’s distance running? Had this race happened in the summer of 1983, little barefoot Zola could have beaten Mary Decker with a pair of nunchuckus and it probably wouldn’t have been mentioned in USA Today.

Q: You work in an office, performing a job you find satisfying (and which compensates you adequately). The company that employs you is suddenly purchased by an eccentric millionaire who plans to immediately raise each person’s salary by 5 percent and extend an extra week of vacation to all full-time employees. However, this new owner intends to enforce a somewhat radical dress code: every day, men will have to wear tuxedos, tails, and top hats (during the summer months, male employees will be allowed to wear gray three-piece suits on “casual Fridays”). Women must exclusively work in formal wear, preferably ball gowns or prom dresses. Each employee will be given an annual $500 stipend to purchase necessary garments, but that money can only be spent on work-related clothing. The new regime starts in three months. Do you seek employment elsewhere?

Q: You are offered a Brain Pill. If you swallow this pill, you will become 10 percent more intelligent than you currently are; you will be more adept at reading comprehension, logic, and critical thinking. However, to all other people you know (and to all future people you meet), you will seem 20 percent less intelligent. In other words, you will immediately become smarter, but the rest of the world will perceive you as dumber (and there is no way you can ever alter the universality of that perception). Do you take this pill?

Drinking more than five glasses of vodka before (or during) work generally qualifies as a guilty pleasure. This is also true for having sex with people you barely know, having sex with people you actively hate, and/or having sex with people you barely know but whom your girlfriend used to live with during college (and will now subsequently hate). These are all guilty pleasures in a technical sense. However, almost no one who uses the term “guilty pleasure” is referring to situations like these; people who use the term “guilty pleasure” in casual conversation are often talking about why they like Patrick Swayze’s Road House. This drives me insane for two reasons: by labeling things like Patrick Swayze as guilty pleasures, it somehow dictates that (a) people should feel bad for liking things they sincerely enjoy, and (b) if these same people were not somehow coerced into watching Road House every time it comes on TBS, they’d just as likely be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both of these principles are wrong.

At least initially, this was a charming idea. It was mainly a way for them to write about things that would normally be nonsensical to cover, and it dovetailed nicely with the primary cultural obsession of all people born between the years of 1968 and 1980 (i.e., comedic nostalgia for the extremely recent past). Entertainment Weekly still does this feature annually, although now they just try to pick crazy shit to confuse soccer moms in Omaha (I question whether any contemporary person derives pleasure from—or feels guilty about—Mr. Rogers’s puppet-saturated Neighborhood of Make-Believe, which EW inexplicably included in their 2003 installment). What’s more troubling are things like The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1,001 Things You Hate to Love.

The failure of The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures is its never-explained premise, which is that there are certain things we’re just supposed to inherently feel shame about. For example, I have absolutely no idea why anyone would be ashamed to like Evel Knievel (page 144); he is an iconic symbol from a specific period of Americana, and he serves as a metaphor for what a lot of people valued in 1976. He also broke thirty-five bones, went to jail for beating a man with a baseball bat, and consciously named himself Evel. He’s not cool in a guilty context; he’s cool in every context. This book suggests there should be guilt associated with the appreciation of prison films (page 216). This makes no sense whatsoever. I feel more guilt when Cool Hand Luke is on television and I don’t watch it.

It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it. Take, for example, the aforementioned Road House. This is a movie I love. But I don’t love it because it’s bad; I love it because it’s interesting in a very specific way. Outside the genre of sci-fi, I can’t think of any film less plausible than Road House. Every element of the story is preposterous: the idea of Swayze being a nationally famous bouncer (with a degree in philosophy), the concept of such a superviolent bar having such an attractive clientele, the likelihood of a tiny Kansas town having such a sophisticated hospital, the authenticity of ripping another man’s throat out, etc. etc. etc. Every single scene includes at least one detail that could never happen in real life. So does that make Road House bad? No. It makes Road House perfect. Because Road House exists in a parallel reality that is more fanciful (and more watchable) than Lord of the Rings. The characters in Road House live within the mythology of rural legend while grappling against exaggerated moral dilemmas and neoclassical archetypes. I don’t feel guilty for liking any of that. Road House also includes a monster truck. I don’t feel guilty for liking that, either.

Let’s say I considered this program a “guilty pleasure,” and let’s say my desire to watch Ashlee explain how her boyfriend ruined Valentine’s Day was something I needed to apologize for. Wouldn’t this imply that The Ashlee Simpson Show was my conscious alternative to something better? Wouldn’t this suggest that—were I not watching The Ashlee Simpson Show—I would be working on logarithms, or studying the liner notes to out-of-print Thelonious Monk records, or searching for factual errors in The Economist? Because these are not things I do (and I don’t think many of the other 2.9 million people watching Ashlee Simpson each week do these things, either). We’re not losing the cure for cancer because of Ashlee Simpson; if we weren’t watching her pretend to be sexy, we’d probably just be going to the bar earlier.

But because we were drunk, the conversation was very loose and slightly flirtatious. And then this woman suddenly tells me that she has a bizarre sexual quirk: she can only have an orgasm if a man watches her masturbate. This struck me as fascinating, so I started asking questions about why this was. And then—somehow—it just sort of happened. I never touched her and I never kissed her, but I ended up watching this woman masturbate. And then I went home and went to bed. And I told Jane about this a few days later, mostly because it was all so weird. But Jane went fucking insane when I told her this, and she angrily said our relationship was over. Now she won’t even return my calls.” Whose side do you take: Jack’s or Jane’s? I have posed this question to myriad people, and the reactions are all vaguely similar. Women almost always think Jane’s rage is completely valid; men generally inquire about the availability of housing in Jack’s hypothetical building. Women usually agree that this offense warrants a breakup, while many men think it merely warrants a tenure in the doghouse. But what’s noteworthy is that—while almost everyone agrees that Jack did something wrong—everyone uses a staunchly different, weirdly personal argument to justify what makes it so bad.

It is very easy to be underrated, because all you need to do is nothing. Everyone wants to be underrated. It’s harder to become overrated, because that means someone has to think you were awesome before they thought you sucked. Nobody wants to be overrated, except for people who like to live in big houses. But I am not interested in overrated and underrated bands. That argument is too easy, and all it means is that somebody else was wrong. I’m far more interested in “rated” bands. I’m obsessed with bands who are rated as accurately as possible—in other words, nobody thinks they’re better than they actually are, and nobody thinks they’re worse.

Q: It is 1933. You are in Berlin, Germany. Somehow, you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler’s wallet. This theft will not effect Hitler’s rise to power, the nature of World War II, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty Reichsmarks and completely ruin his evening. You do not need the money. The odds that you will be caught committing this crime are less than 2 percent. Are you ethically obligated to steal Hitler’s wallet?

On Lost, greatness is everything4—and that makes the show likable. But it also reminds people that Lost is fake, and it suggests that the story will rarely show them glimpses of their own life (which, ultimately, is art’s main function). The wholly constructed world of Lost is how life should be, but isn’t. Meanwhile, the semi-constructed world of Survivor mirrors the way life actually is: every season, the mediocre majority unifies to destroy the unrivaled. After that, it becomes a popularity contest based on lying. If Dr. Jack and Mr. Locke were characters on Survivor, neither would have any chance of winning. On Survivor, being a successful leader is akin to a death sentence; with the exceptions of Ethan Zohn from Season 3 and Tom Westman from Season 10, the strongest players always lose.

“Every generation needs a new revolution,” said Thomas Jefferson, and his thoughts were far from radical: almost all the Founding Fathers were obsessed with the potential for insurgency on U.S. soil. The Constitution is filled with provisions that made such a scenario conceivable. “Future citizens will need muskets to assassinate their oppressive viceroys,” James Madison might have hypothetically remarked during the intermission of a slave auction. “In fact, this is probably the second-most important freedom any of us will be able to come up with. Somebody should write this shit down.”

4:18 P.M.: “Raspberry Beret,” the best Prince song ever recorded, is followed by the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” the best Prince song ever recorded by somebody else. Prince supposedly gave “Manic Monday” to Susanna Hoffs in the hope that she would sleep with him. If I were Prince, that’s all I would ever do—I’d write airtight singles for every female musician I ever met. As far as I can tell, the reason you write great songs is to become a rock star, and the reason you become a rock star is to have sex with beautiful, famous women. Why not cut out the middleman? Prince is a genius.

6:00 P.M.: The Metal Mania hour opens with “Summertime Girls” by Y&T, which makes me wish my apartment was an ’84 Caprice Classic. Beautiful women are wearing black leather outfits on the sands of Malibu, and that can’t be comfortable. Luckily, they remove them in order to don black lingerie, which is evidently what they wear when they play beach volleyball. I can totally relate to this.

8:06 P.M.: Okay, here’s something I failed to anticipate: it turns out VH1 Classic operates on some kind of “block system,” because they just played Tom Petty’s “So You Want to Be a Rock & Roll Star” (again), and now they’re playing the same Roger Waters shit I saw at 12:05. I am now going to have to spend the next eight hours rewatching the exact same videos I just spent the previous eight hours watching, in the exact same sequence. If I were a member of al Qaeda, this would be enough to make me talk. 8:28 P.M.: This is all so idiotically meta. Because this is VH1 Classic, all these videos are things I saw in the distant past. They make me think of junior high. But because I just finished watching these same exact clips eight hours ago, my window for nostalgia is much smaller. I am now nostalgic for things that just happened. So the second time I see Fine Young Cannibals’ “Good Thing,” it makes me nostalgic for 12:30, which was when I had General Tso’s chicken for lunch. Yeah, those were GTs.

5:42 A.M.: The video for Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is not remotely akin to the way I remember it from Friday Night Videos. It seems to be set in a postapocalyptic haunted mansion, occupied by goth witches and tuxedo-clad warlocks wielding Darth Vader’s light sabers. I suddenly have an urge to locate my twelve-sided die and roll up some hit points.

SOMETHING THAT ISN’T TRUE AT ALL I became the movie critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in 1999. Compared to my aforementioned stint as “amorphous pop culture reporter,” this was an incredibly effortless (and surprisingly boring) job. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking that watching movies for a living would be an easy, interesting way to make a living, you would be exactly half right. I continually found myself sitting at my office desk doing nothing; it is not a field with a great deal of breaking news. You pretty much just wait for the movies. To kill time, I would sometimes work on a novella about a guy from North Dakota who moved to Akron, Ohio, and became the film critic. I like to call this “reverse creativity.”

“I liked your review of Fight Club,” Margaret says, and I suspect she is being sincere. “Oh really,” I say. “It was funny.” “Well, I’m a pretty awesome writer.” Margaret laughs and (possibly) cackles. “Absolutely,” she says. That response seems less sincere.

It’s been several months since I’ve been able to handle talking to Donna while sober, so I pour three shots of Southern Comfort into a Coke glass and fill it up with Mountain Dew; this creates a color resembling the deepest waters of Loch Ness. In order to be more efficient, I suck on an ice cube while I drink (this eliminates the problem of the cubes melting in the glass and diluting the mix). I figure I have fifty minutes to get fucked up, plus or minus three hundred seconds. Time for three drinks, maybe. The first glass goes down like a handful of liquid thistles, but the second is smooth as a gravy avalanche and the third literally disappears from the glass that contains it. When Donna knocks on the door of my apartment and opens it in one motion (she has her own key), I am both drowsy and awake, the product of combining 80 proof alcohol with enough caffeine and glucose to make a ground sloth break-dance.

Donna nibbles on her noodle and looks sharp in her capri pants, and I am pleasantly surprised that she temporarily loses interest in her interrogation; she simply sits on my floor and smiles, obviously rhapsodic about being inside my apartment, even though I have no idea why anyone could be rhapsodic about being with me.

complete missuse of the word "rhapsodic."

For ninety minutes, I lie on the futon and outline my views on partial-birth abortion. Donna drinks a shitload of wine and asks me a bunch of questions about the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, some of which I know but all of which I answer.

Here’s a detail about Michael Stipe I couldn’t jam into the article, mostly because I thought the sentiment would be distracting: when we spoke on the phone, my first question was directly about Yorke’s cultural position, and Stipe said, “Well, Thom has entered that rarefied class of songwriter—these are people like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and myself. The things he says now take on a different kind of significance.” This, I suppose, is completely true—but what a fucked-up thing to say about oneself! Were those the only three people he could think of?

What made Orange 17 awesome was how so many people in Fargo hated them for their success. This is a band who never made an album, never went on tour, and never made any money. However, they once opened for Ted Nugent and Bad Company at the Fargodome (they were the replacement for a national band who got sick). In a way, Orange 17 truly were a little ahead of their time; they loved hair metal ironically when absolutely nobody else did, and—had they emerged ten years later—I suppose they could have been a second-tier version of the Darkness. The band was also hurt by the fact that vocalist Karl Qualey—as mentioned above—looked too much like Kurt Cobain, and everyone thought he was doing it on purpose. In truth, it was just a weird coincidence. He really just needed a different barber.

The exceptions being Dale Peck, MTV on-air personalities who aren’t Kurt Loder, Al Franken, and myself.

Here’s why the knife fight was rigged: if you recall, the two gang members in the video had their wrists tied together before they started trying to slice each other up. However, the white guy with the striped shirt has his right wrist tied, and the black guy in the white suit has his left wrist tied. So—unless one of these dudes was a southpaw—this situation is patently unfair.