Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

I feel more intimately connected to Charlie Brown than to any musician or any athlete, and I care about Peanuts more than any novel or any film. I’m almost embarrassed by the depth of this feeling. I haven’t watched A Charlie Brown Christmas in at least twenty-five years, solely because I can’t emotionally reconcile the final scene: I can’t get over the fact that the other kids don’t tell Charlie Brown that his decision to pick the tiny, pathetic tree was ultimately the right call. They wish him a Merry Christmas and help him sing “Hark! The Herald Angels,” but they never concede he was correct. This will bother me forever. Even writing this paragraph is making me angry. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. And as Charles M. Schulz once noted, that’s a good system, no matter how it makes us feel.

“I’m a T-shirt and jeans guy,” he says while compulsively vaping.

After every show, the other three members of the band would hit the town and carouse (“My brother was the biggest horndog of them all,” he says). But not Eddie. Eddie would remain alone in his hotel room, where he’d spend the entire night drinking vodka, snorting cocaine, and noodling into a tape recorder. “I didn’t drink to party,” he says now, sober since 2008. “Alcohol and cocaine were private things to me. I would use them for work. The blow keeps you awake and the alcohol lowers your inhibitions. I’m sure there were musical things I would not have attempted were I not in that mental state. You just play by yourself with a tape running, and after about an hour, your mind goes to a place where you’re not thinking about anything.”

For example, it’s widely known that he received no compensation for playing the solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” What’s less known is that he (probably) deserves a chunk of the track’s songwriting credit, too. But he doesn’t care about this at all. It’s almost like he doesn’t comprehend the magnitude of the song, the fame of the person who sang it, or the singularity of his contribution. “I think it’s funny the way people talk about that,” he says. “It was twenty minutes of my life. I didn’t want anything for doing that . . . I literally thought to myself, ‘Who is possibly gonna know if I play on this kid’s record?’ So I went to the studio and listened to the song twice, and I didn’t like the section they wanted me to solo over. They wanted me to solo over the breakdown. I asked [Thriller producer] Quincy Jones to edit the chords underneath the solo. Then I could play the solo in the key of E, but it was the chords underneath that made the solo interesting. So I guess I did re-arrange it.”

(when they arrived in the U.S., the brothers could speak only four English words—“yes,” “no,” “motorcycle,” and “accident”).

I suppose you don’t like sports, do you?” This is what Stephen Malkmus—the enigmatic architect of Pavement—asks me as he sits in a Thai sandwich restaurant, waiting for his bacon and bread. He’s casually pawing at a Portland alternative newspaper that features Trail Blazer center Greg Oden on the cover; it’s the day before Thanksgiving,24 so Oden’s patella is still unexploded.

This was always the core criticism of the Pavement posture—some may remember an especially insightful episode of Beavis & Butt-head wherein Beavis watches the “Rattled by the Rush” video and reprimands the band for being “too lazy to rock.”

I Need to Be Alive (in Order to Watch TV)

If I record a sporting event, there’s no way I’m sitting through the commercials. That would be like volunteering for a DUI.

Though some may disagree (and I’m sure some will, because some always do), there doesn’t seem to be much debate over what have been the four best television shows of the past ten years. It feels like an easy puzzle to solve, particularly since it’s become increasingly difficult to write about the state of TV (or even the state of popular culture) without tangentially mentioning one of the following four programs—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and/or Breaking Bad.

It has been brought to my attention that Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse. This information comes not from some rival beverage critic, but from PepsiCo itself: In an attempt to get out of a lawsuit, the manufacturers of Mountain Dew are suggesting that—if a mouse were somehow trapped inside a bottle of Dew—the rodent would be turned into a gelatinous, unrecognizable blob. If true, such evidence would contradict the accusation of Ronald Ball, a Wisconsin man who claims to have purchased a Mountain Dew at a vending machine and found a dead mouse inside the bottle. As someone who’s consumed 32 to 64 ounces of Mountain Dew almost every single day for the past twenty-one years, I found this news unnecessarily salacious. I’ve experienced no ill effects whatsoever from my Mountain Dew consumption, except that I’m kind of fat and pretty crazy and I can never sleep (even though I’m always tired). I’m sipping one right now, and it’s making me invincible. I’m not gonna lie—I feel awesome. I feel more awesome than you, in all probability. Which prompts me to consider a counternarrative to this atypical Mountain Dew controversy: How do we know it’s not good for us to drink mouse-dissolving acid?

Antonoff’s nickname for Swift is “Dead Tooth,” a reference to a minor dental mishap. Just as she tells me this, her cell phone rings. The display panel says the incoming call is from J TIMB. “Oh my God. Justin Timberlake?” Her surprise does not seem artificial. “Can I take this?” She takes the call. The volume on her phone is loud enough for me to intermittently hear both sides of the conversation. Swift explains that she’s driving to her house, but that she can’t actually stay there because contractors are renovating almost every room. “Have you ever seen the movie The Money Pit?” asks Timberlake. She has not, so Timberlake provides a capsule review. He has a four-month-old baby at home and is constantly tired, yet he can’t fall asleep. He asks Swift for advice on sleeping. Swift tells the driver to pull over to the shoulder of the road, since she keeps losing reception as we drive through the canyon. The paparazzo in the gray car casually passes, having not-so-casually followed us for at least five miles. The conversation lasts almost fifteen minutes (which is a little weird, since I’m just sitting there beside her, openly taking notes). “You’re never going to get old,” Swift assures Timberlake. “That’s scientific fact. That’s medical.” Even her sarcasm is aspirational.

I ask if he’s seen Whiplash. “Of course,” he replies. Whiplash is about a psychotic music instructor (J. K. Simmons) who physically abuses and emotionally manipulates a self-driven jazz drummer (Miles Teller) until the teenage musician both collapses and succeeds. Thematically, the film suggests an idea that has been mostly erased from modern popular culture: the possibility that inhumane, unacceptable treatment is sometimes essential to the creation of genius. I ask Bryant what he thought of Whiplash. “That’s me,” he says, although I can’t tell if he means the Simmons character or the Teller character. He might mean the entire movie. In any case, he’s acutely aware of the draconian strangeness of his own personality and of the downside to his ambitions, two characteristics he views almost interchangeably. Do you ever think that the qualities that make you great are actually problems? Oh, yeah. But the things that make a person average are also problems. The things that make someone not good at anything at all are a problem. If you want to be the greatest of all time at something, there’s going to be a negative side to that. If you want to be a high school principal, that’s fine, too—but that will also carry negative baggage. So how much are you willing to give up? Have you given up the possibility of having friends? Do you have any friends? I have “like minds.” You know, I’ve been fortunate to play in Los Angeles, where there are a lot of people like me. Actors. Musicians...

He ultimately tells me only two “on the record” anecdotes that are worth mentioning here. One involved his failed attempt in Dallas to play Radiohead in the Cowboys weight room (“All the guys were like, What the fuck is this?”).

Gravity’s Rainbow, I did so because I thought it would make me seem cool. That was my original motivation. But now I’ve read

Of course, the clearest illustration of LCD’s identity will always be 2002’s multidimensional “Losing My Edge,” the best song ever written about liking music too much.

“What changed everything was when I got into Woody Allen,” says Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton. He is sitting on a couch in the Power Plant lounge, eating two different kinds of pizza

So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy. We talked about this for hours, and then I went home. But while I was away, CeeLo took that conversation and made it into ‘Crazy,’ which we recorded in one take.

THE COACHELLA VALLEY Music and Arts Festival is the hottest weekend in American popular music. This designation is literal: It takes place in the arid California desert, and it feels like watching MTV2 inside a blast furnace.

“Tom would prefer to do this over the phone,” the agent supposedly tells the magazine. “He doesn’t want to look [you] in the eye when this stuff is discussed.”

THE OAKLAND RAIDERS of the 1970s broke every rule they could, on and off the field, sometimes for no reason. They were successful and corrupt, and fans living outside the Bay Area hated who they were. But nobody hates the ’70s Raiders now. In fact, we long for those teams, nostalgic for the era when their sublime villainy could thrive.

When former Tar Heel basketball player Buzz Peterson talks about the greatness of his college roommate Michael Jordan, he sometimes recounts a story of the evening Jordan tried to cheat Peterson’s grandmother in a card game, an anecdote employed to reiterate how MJ was so supernaturally competitive that even elderly women got sliced.

“This next song is dedicated to all the Internet tough guys who talk a lot of shit on the computer but would never say shit to your face,” he declares before they play a tune called “Run Your Mouth.”

Kroeger is a borderline genius at his craft. (And I don’t mean a genius like Einstein. I mean a genius like Nikki Sixx.) He listens to the radio, studies every hit, deconstructs how those songs succeed, and then creates a composite simulacrum that cannot be deconstructed. “Bottoms Up” is about drinking your face off. “Animal” is about getting a hand job in a car. “How You Remind Me” is about being reminded of something you once forgot. I have no idea what “Something in Your Mouth” is about (I’m guessing dentistry school).

Several weeks ago, members of the Bill Simmons Institute for Randomly Idealized Utopian Statistics (B-SIRIUS)

It should also be noted that “Rock and Roll All Nite” closes Dressed to Kill, although this fledgling version sounds like it was recorded on a microcassette inside an aluminum grain bin. “Rock and Roll All Nite,” by sheer public response, is the greatest song KISS ever made. So how good is that, really? In his book Revolution in the Head, British critic Ian MacDonald analyzes every composition the Beatles recorded in the studio, of which he cites 188. By my half-drunk estimate, “Rock and Roll All Nite” is better than 93 of these tracks, along with 12 ties. So the best song by KISS would be (at worst) the 95th best song by the Beatles. Which is outstanding.

The cover art makes for an excellent T-shirt and a decent golf visor;

But I guess it’s not bad for a song written completely inside Paul’s head while he stared out the window during a cross-country flight (although this also means Paul was sitting on an airplane and thinking about metaphors for his cock, a preoccupation that skews uncouth).

It’s also about having sex in a Holiday Inn, with a drum intro that vaguely mirrors “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and a passable Big Bopper impersonation.

KISS: Peter Criss (1978): This record was released by Peter Criss in 1978. GRADE: D

The songs are all worth spinning if you’re lifting weights or moving furniture or oxy-acetylene welding.

Crazy Nights (1987): The album title is Crazy Nights. The single is titled “Crazy Crazy Nights.” The chorus of the single states that these are “Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Nights.”

I support the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a physical building. It’s a pleasant structure to meander around when you’re loaded. There’s a futuristic room where you can lie on the floor and watch videos on a massive TV, and it’s right next to the Great Lakes Science Center (so you can visit both venues without reparking your car).

I remember they played “Heaven” and everybody sort of instantly knew this would be a super-successful single that a lot of guys would pretend to hate during prom.

Lane wrote most of the music for Warrant and was particularly excited about the release of what would be their second album, a record he wanted to title Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He thought the hypothetical title track, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was the most sophisticated thing he’d ever composed, and it probably was. But the people at Columbia Records thought it was too understated and “political” (or something), so they told Lane to write an anthem that was consciously unserious. He supposedly wrote “Cherry Pie” in less than fifteen minutes, made several million dollars, and regretted having done so for the next fifteen years. When you interviewed Lane during the late ’90s, he would talk about “Cherry Pie” like a man who’d thoughtlessly married a gorgeous woman and immediately realized he’d irrevocably altered the very meaning of his life, but I guess Lane did that, too (he married the woman from the “Cherry Pie” video, Bobbie Brown, in 1991—but they divorced in ’93). He sighed a lot. He still made jokes, but they were dark as fuck.

He died in a Comfort Inn, which just seems depressing as hell.

watching athletes who are somehow older than I am, even though this is almost never true (even when I watch golf).

Musburger speak aloud undoubtedly dwarfs the amount of time I’ve spent listening to almost anyone I know personally (I mean, there just aren’t that many non-cult scenarios where it’s normal to listen to the same person talk for three and a half straight hours on a weekly basis for thirty years).

People don’t worry about the idea of a Generation Gap anymore. That notion has been replaced by a Technology Gap. The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced. Yet there are still certain chasms forged by the rudimentary passage of time.

What was once a distant obsession is now an ongoing concern. My life simply has more death in it. My father is dead. I’ve had friends die, and an actuary would assert a few others are queuing up for the transition.110 I now have two small children, which means I live in a perpetual state of fear that something terrible will happen to them, to the point where I won’t watch a documentary if I know it involves the death of a child (despite my embarrassment over how cliché and preposterous that must sound to any childless person, including myself at the age of thirty-three).