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

by Chuck Klosterman

But by the time the twenty-first century started, the notion of being a rock critic and a sportswriter was no longer awkward (or even contentious), which nicely coincided with the period of my life when I tried to earn a living by doing so. Which is what this book is, more or less. The surgery was a success and the patient is resting comfortably. I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough), but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened. Which, from my limited perspective, is a dream I could not anticipate.

The nature of sports lends itself to the polarization of celebrity athletes. But this case is unlike any other I can remember. In 1996, when Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to face the flag during the national anthem, it was easy to understand why certain people were outraged and why others saw that outrage as hypocritical. It was predictably polarizing. But this “Tebow Thing” is different. On one pole, you have people who hate him because he’s too much of an in-your-face good person, which makes very little sense; at the other pole, you have people who love him because he succeeds at his job while being uniquely unskilled at its traditional requirements, which seems almost as weird. Equally bizarre is the way both groups perceive themselves as the oppressed minority who are fighting against dominant public opinion, although I suppose that has become the way most Americans think about everything.

JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH of people believe something does not make it true. This is obvious, even to a child. People once thought the earth was flat.13 But here’s a more complex scenario: If you were living in Greece during the sixth century, and there was no way to deduce what the true shape of the earth was, and there was no way to validate or contradict the preexisting, relatively universal belief that the world was shaped like a flat disc—wouldn’t disagreeing with that theory be less reasonable than refuting it? And if so, wouldn’t that mean the only sixth-century people who were ultimately correct about world geography were unreasonable and insane? Trust the insane!

I’m writing about. I was honored to write this foreword. I still can’t believe I was asked to do so. But I wish the essay I ultimately typed into my keyboard remotely reflected the essay that still exists inside my skull. Something was lost in the translation; I think I just choked. My relationship to Peanuts—and specifically to the character of Charlie Brown—is so overwhelming that I couldn’t describe the things I wanted to describe. It was too uncanny. 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.

But I will miss the Sunday comics. I miss them already. As a kid, I loved the idea that there was at least one section of the newspaper directly targeted at my brain; as an adult, it was reassuring to read something that was still the exact same product I remembered from the past. It was static in the best possible way. Like most people, I moved through various adolescent phases where different strips temporarily became my obsession: Garfield in fifth grade, The Far Side throughout high school, Calvin and Hobbes as a college boozehound. But I always considered Peanuts the most “important” comic strip, and the one that all other strips were measured against. The fact that Peanuts was the first strip on the very top of the Sunday comics’ front page verified this subjective belief—if comics were rock bands, it seemed obvious that Peanuts was the Beatles.

I landed at Heathrow airport at eight a.m. on August 26, 2014. I think it was a Tuesday. I took a taxi through the spitting rain to a fancy hotel in order to ask Jimmy Page questions about Led Zeppelin II. I will never forget that cab ride. I was exhausted, I had a terrible toothache, and I felt wonderful. I think it was the first time I ever felt professionally successful. Page, of course, hated our conversation, both in theory and in practice. His mind still resides in an era when media exposure only served as a detriment to artistic aspiration. Led Zeppelin did not need the press to succeed. They did not need to explain what they were doing or persuade people to care. They just had to record and tour. The songs were enough. Forty years after the fact, Page still assumes answering questions about his music can only erode its interpretative potentiality. He looked at me like I was a man who was trying to ruin his life. Part of my job is annoying people I admire. I hate to admit that, but I have to accept it.

The most straightforwardly psychedelic passage involves Page: As “Dazed and Confused” drones in the background, we see the (then) twenty-nine-year-old guitarist climbing a rock cliff on a moonlit December night, eventually reaching a wizard who’s a decrepit, kaleidoscoped version of Page himself. The footage was filmed near the Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Ness, a mansion that had once been the residence of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. I start to ask Page a question about this fantasy sequence. But I don’t get to finish. “I knew you were leading up to that. I knew you were eventually going to ask me what that sequence represents,” says Page. Throughout our two-day interview, he often predicts what he thinks I’m about to ask. “You have the hermit, and you have the aspirant. And the aspirant is climbing toward the hermit, who is this beacon of light. The idea is that anyone can acquire truth at any point in his life.” Jimmy Page is seventy years old. He undoubtedly knows the truth, at least about himself and the most important hard rock band that ever walked the earth. He has become the hermit on the hill. But getting the hermit to share those truths is not easy, because hermits are hermetic for a reason: They don’t trust the aspirants, and particularly not the aspirants who want to record whatever they have to say.

All the Led Zeppelin albums are being rereleased as individual box sets that include an updated vinyl pressing of the LP, a compact disc, rough studio mixes and outtakes from the respective recording sessions (in both formats), a code for a high-definition download, and a seventy-page photo book. They’re not cheap (each box retails for over a hundred dollars), but the sound quality cannot be disputed. And this is the only thing Page really wants to talk about—the sound of the music, and how that sound was achieved. He can talk about microphone placement for a very, very long time. Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, find Jimmy Page. He has thoughts on this.

The fundamental nature of his genius confounds logic: He is an autodidact who can play any instrument he gets his paws on (he owns an oboe, for instance), but he’s also the rare rock artist who studied music at college (both he and his brother Alex attended Pasadena Community College in the early seventies). He’s a classically trained pianist, but he can’t read music. And he insists that—had he taken proper guitar lessons—he would have never developed the innovative techniques that are now regularly taught by proper guitar instructors. His entire career has been built on astonishment and influence. The first question every rival guitarist asked upon hearing the ’78 instrumental song “Eruption” was, “How is he making those sounds?” The second tended to be, “And how can I copy it?” As a consequence, the 1980s were saturated with EVH clones, all of whom tried to prove that they, too, could hammer on the neck of their guitar with maximum dexterity. But it never really worked for anyone else. “That was a different trip,” Van Halen recalls. “It was like, ‘What the hell did I start here?’ Because [that technique] had been a part of my playing for so long, and then everybody else started doing it. I did not take it as flattery. But it ultimately didn’t matter, because I still play that way and none of those other people stayed with it.”

PART OF WHAT MAKES Van Halen’s persona difficult to interpret is his tendency to swing between unyielding perfectionism and mild apathy. When making the early VH albums, he would often sneak back into the studio at four in the morning to fix mistakes only he could hear. Yet he can also be confoundingly laissez-faire about significant career accomplishments. 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.”

At 7:35 p.m., Mercury Records president David Massey picks up a microphone and explains how most people in the 1990s incorrectly assumed Oasis would “just flame out in a drug haze.” This is an odd compliment, particularly since that’s precisely what many casual fans concede must have happened. After his speech, we get to hear six tracks off High Flying Birds. No one even pretends to listen. The partygoers talk the whole time and stand in line for free vodka. I’m told that Noel is allegedly coming to this party later, but I don’t stay long enough to find out. As I ride the elevator down from the twenty-sixth floor, I find myself hoping he never shows up at all, because I suspect he’d really hate it.

There’s an inherent problem with writing about Pavement, and the problem is this: People tend to know nothing or everything about them. There are very few “casual” Pavement fans. To most of the music populace, they were a band with a funny name, one minor MTV hit (1994’s “Cut Your Hair”), and a lot of abstract credibility among people who get mad at the radio. They view Pavement as a minor act. But to the kind of hyperintellectual, underemployed people who did not find it strange to buy concert tickets a year in advance, Pavement is the apotheosis of indie aesthetics, the “finest rock band of the ’90s” (according to former Village Voice critic Robert Christgau) whose first full-length record is better than the original Velvet Underground album (according to the now-defunct music magazine Blender). They are remembered as the musical center of the Clinton-era lo-fi universe, a designation that’s spiritually true but technically wrong.25 Over the span of five albums and nine EPs, Pavement became decade-defining music, widely regarded as dazzling and essential and game changing (at least among those who cared).

sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins, whose work will appear in the prestigious Whitney Biennial; he tells me their wedding song was “What Love Can Be” by Kingdom Come. I believe him, but I’m not sure if this indicates weird sincerity or next-level mockery. Sometimes he’s amazingly straightforward, like when I ask if he thinks Pavement could have been bigger if that had been what they wanted. 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.”

When you watch an event in real time, anything is possible. Someone could die. Something that has never before happened could spontaneously happen twice. When there’s :03 on the clock, not one person in the world can predict how those seconds will unspool. But if something happens within those three seconds that is authentically astonishing and truly transcendent . . . well, I’m sure I’ll find out three minutes after it happens. I’m certain someone would tell me, possibly by accident. You can avoid the news, but you can’t avoid The News. Living in a cave isn’t enough. We’ve beaten the caves. The caves have Wi-Fi. And that, ultimately, is why a prerecorded game can never feel the same as a game that is happening in real time: If I don’t know anything about the event I’m about to watch, I can be certain that nothing except a good game is going to transpire. I know I’m merely going to see a slightly different version of something I’ve seen a thousand times before. And even though I think that’s all I want, it doesn’t come close to what I unconsciously crave.

I Will Choose Free Will (Canadian Reader’s Note: This Is Not About Rush) 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. The four fit together so nicely: two from HBO that are defunct, two from AMC that are still ongoing, and all of which use nonlinear narratives with only minor experimentation. There have been bushels of quality television during the past decade, but these four shows have been the

As a result, you often hear people making damning, melodramatic criticisms of TV shows they ostensibly like. You hear a lot of sentences that begin, “I love Mad Men, but . . .” or “The first two seasons of The Sopranos were great, but . . .” And whatever follows that “but” is inevitably crazy and hyperspecific. This is especially true among people who prefer The Wire. There’s never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire. It’s a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn’t classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It’s almost like these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing any detail is like mocking an episode of Frontline.

Gilligan detailed this process in a recent interview with Newsweek: “Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades. When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?”34 In that same Newsweek article, the writer suggests Walter White’s ongoing metamorphosis is what makes Breaking Bad great. But that doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just that watching White’s transformation is interesting; what’s interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of season one and White in the debut of season four is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It’s a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that’s what matters.

For whatever the reason, this is one phenomenon that I have missed completely (and mostly, I suppose, on purpose). Now, do not take this to mean that I dislike these books. I do not. I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial,35 but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they’re written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they’re the right speed for 90 percent of American adults. I don’t hate these novels at all—in fact, I suspect they’re good. Moreover, I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers is five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard.36 We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no pop star or film starlet as popular as J. K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share. And I have no interest in any of it.

The narrative core of most Hannah Montana episodes is established by the show’s expository theme song, “The Best of Both Worlds.” The hook is supposed to be a contradiction—instead of working to achieve fame, Miley craves anonymity. When the show was created, I’m sure this reversal of desire was expected to serve as a novel twist on an old theme. It was supposed to operate as fantastical irony. But that is not what happened. Instead, Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart became a concept Web-obsessed teenagers could understand innately: They, too, struggle to reconcile who they are with the quasi-real persona they consciously construct. Hannah Montana is the Internet incarnate.

Every online existence is a noncommercial simulation of celebrity culture: Users develop a character (i.e., the best-case portrait of themselves) and then track the size of its audience (via the number of friends they acquire or page views they receive). Private citizens now face a dilemma previously reserved for the authentically famous: How do they cope with the disparity between how they are seen in the communal sphere and how they live in private? This is why Hannah Montana works. Teenagers can relate to her.

II. Simplify, then exaggerate. The McLaughlin Group is not about details. If you want details, don’t watch television. Also, don’t read newspapers or magazines and stay off the Internet—buy nonpartisan books about events that happened no less than ten years ago. Modernity is not detail oriented. What The McLaughlin Group is about is the abstraction of policy, delivered in the most propulsive way possible. Here’s the formula: Take a specific news item, locate its core essence, and then debate its metaphoric significance on the grandest possible scale. Nobody cares if Hillary is up four points in South Carolina; what’s compelling is the notion that those four points could somehow represent the potential for how the new American South may (or may not) be rethinking the role of women in society. On CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, all they talk about is politics. On The McLaughlin Group, they talk about political science. And—yes—I suppose it’s the junk science version of political science, but it’s still more engaging than the alternative.

They just thought they were having a good time, but the results were astonishing. Though it may not have been their intent, the Beatles took performance-enhancing drugs. And this is germane to sports for one reason: Absolutely no one holds this against them. No one views Rubber Soul or Revolver as “less authentic” than the band’s earlier albums, despite the fact that they would not (and probably could not) have been made by people who weren’t on drugs. Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road on a Dexedrine binge, yet nobody thinks that makes his novel less significant. Wall Street stockbrokers get jacked up on cocaine before going into the trading pit, but nobody questions the merit of their business acumen. Kindergartners eat Ritalin like candy, but nobody discounts the validity of their Candy Land performance. It’s entirely possible you take 20 milligrams of Ambien the night before a difficult day at the office and then drink 32 ounces of coffee when you wake up (possibly with a mind-sharpening cigarette). Anytime a person takes drugs for purposes that aren’t exclusively recreational (i.e., staring at a ceiling fan, renting Planet of the Apes, etc.), he or she is using them to do something at a higher level. And—yes—I realize there is a difference between caffeine and HGH. They are not the same. But there’s an even greater difference between a morning of data processing and trying to cut block Shawne Merriman.

Having missed everything except Saturday night’s Tulsarama Sock-Hop (Fabian, Bobby Vee, and the Chiffons are scheduled to perform), I decide to find a bar and drink until my situation improves. This is harder than one might anticipate; taverns don’t seem to exist here. I have lived in some of the least exhilarating cities in America, but Tulsa is almost like urban sarcasm. Tulsa makes Akron seem like Las Vegas (and I lived in Fargo, so I can say this). It’s Friday night, but every downtown street is a reenactment of the opening ten minutes from 28 Days Later.

Times change, and you have to change with them, even when the changes are dumb. Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover. Around the same time my piece was published in GQ, two other high-profile articles on female pop stars ran in The New York Times: a Nicki Minaj feature by Vanessa Grigoriadis and a reported magazine essay on Rihanna by Miranda July. Grigoriadis noted that Minaj has “a shockingly beautiful and complex face, with a wide, high forehead [and] dark, almond-shaped eyes.” July literally describes sniffing her own blouse hours after the interview in order to relish the remnant scent of Rihanna’s perfume. These are visceral, vivid details. They’re excellent details. But I would no longer write anything close to those passages, assuming the person I was profiling was female. If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn’t take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story. This is part of the reason it’s so much easier to write about old white guys: nobody gives a shit how you describe them.

Have you ever stopped yourself from writing a fictional lyric because you feared it would be incorrectly applied to your literal life? No. Some of the things I write about on a song like “Blank Space” are satire. You take your creative license and create things that are larger than life. You can write things like, “I get drunk on jealousy but you’ll come back each time I leave, because darling I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream.” That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious. It’s impossible for an artist to control how she is perceived. But an artist can anticipate those perceptions, which is almost as good. “A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale,” Swift says, “and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. But at this point, if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.”

She recounts a litany of arguments with various label executives over every possible detail, from how much of her face would appear on the cover to how cowriter Max Martin would be credited in the liner notes. As far as I can tell, Swift won every one of these debates. “Even calling this record 1989 was a risk,” she says. “I had so many intense conversations where my label really tried to step in. I could tell they’d all gotten together and decided, ‘We gotta talk some sense into her. She’s had an established, astronomically successful career in country music, and shaking that up would be the biggest possible mistake.’ But to me, the safest thing I could do was take the biggest possible risk. I am confident that I can write a song. I’m not confident about a lot of other aspects of my life, but I know how to write songs. I’d read a review of [2012’s] Red that said it wasn’t sonically cohesive. So that was what I wanted on 1989: an umbrella that would go over all of these songs, so that they all belonged on the same album. But then I’d go into the label office, and they were like, ‘Can we talk about putting a fiddle and a steel guitar solo on “Shake It Off” to service country radio?’ I was trying to make the most honest record I could possibly make, and they were kind of asking me to be a little disingenuous about it. ‘Let’s capitalize on both markets.’ No, let’s not. Let’s pick a lane.”

The Enemy of My Enemy Is Probably Just Another Enemy I know who I am,” is among the first things Kobe Bryant tells me, which is the kind of statement made only by people who are very, very right or very, very wrong. He tells me this in a breakfast café called Haute Cakes, tucked inside a strip mall in Newport Beach, Calif. We’re fifteen minutes from his house, but I nonetheless mention that this is not the kind of place I expected to meet him. “What did you expect,” he asks, “a dungeon?”

My recollection of meeting Jonathan Franzen in 2010 fixates on a perpetual sense of clinical oddness. I came into the interview assuming Franzen had no idea who I was, and I don’t think he did—except when he’d toss random details into the conversation that almost felt like pointed, scolding references to things I had written in the past. I could never tell if he hated being interviewed or if he was trying to hide the fact that he kinda liked it. He had a warm smile but a clumsy laugh. It was a formal interaction, even when we talked about the Mekons. I was never particularly comfortable. Maybe he wasn’t, either? No idea. Part of my discomfort was a product of our theoretical similarity and practical imbalance. We are both working writers with vaguely similar lives. He, however, is more talented, more successful, and significantly more respected. We’re doing the same thing but getting different results. There was a power imbalance, recognized by both of us. When I interview people like Taylor Swift or Kobe Bryant, I never internalize their greatness or their success, or their public perception. It doesn’t have anything to do with me, so I feel nothing. My curiosity is impersonal. But that’s not how it was with Franzen. The whole time I was with him, I felt like his subordinate. I felt vaguely embarrassed to be there, wasting his time. Which says more about me than it says about him.

THE LAST TIME the Browns won an NFL championship was 1964. This feels distant to everyone in America, except those living in Northeast Ohio. To them, it seems like last weekend.

Over the next three days, he tells me many interesting things, but virtually none of them are eligible for attribution. He’s a very nice guy and a nuanced sports thinker, but his level of caution is profound (almost to the point of comedy). Most of my direct queries are answered with either banal business-speak or a nondescript chuckle. 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?”). The other is that—upon his graduation from Georgetown law school—he almost became a diplomat. “I wanted to be a diplomat in Latin America,” he tells me. “I had lived in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. I guess I was more idealistic back then. I was working down there, right after El Salvador had finished a civil war. I thought I could make the world a better place. But then I realized all I was really doing was helping rich people get richer than they already were. I figured if that was all I was doing,

The Browns live in a state of perpetual war, endlessly convincing themselves that every scrap of information they possess is some kind of game-changing superweapon that will alter lives and transmogrify the culture. They behave like members of a corporate cult. Yet what do these cultists watch on the day of the draft? They watch ESPN. They log onto the Internet and scan Pro Football Talk. The comments they make about college prospects are roughly identical to whatever your smarter friends might glean from The Plain Dealer. I’ve never witnessed this level of institutional paranoia within a universe so devoid of actual secrets. I don’t even know what they don’t want me to know.

Just a few thoughts on the next seventy-eight pages, since most of this stuff is self-explanatory: One of the things I love about covering uncool artists is the inevitable recognition that groups widely described as “hated” are almost always more popular than groups widely described as “beloved.” I wrote a satirical overview of the Beatles catalog for The Onion’s A.V. Club. I remain amazed by how many of their readers had no idea this was a joke. This was further amplified by some idiot (or collection of idiots) who used my fake article as source material for Wikipedia entries on the various Beatles albums. I wrote about the video for Beck’s “Loser” for the twenty-fifth anniversary of SPIN magazine, which is kind of like writing about Gayle King’s favorite sweater for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Oprah Magazine. Everything in my Chinese Democracy review remains true. Everything in my Lulu review remains true, except the part about it being supernaturally appalling. It’s merely terrible. The conceit behind the VORM experiment was concocted by other people, and the whole thing felt like a fadeaway twenty-three-foot jumper with the shot clock running down. But the fabricated math equation holds up surprisingly well, except that you need to know a lot about the Strokes in order to get it. I don’t expect most people who buy this book will read a ten-thousand-word essay on KISS. It is, however, twice as good as a five-thousand-word essay on KISS.

You tell people you’re seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert—on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues—and it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky—it’s like Def Leppard playing on three different continents in twenty-four hours, or maybe something David Blaine would attempt if he worked for the FUSE network. The assumption is that this is some type of ironic endurance test, and that no person could possibly enjoy the experience of seeing the most hated (yet popular) rock band of 2001 followed by the most popular (yet hated) rock band of 2012. But this is what I wanted to do: I wanted to see Creed at New York’s intimate Beacon Theatre (performing their 1997 album My Own Prison in its entirety), followed by Nickelback in front of eighteen thousand people at Madison Square Garden. I did not do this because I particularly like or dislike either band. I did it because other people like and dislike them so goddamn much.

The singer brings a bottle of Jameson onto the stage, but he doesn’t take a swig until after the last song. He sings exactly like Stapp and facially resembles Around the Horn host Tony Reali (this is mostly a compliment). The music is competent but unnervingly, relentlessly, idiotically straight ahead; they’re like a fictional rock band invented by Daniel Clowes, deliberately designed to represent the polar opposite of alt-cool. At one point they cover Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” but the rhythm section appears to be playing Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” It’s the high point of the set. The lead guitarist wears a super-long scarf and reminds me of a grunge Warren DeMartini (again, this is mostly a compliment).

I highlight this because I really have no idea what CK is talking about.

Sitting in the back of the taxi, there’s not much for me to do except think about the group I just saw and the group I’m about to see. And what I think about is this: Over the past twenty years, there have been five bands totally acceptable to hate reflexively (and by “totally acceptable,” I mean that the casual hater wouldn’t even have to provide a justification—he or she could just openly hate them and no one would question why). The first of these five acts was Bush (who, bizarrely and predictably, was opening for Nickelback that very night). The second was Hootie and the Blowfish, perhaps the only group ever marginalized by an episode of Friends. The third was Limp Bizkit, who kind of got off on it. Obviously, the last two were Creed and Nickelback. The collective animosity toward these five artists far outweighs their multiplatinum success; if you anthologized the three best songs from each of these respective groups, you’d have an outstanding fifteen-track album that people would bury in their

Beatles earns another A. A Hard Day’s Night provided the soundtrack for a 1964 British movie of the same name, a film mostly remembered for its subtle advocacy of euthanasia. The album initiates like the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” and never gets any worse. These poor Beatles would end up living quiet, desperate lives filled with sheep and heroin, but at least they aspired to wisdom: Though they’d covered “Money (That’s What I Want)” in ’63, they had now advanced to the cognitive realization that money cannot purchase love. It was a period of inner growth and introspection—they wanted to know why people cry and why people lie, and they embraced the impermanent pleasure of dance. They also experimented with the harmonica, but that turned out okay. I was originally going to give Hard Day’s Night an A–, but then I heard the middle eighth from “You Can’t Do That” (“Ev’rybody’s greeeeeen / ’Cause I’m the one who won your love”), so I’m changing my grade to A. I assume the accompanying movie is on Hulu or something, but I don’t feel like searching for it.

After Mr. McCartney was buried near Beaconsfield Road in Liverpool, Beatles bass-playing duties were secretly assigned to William Campbell, a McCartney soundalike and an NBA-caliber pothead. This lineup change resulted in the companion albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, both of which are okay. Despite its commercial failure, Rubber Soul allegedly caused half-deaf Brian Wilson to make Pet Sounds (this is also why EMI has released a mono version of the entire Beatles catalog—it allows consumers to experience this album the way Wilson did). If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals or the invention of sound, you will probably enjoy these records. Rubber Soul gets an A– because I don’t speak French. Revolver gets an A+, mostly because of “She Said She Said” and “For No One” but partially because I hate paying taxes.

A concept album about finding a halfway decent song for Ringo, Sgt. Pepper has a few satisfactory moments (“Lovely Rita” totally nails the experience of almost having sex with a city employee), but this is only B+ work. It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles catalog and the Stones catalog—it often seems as if every interesting thing the Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to the Rolling Stones?

The artwork for Abbey Road seems eerily familiar (that’s actually my car in the photo’s background), but the music it symbolizes is almost alien—I don’t know why they wrote a song about the least compelling Clue character, but that’s par for the course for these chain-smoking longhairs. The opener sucks (seems as crappy as mid-period Aerosmith), but Mr. Harrison follows with a wedding song that effortlessly proves why people who try to quantify visceral emotion should just stop trying. The entire band seems unserious on this endeavor, but in the best possible way—for the first time in a long time, they sound as free as they look. That said, the audio quality is unusually heavy and detailed; one suspects most of the arduous lifting on Abbey Road fell on the shoulders of Jeff Beck producer George Martin. The album ends perfectly, except that Fake Paul decided to add a superfluous twenty-four-second mini-song that wipes away any historical closure Abbey Road might have otherwise achieved. The real Mr. McCartney (R.I.P.) would have never considered such a move. I give Abbey Road an A, but begrudgingly.

The weirdest (yet stupidly predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to directly comment on the process of making the album itself. The rest of the vocal material tends to suggest some kind of abstract regret over an undefined romantic relationship punctuated by betrayal, but that might just be the way all hard rock songs seem when the singer plays a lot of piano and only uses pronouns. The craziest track is called “Sorry,” which resembles spooky Pink Floyd and is (possibly?) directed toward former GNR drummer Steven Adler, although I suppose it might be about Slash or Stephanie Seymour or David Geffen. It could even be about Jon Pareles, for all I fucking know—Axl’s enemy list is pretty Nixonian at this point.

The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who wrote or cowrote many of the band’s most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite for Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan had worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N’ Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many Appetite-era tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the opposite. He takes the path of most resistance. Sometimes it seems like Axl believes every single Guns N’ Roses song needs to employ every single thing that Guns N’ Roses has the capacity to do—there needs to be a soft part, a hard part, a falsetto stretch, some piano plinking, some R&B bullshit, a little Judas Priest, subhuman sound effects, a few Robert Plant yowls, dolphin squeaks, wind, overt sentimentality, and a caustic modernization of the blues. When he’s able to temporarily balance those qualities (which happens on the title track and “I.R.S.,” the album’s two strongest rock cuts), it’s sprawling and entertaining and profoundly impressive.

If these geniuses had consciously tried to make a record so simultaneously dull and comedic, they’d never have succeeded; the closest artistic equivalent would be what might have happened if Vincent Gallo had been a script consultant for The Room. To be fair, the end of the album does have one song that’s mildly okay—a dreamy, unaggressive twenty-minute exploration titled “Junior Dad” that will probably resonate with Damien Echols. There’s also a track called “The View” that’s pretty mind-expanding if you pretend the lyrics are literally about watching The View. But the rest of Lulu is as appalling as logic demands. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers acoustically covered the twelve worst Primus songs for Starbucks, it would still be (slightly) better than this. “Loutallica” makes Super Heavy seem like Big Star. But this is what happens in a free society. Enjoy your freedom, slaves.

They’ve earned the right to overreach. But if the fundamental goal of Metallica is to make good music, it seems like trying to get rich while doing so dramatically improves their creative process. The constraints of late capitalism really work for them; they’re extraordinarily adept at making electrifying heavy rock that’s designed to generate revenue. The reason Lulu is so terrible is that the people making this music clearly don’t care if anyone else enjoys it. Now, here again—viewed in a vacuum—that sentiment is admirable. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live on earth. And that means we have to accept the real-life consequences of a culture where recorded music no longer has monetary value, and that consequence is Lulu

This type of straw-man construction happens all the time. For much of my life, I lived under the fable that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired—they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles that frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously turned art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.

One thing I’ve learned in my life is that—creatively—it’s better to have one person love you than to have ten people like you. It’s very easy to like someone’s work, and it doesn’t mean that much; you can like something for a year and just as easily forget it was ever there to begin with. But people remember the things they love. They psychologically invest in those things, and they use them to define their life (and even if the love fades, its memory imprints on the mind). It creates an immersive kind of relationship that bleeds into the outside world, regardless of the motivating detail. In pop music, the most self-evident example is the Grateful Dead, although Rush and the Smiths fall into the same class. Another example is Fugazi. Two others are Bikini Kill and the Insane Clown Posse. These are artists who diametrically impact how substantial factions of people choose to think about the universe. The social footprint they leave is deeper than their catalog. This is why KISS must be accepted as meaningful.

Those of us who dig Boston only tend to think about them when “More Than a Feeling” or “Something About You” comes on the radio; conversely, those of us who dig KISS think about them all the time. They (we?) buy new KISS records they (we?) know we won’t like, and the purchase still feels essential. It almost wouldn’t matter if the CDs were blank, because KISS has transcended music and become something else entirely. And if you are not going to lionize the transposition of creation and emotion—if you’re not going to lionize the ability of a musical band to matter more as a concept than as a mere producer of sound—I’m not sure what we’re pretending to do here.

When the critical world looks at KISS, they see adults pretending to be characters they are not, projecting unsophisticated music about fantasy emotions, presented as a means of earning revenue. What they do not see is that this is how almost all rock music would appear to an alien. It is inside the genre’s very DNA, all the way back to Elvis. So KISS is not a cheaper, exploitive translation of rock. KISS is the living definition of rock’s electrifying unreality, presented with absolute transparency. And the many rational, intelligent people who disagree with that are simply wrong (not about everything, but certainly about this).

I’ve thought about KISS way too much over the past three decades, but still not as much as I’d prefer. There is just no group that’s more fun to think about. There are some that are more fun to listen to, but that’s a different question. Whatever KISS did, they did it right, including the things they did wrong. They have no rival and they have no peers. Advertising worked on me. —April 2014

You were allowed to think whatever you wanted about who he was as a person (mostly because he didn’t seem to care), but there was never any argument over the veracity of his genius. Few rational listeners injected their discomfort with Reed’s personality into the experience of hearing his records; even fewer concluded that the way he sometimes acted in public eroded the insight of his output. You might say, “I hate Lou Reed,” but you couldn’t say, “I hate Lou Reed and I hate all his music.” If you did, it only meant you had terrible taste in everything. And this is why Reed’s life was such a philosophical, unparalleled success: He proved that the only thing that truly mattered about an artist was the art. Everything else was just something amusing to talk about.

As I’ve aged, my affinity for the visceral straightness of AC/DC has increased; I like them more today than I did when I was fourteen. This is strange for an obvious reason (AC/DC is straight-up designed for fourteen-year-olds), but also for a convoluted one: My aesthetic evolution runs counter to the modern direction of pop music appreciation. It’s now considered antiquated for any critic to be compelled by “authenticity” or “auteurism” or “creative integrity.” Those qualities are viewed as absurd and pejorative; naked artifice (and a hyperawareness of one’s own self-generated perception) is what we’re supposed to want. Criticism, like all forms of public discourse, is mostly fashion. And my sense of fashion is always inverted. I liked fake things when I was supposed to like real things, and I never cared about authenticity until everyone else decided it was an irrelevant thing to value.