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

by Chuck Klosterman

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.