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

by Chuck Klosterman

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.