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

by Chuck Klosterman

“What I was originally trying to do was make a psychedelic record that sounded like psychedelic records from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Basically, anyone who was copying the Beatles,” Burton says. “I suppose bands like the 13th Floor Elevators and the Prunes are the ones people have heard of, but that was really nameless music; there were thousands of those groups. And what I liked about those bands was that the musicians made crazy decisions. They would play a normal melody for thirty seconds and then throw in something completely uncommercial and insane. Why did they do that? It blew my mind. I wanted to make experimental music that still had melody.”

There is nothing more attractive than a person who does not care if other people find him attractive.

which makes logical (but not practical) sense. Now, the reason I keep including the word “seems” is that I don’t know if this is actually true; the band might consider the entire trajectory of their career totally hilarious. But their posture is serious. As I watch them onstage, they don’t seem to be having fun in any context. The various musicians are dressed in a style best described as “business casual,” assuming their business is happening in East Texas.

The payoff explodes at the end, where Stapp insists, “I created, I created, I created, I created, I created, I created my own prison.” Free will: intact. I’ve long wondered if this song is popular inside actual prisons.

Several years ago, I met a history professor from the University of Oklahoma who worked on the doomed 1988 presidential campaign for Michael Dukakis. One of the things I asked him was when he (and all his coworkers) realized that Dukakis was not going to win. His answer surprised me: He said they always believed Dukakis was going to win, even as the results were rolling in on election night. “Presidential campaigns exist inside their own reality,” he told me. “They have to. It’s the only way they can work.”

It’s important to remember that every reality is always happening at the same time.

The day before the New York show, Kroeger appeared on a Philadelphia radio station85 and was asked (of course) why people hate Nickelback so vehemently. “Because we’re not hipsters,” he replied. It’s a reasonable answer, but not really accurate—the only thing hipsters unilaterally loathe is other hipsters, so Nickelback’s short-haired unhipness should theoretically play to their advantage. A better answer as to why people dislike Nickelback is tautological: They hate them because they hate them. Sometimes it’s fun to hate things arbitrarily, and Nickelback has become an acceptable thing to hate. They’re technically rich and technically famous, so they just have to absorb the denigration and insist they don’t care. They have good songs and they have bad songs, and the bad songs are bad enough to build an anti-Nickelback argument, assuming you feel like that’s important. But it’s never required. It’s not like anyone is going to contradict your thesis. There’s no risk in hating Nickelback, and hating something always feels better than feeling nothing at all.

It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music. More than any other group, their sound is best described as “Beatlesque.”

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.

Help! gets an A, despite the title’s insertion of a totally extraneous exclamation point (which kind of makes the band seem like bloggers from 2004).

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.

The Beatles is almost beyond an A+; in retrospect, they probably should have made this a triple album. They could have just included the five Pepper-y songs from Yellow Submarine (C–), which I think might have been a Halloween record.

How could a song called “Rain” not be boring? Have you ever listened to regular rain, pelting a bedroom window as you drift off to sleep? Annoying! I feel like I’ve heard enough.

Here’s what happened when MTV played Beck’s “Loser” for the first time in 1994: People watched it and said things like “I guess this is an okay song.” Here’s what else happened when MTV played Beck’s “Loser” for the first time in 1994: The culture inverted itself, weirdness was mainstreamed, everyone stopped combing their hair, people slept more, dirtbags began using the word “art” in casual conversation, people purchased broken turntables at stoop sales, and the boy who would become Michael Cera entered kindergarten.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was over-produced and impenetrable, but its impact was organic and interpretative—it was an unanticipated watershed whose meaning changed over time. And that makes it completely unlike “Loser,” a song that galvanized how 1994 felt in a most unnatural way.

When you listen to “Loser” in the present (or—even better—if you watch the video), it seems like an engaging, strange song. Not a truly strange song, but a conventionally strange song. The lyrics are faux-Dylan surreal, the music is primitive, and the hook is immediate.

Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album we’ll ever contemplate in this context. Artists will continue to make “albums,” but only as a gimmick or a packaging device. This is the last record that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of all that, partially because the recording process started five years before those specific qualities even had theoretical alternatives.

embargoed what the definitive product eventually became. The explanation as to why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is not simply because Axl Rose is an insecure perfectionist; it’s because Axl Rose self-identifies as a serious, unnatural artist. He can’t stop himself from anticipating every possible reaction and interpretation of his work. I suspect he cares less about the degree to which people like his music and more about how it is taken, regardless of the listener’s ultimate judgment. This is why he was so paralyzed by the construction of Chinese Democracy—he can’t write or record anything without obsessing over how it will be received, both by (a) the people who think he’s an unadulterated genius, and (b) the people who think he’s little more than a richer, red-haired Stephen Pearcy. To him, all of those disparate opinions have identical value. So I will take Chinese Democracy as seriously as Axl Rose would hope, and that makes it significantly less simple. At this juncture in history, rocking is not enough.

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.

The most uplifting songs are “Street of Dreams” (a leaked song previously titled “The Blues”) and the exceptionally satisfying “Catcher in the Rye” (a softer, more sophisticated reworking of “Yesterdays” that occupies a conceptual self-awareness in the vein of Elton John or mid-period Queen). The fragile ballad “This I Love” is sad, melodramatic, and pleasurably traditional. There are many moments where it’s impossible to tell who Axl is talking to, so it feels like he’s talking to himself (and inevitably about himself). There’s not much cogent storytelling, but it’s linear and compelling. The best overall description of the literary quality of the lyrics would probably be “effectively narcissistic.”

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.

But Chinese Democracy sporadically suffers from the same problem that paralyzed proto-epics like “Estranged” and “November Rain”: It’s as if Axl is desperately trying to get some unmakable dream song from inside his skull onto the CD, resulting in an overstuffed maelstrom that makes all the punk dolts scoff. His ambition is both noble and wildly unrealistic. It’s like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out of the Blue sound more like Funhouse, except with jazz drumming and a girl singer from Motown.

The most compelling question throughout Chinese Democracy is never “What was Axl doing here?” but rather “What did Axl think he was doing here?”

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.

Many of the existential paradoxes originally raised by post-Renaissance philosopher Gallagher continue to haunt us (parking on driveways, driving on parkways, etc.).

The New York–based rock and roll group KISS formed in 1972, when two workaholic Jews (guitarist Stanley Eisen and bassist Chaim Wits) aligned forces with two irresponsible boozehounds (drummer Peter George John Criscuola95 and guitarist Paul Frehley). Their adopted stage names are household, unless you are very young, crazy old, or not interested in loud music: Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, and Ace Frehley (the latter adopting “Ace” because “the band didn’t need another Paul”). The group was spawned upon the dissolution of Simmons and Stanley’s previous band Wicked Lester, a folk-rock five-piece Simmons likes to compare to the United Nations (due to their mixture of ethnicities and non-uniform physical appearance). Wicked Lester scored a record deal with Epic, but most of the music was never officially released. Some of the tracks would fit on the soundtrack to Hair.

But somewhere around 1979, a lot of odd and foreseeable things started happening in persistent succession: They made a disco album, Peter was fired, they made a concept album, Ace quit, they took off the makeup, they fired the guy hired to replace Ace, the guy who replaced the guy who replaced Ace got a bone disease, they sued a record label, they temporarily rediscovered popularity, the drummer who replaced Peter died from heart cancer, the original quartet reunited for $144 million, they created a 3-D concert experience (despite the fact that life itself is already three-dimensional), Peter quit twice, Ace quit again (replaced by a guy who once painted Paul Stanley’s house), Gene blamed the Internet for ruining music, Paul played the lead in Phantom of the Opera, and every original member wrote an autobiography. And now it’s today, and KISS is still my favorite band, for reasons I incessantly attempt to articulate to varying degrees of imaginary success.

KISS doesn’t make it easy for fans of KISS. There’s never been a rock group so effortless to appreciate in the abstract and so hard to love in the specific. They inoculate themselves from every avenue of revisionism, forever undercutting anything that could be reimagined as charming.

It’s the guiding principle behind everything KISS does: In order to “qualify” as a KISS supporter, you have to be a KISS consumer. And this is non-negotiable—it doesn’t work any other way.

There’s never been a band inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame whose music output has been critically contemplated less than the music of KISS, at least among the people who voted them in. I can’t prove this, but I’d guess 50 percent of the voters who put KISS on their Rock Hall ballot have not listened to any five KISS records more than five times; part of what makes the band so culturally durable is the assumption that you can know everything about their aesthetic without enjoying any of it.

Kiss (1974): The first song on the first album is “Strutter,” which (coincidentally or unfortunately) might be the clearest, classiest rock song KISS ever produced. I suppose a cynic might claim it was all downhill from there. But that’s stupid: All five tracks on side 1 are unambiguously excellent—simple, chewy, and stylized (employing the best possible connotations of all those modifiers). “Cold Gin” makes poverty seem as exhilarating as alcoholism97 and “Let Me Know” remains the most underrated song in their entire forty-year history. The stuff on side 2 is slightly weaker . . . but if Paul Westerberg considers it halfway canonical, the plaintiff has no further questions. The straightforward reality is that if KISS had died in a boating mishap the week this record hit stores, the same people who currently hate them would insist this 35-minute document is a forgotten progenitor of punk, on par with the Stooges. KISS would be remembered as a catchier, savvier version of the New York Dolls, and only Morrissey would disagree. GRADE: A

“Parasite” is one of the rare early KISS riffs that qualify as traditionally metallic; rarer still, it’s also inventive and influential (you’ll recognize its chord progression on Gang of Four’s “What We All Want” and “Ghetto Life” by Rick James). Of course, the main artifact people tend to recall about this album is “Goin’ Blind,” a dirgelike Gene Simmons power ballad about a ninety-three-year-old man having an affair with a sixteen-year-old girl. (The detail about the age difference was actually concocted by Paul.)

“I Stole Your Love” is the musical equivalent of giving five Heinekens and an El Camino to a fourteen-year-old who thinks 2 Fast 2 Furious was based on real events.

Was Made for Loving You” is a wide-angle caricature with a paint-by-number guitar solo—it sounds like what would happen if you hauled a $79 Casio keyboard into a cave and hit the “DISCO” function. Paul has claimed he was simply trying to prove that absolutely anyone could write a disco song and have it chart in the top 10. It got to #11.

(Music from) The Elder (1981): Undeniably the most fascinating KISS album by a factor of ten, this is the soundtrack to a movie that does not exist,99 fueled by mountains of cocaine the band members did not ingest.

This is the Rubicon that changed KISS forever: They actively made a record solely for the critics, earnestly believed the work was exceptional, and found themselves humiliated in front of an audience who had pre-decided to hate them. In response, Paul and Gene reversed their original feelings (they now claim to hate all the songs), rejected the entire notion of taste, and decided to view any art created for non-commercial purposes as inherently false. This album will never be appreciated objectively, unless we can find a way to play it for someone who (a) likes theatrical classical rock but (b) has no idea that KISS ever existed.

Creatures of the Night is the most metal KISS record (in response to The Elder) and also the worst-selling (because of The Elder). At times, it traffics in heaviness for the sake of heaviness, which would be okay if KISS was an organically heavy band (which they aren’t).

“You’d be hard pressed to name another band that wrote all its own songs over such a long period of time without ever learning how,” noted Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone.

“All Hell’s Breaking Loose” deserves some credit for inventing rap-rock,

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.” (Well, that escalated quickly.) The penultimate track is “Turn On the Night.” The ultimate track is “Thief in the Night.” A lot seems to be happening nocturnally.

KISS Symphony: Alive IV (2003): This was recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Australia. If you own this album, it means (a) you own every album on this list, (b) “Shandi” was your wedding song, or (c) you are a member of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. GRADE: D

Vinnie Vincent Invasion (Vinnie Vincent Invasion, 1986): A Joycean masterwork. The Reagan administration’s Blow by Blow. Nine and a half perfect songs (because even I get a little bored during “Back on the Streets”). This was either the second- or third-best rock album released in ’86, depending on your relative feelings toward Master of Puppets and The Queen Is Dead. GRADE: A+

Frehley’s Comet (Frehley’s Comet, 1987): It took almost ten years to make this album, which feels about right: The opener (“Rock Soldiers”) is the rare example of a man writing a song about the defining moment of his own life while somehow managing to misremember almost all of the factual details.101 “Love Me Right” is direct and “Dolls” is obtuse, yet both are closer to Old KISS than whatever New KISS was doing in 1987. The best cut is “Calling to You,” which was (not exactly surprisingly) written by the bass player in 1982. Is this the KISS corollary to All Things Must Pass? Yes, if we are somehow legally obligated to pretend such a thing exists. GRADE: B+

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.

As far as KISS is concerned, I exist only to buy the same old material they keep repurposing while unconditionally investing my thoughts into the same self-mythologizing anecdotes they keep telling, over and over again.104 But here’s the thing: I like it. I enjoy giving KISS my money—it’s one of the only extensions of consumerism that provides me with genuine gratification.

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.

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.