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

by Chuck Klosterman

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don’t really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you’re the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life.

When we think critically about monsters, we tend to classify them as personifications of what we fear. Frankenstein’s monster illustrated our trepidation about untethered science; Godzilla was spawned from the fear of the atomic age; werewolves feed into an instinctual panic over predation and man’s detachment from nature. Vampires and zombies share an imbedded anxiety about disease. It’s easy to project a symbolic relationship between zombies and rabies (or zombies and the pitfalls of consumerism), just as it’s easy to project a symbolic relationship between vampirism and AIDS (or vampirism and the loss of purity).

The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never truly be finished with whatever it is you do.

Every so often (like right now), people interested in culture become fixated on a soft debate over the merits or dangers of nostalgia—as it applies to all art, but particularly to popular music. The dispute resurfaces every time a new generation attains a social position that’s both dominant and insecure. I suppose if this ever stopped, we’d be nostalgic for the time when it still periodically mattered. The

And in all three cases, both sides of the debate are tethered to that magical bridge between the experience of art and the experience of being alive.

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.

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.

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 That notion has been replaced by a Technology Gap.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.

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.

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Why is the uncreative therapist a woman

Perversely and predictably, recognizing the death of a celebrity on Facebook has become a form of lifestyle branding: Expressing sadness over the passing of an obscure calypso musician is public proof that you care about obscure calypso music. Posting the posthumous photo of a forgotten sitcom star is proof that you were one of the few who did not forget, because that sitcom has now been integrated with your own formative experience.