Chuck Klosterman: evaluation

Transcript context

…You grew up in North Dakota. You loved metal. You documented it for Spin and other media sources. If you were coming of age today, what would be your passion in music? What would be your thing? What would be your at least partial subculture? That’s an almost impossible question, but a great one. It’s fun to think about that, but the answer I give is going to be completely worthless because if I’m coming up in rural North Dakota now . . . Okay, so my hometown had 500 people, and I lived outside of that town. In my hometown, there was essentially two kinds of music. There was metal, and there was country. AC/DC was kind of the crossover act. That’s all there was. There was Top 40 music that no one seemed to care about, and even as high school students, we seemed to view it as shallow and superficial, while we were listening to bands like Poison and Mötley Crüe, so there are lots of contradictions here. It doesn’t always make sense, but I fell into that music. My brother came back from the army. He had a Mötley Crüe cassette. He had an Ozzy Osbourne cassette. I had been listening to Huey Lewis and Eddie Grant and Madness and Prince. Got this — I just loved it immediately, and it became my whole identity for a while. How would that experience possibly happen now? I would be on the internet. I assume that instead of just sitting in my bedroom listening to an Ozzy Osbourne cassette and just reading the liner notes over and over again, I would be on a computer. And the experience of having my brother drop something off and then leave would be replaced by someone online that I find interesting, leading me in some direction. I don’t think that I would have the same experience with music that I had growing up in a situation where my options were limited, where there were long stretches of time when I had six cassettes. That was all I had, and I would play them over and over and over again and think about them and see things in that music that probably didn’t exist. It seems odd to say this now, and it seems almost crazy, but I think part of the reason I was able to succeed as a critic was because I came from a place where I was so limited in the art I was consuming that I had to think about it differently. I didn’t have MTV. Even if I’d grown up in Minneapolis — because the people that I became friends with later in life, most of which came from bigger towns, the people who seemed to like me as an adult — they were the people who listened to The Smiths and who thought Guns N’ Roses was terrible or whatever, but Guns N’ Roses was the most interesting thing I had. I would look at Axl Rose the way somebody else might think of David Byrne or something. I had to get all this meaning from him. That really worked to my advantage, I think, as I matured and was able to experience these other kinds of art but still working from the way it was when I had nothing. I guess I don’t know what I would be like now. I don’t even like reading my early books because I can’t relate to the person who wrote them. The idea of me thinking about what I was like at 13 — no idea. Why did Spin magazine fail? Even I subscribed.…

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