Chuck Klosterman is the author of four books of essays and one novel, Downtown Owl. An upcoming collection of previously unpublished essays, Eating the Dinosaur, is due sometime this year. Klosterman was a senior writer for Spin and is a featured monthly columnist for Esquire. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Believer, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post. Chuck Carlise has been awarded the C. T. Wright Poetry Prize and writing fellowships at Wildacres Retreat and the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Southern Review, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review and others. Currently he is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where he serves as Nonfiction Editor of Gulf Coast. Brandon Hernsberger is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Houston, where he specializes in rhetoric / composition and 19th-Century American Literature. His work has appeared in The Thoreau Society Bulletin and the Concord Saunterer. He is also a contributing music critic for Space City Rock and the Houston Press. Do You Think We'll Be Able to Love Again? an interview by Chuck Carlise and Brandon Hernsberger The growing popularity of cultural studies has created a saturation, of sorts, that sometimes makes it difficult to understand what ‘cultural studies’ really means. Materialist interpretations of different media have given way to a myriad of ‘isms’ that can turn cultural studies into something less than nuance; the practice of studying culture has become tedious and theory-ridden. And then along comes Chuck Klosterman—the man who reads the text of life not through the lens of Kant or Wittgenstein or Shakespeare, but rather through Britney Spears, Frosted Flakes, and Saved by the Bell. He has redefined ‘cultural studies’ by making it relevant to those outside the academy, while using a form of rhetoric that would impress even the most ardent theory-minded purists. Klosterman, a former music writer for SPIN and a featured monthly columnist for Esquire, has published four books of nonfiction: Fargo Rock City (2001); Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003); Killing Yourself to Live (2005); and Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006). His new collection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, will appear later this year. These books engage an impressive range of themes and subjects, including what makes country music the most brilliant form of American folklore; whether reality television now defines reality itself; the popular obsession with rock-star deaths (and what that might suggest about girlfriends… specifically his own); or how bands like Coldplay are ruining for all of us the conception of what it means to love. Last year Klosterman released his first novel, Downtown Owl, a love story (kind of) about normal(ish) people in small-town North Dakota (football, alcohol, snow, and boredom). And no, it’s not about Klosterman’s life—though yes, it does resemble his biography… a lot. Chuck Carlise and Brandon Hernsberger had the chance to ask Klosterman a few questions last winter, during his Downtown Owl tour. BH & CC: I guess we should begin with the obvious. Now that Coldplay is breaking up, do you think we’ll be able to love again? CK: You know, I feel bad about that. Personally, I don’t like Coldplay, but—when I wrote about how much I hated them—I was just trying to illustrate the common practice of using pop culture as a way to deal with a real-life problem that I didn’t want to accept. I was “mad” at Coldplay because I couldn’t convince a certain woman to fall in love with me. This anecdote was supposed to show how I was insane. Instead, all it did is validate the taste of everyone who hates songs like “Clocks.” That was not a successful venture. I regret writing that. Not that much, but some. BH & CC: That makes sense, and we’ll admit a certain tongue-in-cheek quality to that question. But your answer opens an interesting door: all writing, once produced, is subject to potentially endless misunderstanding, but it seems like the kind of work you’re best known for (autobiographical, intellectual, dry-witted, often ironic, critical), is perhaps especially prone to “selective understanding.” We’re sure it’s too early after Downtown Owl’s publication to ask you to compare the novelist/critic experience, but we’re curious if you find that readers and fans misconstrue the points of your essays and books? If so, does this seem like a particularly contemporary issue, given the success of publications like Pitchfork and the proliferation of alternative weeklies, which tend to use this style as well? CK: What’s funny about Downtown Owl is how a lot of people evidently seem to think they already understand everything about me, simply because they’ve read the books that came before it. For example, most people are certain that the “Mitch” character is based on me. That’s kind of hilarious. There’s no relationship whatsoever. But people who had read my autobiographical work just assumed that I would never write a novel without making the initial character a reflection of my own experience. They framed the book more than I did. And I’m sure that impacted the experience of reading the story. But who knows? Maybe it made the experience better. BH & CC: That probably comes with the territory for any writer dealing with likeable characters—though we wouldn’t be surprised if it was more pronounced with Downtown Owl just because your non-fiction essays tend to be so character-driven as well. Do you wish you had written a novel sooner so that some of these misappropriations could have been quelled? CK: No. Mostly because if I had written a novel earlier in my life, it might have really sucked. After I wrote Fargo Rock City, I briefly had an idea for a comedic novel about a suicide cult. It was an okay premise, but people kept advising me that I couldn’t write a funny novel where everybody dies at the novel’s conclusion. I was told this by many, many people. At the time (this was around the year 2000), the example they kept using was High Fidelity—they would always point to this novel and say, “People love this book, but they wouldn’t love it if things didn’t work out for the main character at the end. Readers would feel betrayed.” Now, all my favorite books tend to be funny stories with sad endings. But this was before FRC had even been released, so I really wasn’t in a position to argue with anybody’s advice. So I decided I would just wait a few years before trying fiction. Instead, I wrote an essay collection about modern culture, which seemed crazier (at the time) but was what I really wanted to do, anyway. And things worked out. When I finally wrote Downtown Owl, I felt like I had complete control of the narrative. I realize people are now more likely to misinterpret my work, but at least it’s the work I want to do. BH & CC: For the past half decade at least, the term “indie” has seeped its way into the collective consciousness of an entire generation, and has now become so culturally homogenized as to render it almost meaningless. “Indie” no longer means “independent businesses unaffiliated with mega-corporations.” What do you think this has done to our understanding of media (and entertainment), as well as our place in it?    CK: Well, I think “indie” does still have a meaning. It’s just not (as you noted) the literal meaning. If someone says they prefer indie movies or they only listen to indie bands, it’s pretty easy to understand what kind of stuff they are referring to. It’s now an aesthetic term, which is probably more meaning than the original designation, even though that concept makes a certain kind of person depressed. And the fact that “a certain kind of person” actually gets depressed over the technical misappropriation of the word indie is pretty interesting, in and of itself. I guess I mildly disagree with your supposition: I think everyone immediately understands what “indie” now means. They just don’t like what it means, at least compared to what they think it should represent. BH & CC: Where it gets interesting is how invested people are in the act of naming rather than becoming a part of what that name actually represents. The other day one of us read about a band who called themselves a “Christian post-grunge emo-core pop group”—which is kind of a lot to swallow in the first place, but the terms “post” and “core” seem so culturally digested as to be practically meaningless there. It seems that the fetishization of genre has come to mean at least as much as engaging with the very genre being fetishized, and we think this says a lot about the culture taking part in it. If that’s a fair statement to make, do you think music (or more broadly, pop culture/counterculture) has suffered because of this? CK: Well, first of all, I assume the “Christian post-grunge emo-core pop group” was probably joking, but—if they weren’t—that description actually seems pretty self-explanatory to me (although “post-grunge” is a pretty needless modifier—are they afraid people will think they started in 1989?). What’s interesting to me is that I think genres have become fetishized because they’re no longer reflections of anything except the sound of the music. They seem to have far less social meaning. For example, I was told that Hot Topic stores are really struggling with their business model, simply because there are no longer kids who solely identify as being Goth. But I can see how that would happen. If you were fifteen years old in 1995 and you had $20 to spend on music, you’d only be able to buy one or two albums. So if you purchased The Downward Spiral, that was going to be your music. You were going to listen to all those songs exclusively and decide that Trent Reznor had this specific meaning, and maybe you would decide that other kids who liked Nine Inch Nails were like you, so maybe you’d go to the mall and try and buy clothes that would connect you to that culture. You would become semi-Goth by default. But now a fifteen-year-old kid with $20 is going to buy twenty autonomous songs on iTunes (or—more likely—steal 1,000 songs for free), and they will be all over the map. That kid will listen to Beyonce and The Sword and Brad Paisley and The White Stripes and The Beatles in the same afternoon, which means they’ll never de facto identify with a genre (and will therefore never shop at a chain store that caters toward a specific type of teenager). Now, is this good or bad? I have no idea. I think it’s bad for people who prefer albums to singles and good for people who prefer the opposite. I have no idea who or what the counterculture is at this point, so I can’t really comment on that. BH & CC: That’s interesting. The way the internet has equalized access (to information, to style, to alternate cultural ideas) seems to make a lot of observers and critics uncomfortable. The result often seems to be a rush to group people together under oversimplified (and sometimes inaccurate, or at least inorganic) names. We’re thinking of everything from “red-state/blue-state” election language to those same youth-culture genre tags (Goth, Emo, Grunge) that we were just talking about. It’s easy to track how CNN and Rolling Stone play that game, but we wonder if you’ve seen this trend unfold in the work you’re doing? CK: I’m not sure if this is really a problem. I mean, to a certain degree, you have to create labels for subcultures in order to discuss them in public. You used the red state/blue state designation as an example. Now, obviously, this is a flawed designation, because not everyone in Nebraska thinks exactly the same way and not everyone in New Hampshire shares the same beliefs. But what is a better alternative when discussing the generalized differences in how large groups of people think about politics, particularly in a country where national elections are conducted through an electoral college process that’s divided by state lines? If I’m writing about Metallica’s commercial success and I use the term “Metallica fans” while describing their purchasing motives, I realize I am marginalizing a bunch of people by implying that they all want the same things from Metallica. I realize they are not clones. Many of them have personal reasons for liking Metallica that cannot be lumped into a collective. But what I’m really writing about are certain unifying factors that are potentially shared by a meaningful majority of Metallica consumers, which thereby allows me to write about the iconography of the band itself. Criticism is not science-writing. If you’re reading cultural criticism to find some irrefutable, universal truth that applies to all members of a certain subculture all the time, you are fucking up.   BH & CC: Your writing seems to appeal to at least two distinct readerships—(1) the academic, interested in theories of pop culture and what those theories are able to tell us about the meaning of what is and is not popular, and (2) the non-academic, interested in what is popular. If this is a fair assessment of the territory you cover in your various projects, does the craft of essay-writing change when writing for these two groups? Do you find your method of cultural criticism changing when you move from writing, say, a piece for espn.com about the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, to the chapter in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs that frames issues of race and identity through fandom of the Celtics and Lakers? How do you successfully straddle the line between theories of pop-culture and what is popular? CK: I never think about that. Maybe I used to, but I don’t anymore. It’s impossible to anticipate how people will respond to what you write. I just write about cultural ideas that interest me personally, and I blindly hope that other people will find those subjects interesting, too. It works about half of the time. I write the essays in whatever style feels the most natural. Sometimes I make adjustments to fit the parameters of the specific publication, but never for the audience. That never works. For example, the things I’ve written that are most consistently interesting to the academic community are the same things that are most interesting to stoners who read three books a year. What does that mean? Probably nothing. BH & CC: That may mean that you’re striking a balance of accessibility and intellectualism that resonates across disparate lines. And it seems like that could be both good and bad: good, because of the increased readership and broadening cultural conversation; but bad because it may make you more susceptible to being co-opted. This must make it difficult to negotiate your way into your intended place in the culture. But mis-readings would, we imagine, make it very difficult for this to be taken as seriously as it probably warrants. You said you don’t ever think about these things anymore, but do you have any advice for writers who are also interested in this project (and who do think about these things) on how to make one’s way in an overly saturated field of cultural criticism? CK: It’s tough, because all these things are completely connected. When people write about pop culture (myself included), they are always co-opting the pre-existing ideas that fit what they’re doing and ignoring the points that contradict their thesis. You see this all the time, especially in political writing. In general, I think the core audience for criticism is predisposed toward misreading everything, because they’re inevitably looking to fit the new content into their own worldview. I always try to jam all possible perspectives into my essays (or at least all the ones I can comprehend), which is why it’s so common for people to enjoy my work while still disagreeing with it—they like the parts that validate how they already think, and they disagree with the parts that contradict how they want to feel. BH & CC: You mentioned the notion of cultural critics (yourself included) having set theses that they use to contextualize their work, but thinking about your essays… we can’t come to a conclusion as to what your thesis might be. Is there a trope you can articulate (or even several connected tropes) that you feel ties your writings together? Has it been your experience that readers and/or critics tend to be able to follow that thread (even subconsciously) as they read through several of your works—essays, books, etc.? CK: I feel like my theses are pretty straightforward and pretty consistent: In almost all my essays, I propose an idea that I perceive as interesting and then ask, “Why is this interesting to me? Why is this interesting to anyone?” And then I try to work it out in a fashion that’s entertaining. That’s pretty much the whole process. George Orwell used to say that he didn’t know how he felt about anything until he decided to write about it. That makes sense to me. BH & CC: It seems that the past decade or so has seen a sharp decline in how musicians view their roles in the furthering of social causes; the availability of downloadable singles and the increasing ease for almost anyone to create agenda-driven music videos may play a major part in this decline. In your estimation, is there any band, singer, etc. (outside of Radiohead, perhaps) creating music for the social and/or political in a similar vane to previous acts such as The Clash, Bob Dylan, or even a group like Rage Against the Machine? Do you think this is in any way damaging to rock music and what musicians can do to help us understand culture? CK: Not really. Bands who are overtly political don’t have any more or less political impact than bands who just write songs in order to meet girls. People will see political messages wherever they decide they want to see them. It has very little to do with the artist’s motives. I recently read a piece about how bands like Nickleback supposedly make reactionary, conservative rock music for people in the midwest and Canada. This is not a bad theory, but I’m sure it comes as a complete fucking surprise to the guys in Nickleback. BH & CC: Talking about dichotomies and the ways people buy music today has us thinking about the difference between serial iTunes buyers versus record (vinyl) collectors. You’ve written that you’re more a cd collector, but with that whole industry suffering and fizzling out the way cassettes did 20 years ago, the choice between those who appreciate the physical object of a record and those who are fine with the digital song itself seems pressing. (In a way, this could just as easily be a question about digital publishing versus actual magazines, journals, and books, though that may not be fair to lump in with it.) In terms of music, if you had to choose a side, which would it be? CK: The reason I still prefer cds to downloads is the same reason certain people refused to switch from vinyl to cassettes: sound quality. mp3s sound compressed to me. They only sound good at high volume, through headphones. I could care less about the physical object of the cd. I used to like looking at my cd racks, but now they just seem like a bitch to move around. If I could have all my music on a hard drive, my life would be way easier. But it wouldn’t sound as good. BH & CC: You have written about reality television and how it blurs the lines of the “real;” but since The Real World debuted, reality television has taken on a life of its own. It was written in Rolling Stone that The Hills is the most important television show MTV has ever created—turning the people on the show into a-list celebrities. At the same time, the people on The Hills have been heard calling themselves “characters,” implying that they’re conscious of the roles they’re constructing (or have had constructed by MTV). It seems to us that this further limits what we are able to recognize as “reality,” perhaps making it impossible to differentiate between fact and fiction on television. What, if anything, do you think this says about the direction of reality television, television in general, celebrity, and our conception of reality?   CK: Well, first of all, when Rolling Stone says The Hills is the most important show MTV has ever created, what they’re really saying is, “We need to invent a philosophical justification for putting these people on the cover of our magazine.” What happened with The Hills was mostly accidental. MTV made Laguna Beach and assumed that its audience wouldn’t care (and probably wouldn’t even notice) if they scripted certain aspects of the reality. What they discovered is that viewers actually preferred this kind of programming, so they created The Hills and pre-wrote the entire narrative. A person like Lauren Conrad refers to herself as a “character” because that’s how she wants to be perceived. Even she doesn’t think she’s real. Audiences like the construction and the look of MTV’s programming; they really have no interest in how real or unreal the shows ultimately are. The fact that it looks and feels overtly fake generally plays to its advantage—even a 13-year-old girl can feel like she’s smarter than The Hills, and that sentiment has become a big draw for modern reality television.        It’s no coincidence that reality television and the internet both exploded at roughly the same time. The internet makes reality tv possible. For one thing, the web dramatically lowered the bar for what constitutes a “celebrity,” and that makes it reasonable to look at someone on The Amazing Race as a legitimate media personality. For another thing, the internet allows viewers to follow and discuss the content of these shows (in real time) with other bored people, which is the main thing that makes them fun to watch. The internet also allows people to investigate “the truth” about the characters they see on these programs, and that adds another layer of pleasurable bullshit. I really like those “Real World / Road Rules” challenges, and the episode I always love most is the wrap-up reunion show they broadcast at the series’ conclusion—it shows this weird glimpse into the world of ex-RW cast members, where everyone knows each other and their whole life revolves around this singular collective experience. I would love to make a documentary about the current lives of all these former Real World people. I think it would be fascinating for all kinds of reasons.        I think “Top Chef” and “Project Runway” improved the overall quality of reality programming, simply because both of those shows amplified the role of actual, authentic skill within the context of the narrative. That seemed new. But the one reality show that still seems the most different to me is “Survivor.” I realize that program has lost most of its original viewers, but the last four or five seasons have been fantastic. I feel like “Survivor” consistently engages with some very core questions about human nature and group dynamics, and the strategic aspects of the game are pretty sophisticated and underrated. BH & CC: In your own struggles with how to fully negotiate your way through an understanding of contemporary culture, do you find that writing (and reading) fiction is as helpful as writing (and reading) nonfiction? Do you think that your fiction can help your readers gauge the fluid nature of the culture in which they take part, in ways similar to your nonfiction? If so, what do you think this says about literature’s role in helping us understand what is fact and what is not? CK: This is a nonfiction era. Nonfiction is what matters right now. I wrote a novel because I wanted to write a novel, but I don’t think fiction has much cultural import anymore. I don’t think novels are shaping the way people think about the world, regardless of their merit as art. That’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. I think it’s telling that the biggest fiction books in the world right now—even for adults—are escapist young-adult novels about wizards and vampires. I mean, how weird is that? Not weird at all, I suppose.