Front Page Reviews & AIR

Chuck Klosterman is one of the most entertaining non-fiction writers working today.  He’s passionate, hilarious, and willing to explore offbeat pop culture topics that other writers either ignore or thumb their noses at.  And if you’re a fan of Chuck Klosterman’s writing style—as I certainly am—his first book, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota, is going to be a fun read.  At its best, it’s an engaging, first-person account of growing up listening to 80s glam metal in tiny Wyndmere, ND (population 429).  Here is the young Klosterman forging his identity while rebelliously rocking out to Motley Crue, questioning Def Leppard’s glam credentials, and secretly loving Poison.  It’s a story that will sound familiar to many former (and current) metalheads, and it took guts to publish such a heartfelt memoir at a time (2001) when very few hip music snobs were willing to admit their pasts as 80s glam rockers.  As Klosterman notes, part of the reason he wrote the book in the first place was that a trip to his local Borders Books revealed not a single book about 80s metal; instead the shelves were crammed with tomes written on Dylan, punk, and Nirvana.  What about the music of his youth?  Why wasn’t that music worthy of serious critical assessment?

While Klosterman’s autobiographical tales are fun and endearing, when he attempts to tackle more serious critical assessments of glam, Fargo Rock City falls flat.  The main reason is that the book is so poorly researched (as in not really researched at all; there are no citations and there is no bibliography).  Instead, Klosterman relies almost exclusively on personal remembrances and subjective preferences, routinely using measurements like how much things “rock” or “kick ass” to make his points.  Again, this type of analysis is fine in a personal memoir, but Klosterman is shooting for much more than that.  He is clearly hoping for nothing less than the complete and total rehabilitation of glam’s critical reputation.  Perhaps there is a book that can make a good case for such a rehabilitation, but Fargo Rock City is not that book.

Ah, the 80s...

Part of the problem is that—presumably due to his upbringing in Wyndmere—Klosterman’s remembrances are exceedingly limited.  For instance, I almost felt embarrassed for him when he claims that in 1987 Axl Rose became “the first artist of my generation who showed glimpses of an (ahem) alternative to the larger-than-life fairy tale of poofy-haired metal that was the template for all my favorite bands.”  The “(ahem)” is a reference to the “alternative” music that supplanted glam as rock’s popular standard-bearer in the early 90s.  But Kurt Cobain did not spring from a vacuum, as Klosterman seems to think.  Even a cursory attempt at research—or a broader historical knowledge—would have revealed the fact that by 1987, there was already a widespread alternative rock scene.  Where did he think bands like U2, R.E.M., The Cure and Depeche Mode were springing from?  What was all the music on MTV’s 120 Minutes (which debuted in early 1986), if not a vast array of rock artists providing alternatives to “poofy-haired metal?”  There are dozens upon dozens of similarly glaring oversights, and as I read the book I couldn’t help wishing that Klosterman’s passion for 80s metal had been matched by an equal passion for basic journalistic research.  That book would have been something formidable.  As it is, Klosterman seems oblivious to the fact that, according to the New York Times review of Fargo Rock City, "[glam] bands followed rigidly proscribed rules for how to sound and act, parading stereotypical white masculinity to please radio programmers and record labels in love with a cookie-cutter genre.  The result was that for a decade the most innovative rockers had little chance to succeed commercially."

The popular view of 80s glam metal has changed significantly in the last decade.  In 2001, it was easier to forgive Fargo Rock City’s flaws and praise it for its courage, wit, and pure entertainment value, simply because it was so unique.  But here in 2011, the shelves of my local Barnes & Noble are crammed with odes to 80s metal acts, from Motley Crue to Rob Halford.  There are also countless books on those same shelves that seem to have co-opted Klosterman’s under-researched approach to rock criticism, only without his trademark wit.  And it’s hard not to see the success of Klosterman and Fargo Rock City as—at least in some small way—responsible for that.  Maybe critics used to take rock too seriously.  But that pendulum has swung mightily in the other direction since 2001, and the book just doesn’t read the same way it did a decade ago.  Is that Klosterman’s fault?  It would be easy to say no, but if Fargo Rock City is any indication, it seems like he would enjoy the current Barnes & Noble music section more than the one he encountered a decade ago.