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

by Chuck Klosterman

Overview

New York Times-bestselling author and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman sorts through the past decade and how we got to now.

Chuck Klosterman has created an incomparable body of work in books, magazines, newspapers, and on the Web. His writing spans the realms of culture and sports, while also addressing interpersonal issues, social quandaries, and ethical boundaries. Klosterman has written nine previous books, helped found and establish Grantland, served as the New York Times Magazine Ethicist, worked on film and television productions, and contributed profiles and essays to outlets such as GQ, Esquire, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and The Guardian.

Chuck Klosterman's tenth book (aka Chuck Klosterman X) collects his most intriguing of those pieces, accompanied by fresh introductions and new footnotes throughout. Klosterman presents many of the articles in their original form, featuring previously unpublished passages and digressions. Subjects include Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, KISS, Jimmy Page, Stephen Malkmus, steroids, Mountain Dew, Chinese Democracy, The Beatles, Jonathan Franzen, Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Brown, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena. This is a tour of the past decade from one of the sharpest and most prolific observers of our unusual times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399184161
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	998,580
Product dimensions:	5.49(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, But What If We're Wrong?, and Chuck Klosterman X) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

June 5, 1972

Place of Birth:

Wyndmere, North Dakota

Education:

Degree in Journalism, University of North Dakota, 1994

Read an Excerpt

The book you are about to read is a collection of stories I’ve published in various media outlets over the past ten years. I like these stories and wouldn’t republish them if I didn’t. But I certainly hope you like them more than I do. The process of compiling old articles is not difficult, but it also isn’t pleasant. It’s just not enjoyable to reread things you’ve written in the not-so-distant past (I think this is true for most writers, discounting those real crazy motherfuckers who believe the world would be radically different if they weren’t involved). Every positive memory is coated with the ooze of regret: You want to delete every semicolon and alter every joke. Moments that once seemed revelatory now seem banal. You’re forcibly reminded how rapidly society evolves, and it’s disheartening to revisit an arbitrary event from five years ago that suddenly feels like a factoid from 1958. It’s the worst kind of time machine.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Chuck Klosterman X"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Chuck Klosterman.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Three-Man Weave 5

My Zombie, Myself 23

That's not how it Happened 31

The Light who has Lighted the World 43

There's Something Peculiar about Lying in a Dark room. You can't see anything. 57

Liquid Food 69

C'Mon Dave, Gimme a Break 91

Where were you while we were Getting High? 105

I'm Assuming it's going to be fun 121

I Need to be Alive (In Order to Watch TV) 137

I Will Choose Free will (Canadian reader's note: This is not about Rush) 146

Eeverybody's happy when the Wizard Walks by (Or Maybe Not? Maybe they Hate it? Hard to say, really) 153

Speed Kills (until it doesn't) 158

Not a Nutzo Girl, not yet a Nutzo Woman (Miley Cyrus, 2008) 167

When giants walked the earth (and Argued about China) 172

Use your Illusion (But Don't Bench Ginobili) 177

The drugs don't work (Actually, they work Great) 185

The city that time remembered (Tulsa, Oklahoma) 193

But what if we're Wrong? (Drink the Acid, Swallow the Mouse) 200

Owner of a Lonely Heart 207

The enemy of my enemy is probably just another enemy 225

A road seldom traveled by the multitudes 241

Brown would be the color (If I Had a Heart) 255

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars 273

White's Shadow 283

House mouse in the mouse house 299

The man who knew too much 317

The opposite of Beyonce 333

Like regular music, except good 343

Non-suppressive Slacker 350

Democracy Now! 354

Metal Machine "Music" 360

2 + 2 = 5 365

Advertising worked on me 377

Hero in Black 413

Villain in white 418

(1928-2013) 421

Something Else 425

Acknowledgments 433

Index 435

Editorial Reviews

"Often imitated and rarely replicated, the writing style of Chuck Klosterman has proven rather influential in all manner of 21st century writing. From news stories to critical reviews to artist profiles, Klosterman’s often irreverent, self-deprecating, footnote happy smart/funny observations make for highly entertaining reading." —John Paul, Popmatters

"Infectious.... Though Klosterman may be pigeonholed as a guy who thinks too much about Kiss, his 10th book shows he’s something else: a philosopher." —Justin Wm. Moyer, The Washington Post

“Klosterman is a master of the high-low…He injects a level of intellectual rigor into subjects that receive precious little…With X, Klosterman wallows in the trivial…but he’s not trivializing...proving that culture essays can teach us something about ourselves and the people around us…Each of his essays is a love letter to a moment.” —B. David Zarley, Paste
 
“Chuck Klosterman has become a cultural observer of our time. Klosterman roams the junk drawer we call popular culture, providing shockingly keen insight into how our absorption of culture reflects on us.” —Jim McLauchlin, Los Angeles Times

“A hilarious new essay collection…by this brilliant writer… His great gift as a writer is his ability to take the ‘inflexibly personal’ and make it true.” —Ann Levin, The Associated Press

"Highly entertaining...honest, unpredictable, and fun...addictively readable...surprisingly poignant." —June Sawyers, Booklist

"A collection of journalistic pieces that remain provocative...offers insight into the relations among artist, art, and audience that goes considerably deeper [and] will leave readers with fresh appreciation for both the subjects and the journalist." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2017
Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; But What If We're Wrong) has written nine books and a slew of articles for newspapers, magazines, and online publications. This collection features his best pieces from the last ten years. Although a majority of the articles focus on music or sports, Klosterman also ruminates on literature, pop culture, death, and much more. Filtered through his literary sensibility are honest, critical, profound, and compulsively readable interviews with Jimmy Page, Taylor Swift, Kobe Bryant, and Tom Brady (to name a few). Each piece is a polished stone of insightful reportage. But Klosterman's work flirts closest with the sublime when he strays from the famous, including his retelling of an intense junior college basketball game in North Dakota, a conversation with a busboy in Tulsa, the infuriating demands of a forgotten NBA draft pick, and the evening of his father's death. VERDICT A funny, thoughtful Greatest Hits album from a master of nonfiction, with standout tracks that will stand the test of time.—Paul Stenis, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA

Library Journal

2017-03-15
A collection of journalistic pieces that remain provocative, or at least interesting, even if the subjects that inspired them have faded from memory.In his 10th book, pop-culture contrarian Klosterman (But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past, 2016, etc.) suggests that he has matured more gracefully than many of those he has written about. He built his career as the anti-critic critic, the guy who embraced hair metal and didn't care much for a lot of what music critics claimed to love. Or, as he writes in one of his more recent introductions to older pieces, "one of the things I love about covering uncool artists is that groups widely described as ‘hated' are almost always more popular than groups who are described as ‘beloved,' " referring to a piece on the critically reviled Creed and Nickelback. On that same page, he remarks, of a longer retrospective, "I don't expect most people who buy this book will read a ten-thousand-word essay on KISS. It is, however, twice as good as a five-thousand-word essay on KISS." Though it has been tempting to dismiss Klosterman as a one-trick pony, claiming black where others (in print at least) see white, the best work offers insight into the relations among artist, art, and audience that goes considerably deeper. The profiles of Taylor Swift, Kobe Bryant, and Jonathan Franzen will leave readers with fresh appreciation for both the subjects and the journalist, who understands how the three are similar in terms of what they have accomplished and what challenges they have faced in terms of popular perception. It is possible that nobody has ever understood Swift better on the page, while the Franzen piece falls a little short of that for reasons Klosterman explains: "We are both working writers with vaguely similar lives. He, however, is more talented, more successful, and considerably more respected….There was a power imbalance, recognized by both of us." Even those who only dimly remember Royce White, Pavement, or Gnarls Barkley will find the reflections on them engaging.

Kirkus Reviews