Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

by Chuck Klosterman

  At the moment, the leaders of Knight Ridder and Gannett and Thompson and all the other media chains are wrong; people who buy newspapers can still read them. But give them time. They’ll be right soon enough.

  1. These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung cancer.

  2. These are people whose death from lung cancer would make me profoundly sad.

  3. These are people I would generally hope could recover from lung cancer.

  4. Obviously, I’m not counting the New York Post or The National Enquirer or anything else that defines itself as a tabloid, as those publications have no relationship to journalism.

  5. Then again, maybe these people are just way Zen.

  Today I got a phone call from Minnesota, and the person asked me how this book was going. I said it was going fine. Then he asked if I had any hopes for its success.

  “Well, here is my hope,” I said. “I hope the book is published and distributed at least six weeks before a rogue terrorist manages to build and unleash a one-kiloton nuclear warhead in the vicinity of Times Square, since I am told that the blast would instantly incinerate at least twenty thousand people, including me and everyone in my office. It is my understanding that—even if I wasn’t killed by the initial blast—it’s almost certain that I would be dead within twenty-four hours of the explosion, probably via intense radiation poisoning but possibly from third-degree burns and blindness, both of which would make evacuation from the urban chaos virtually impossible. And to a lesser extent, I hope that this book is available on amazon.com before the discharge of a cobalt-60 “dirty bomb” that would turn Manhattan into a cauldron of walking death that—if I’m really, really lucky—will only give me a hyperaccelerated case of skin cancer. And of course I’d love to see this book in paperback before somebody detonates a uranium-rich suitcase bomb, stolen from Belarus or Ukraine.”

  “That’s interesting,” the caller said in response. “I suppose this technically makes you an optimist.”

  17 I, Rock Chump 2:11

  I used to think there was nothing worse than being trapped in a conversation with someone who knows absolutely nothing about anything. However, an acquaintance taught me this wasn’t true. “There’s one thing worse than talking to a person who knows about nothing,” he said, “and that’s talking to someone who knows about nothing except music.”

  You know the kind of person to which my friend refers. You’ve met him at underattended rock concerts and in empty downtown taverns, and he inevitably adores the Moody Blues. But try to imagine if one of those people was so adroit at being singularly obsessive that he actually got paid for it. Imagine if the weirdo who seems to live in your nearest locally owned record store suddenly had a 152 IQ and a degree from Tufts. And now imagine a hundred of those people coming together for four rainy days in Seattle, all of them totally fucking stoked for the opportunity to compare The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society with Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s field theory on radioactive decay.

  Prepare to rock and/or roll.

  What I have just described was a glimpse of life inside the palatial walls of the Experience Music Project, home for the first annual Pop Music Studies Conference (a summit boldly titled “Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning: Making Popular Music in the U.S.”) Held in April 2002, the conference brought together a wide array of respected academics and snarky rock critics who were asked to “think about pop music in the abstract.” What this really meant is that one hundred people who like Sigur Rós way too much came together to read self-penned manuscripts that were either too goofy to be classified as scholarship or too pedantic to be seen as commercially viable.

  I was one of these people.

  Now, let me be completely clear about something: I had a wonderful time at EMP. I’m precisely the kind of supergeek who enjoys forty-minute conversations about side three of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music album. The pencil-necked eggheads at “Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning” are—sadly—my people. If I was Jewish, EMP would have been my Israel. Yet even I cannot deny that this conference was probably the least rock ’n’ roll experience I’ve ever had.

  Thursday, April 11, 5:20 P.M.: I have just arrived outside the EMP building, a monstrosity of postmodern architecture nestled in the shadow of the Space Needle. Frankly, EMP looks ridiculous from the outside (it’s bulbous, multicolored, and possibly made out of aluminum). However, the inside is gorgeous. I can’t believe how clean these bathrooms are, particularly the porcelain urinals. This being a “rock conference,” I wonder if we will later snort cocaine off these fixtures.

  It takes me about ten minutes to realize this is not going to happen; most of the people at this conference barely even drink. We’re all mingling upstairs in the EMP bar (I think it’s referred to as the “Liquid Lounge”), and I’m introduced to Douglas Wolk, a writer for the Village Voice and SPIN and the bass player for a meta communicative band called The Media. I can immediately tell that Wolk is interesting, but we’re both struggling with casual conversation, so I offer to buy him a drink. He wants an orange juice. This is fine (I have nothing against orange juice, per se), but it quickly dawns on me that this sensibility will pretty much be the norm for the weekend. At least in the conventional, stereotypical, Nikki Sixxian definition of the term debauchery, EMP is a “no rocking” zone.

  I wander about the mixer, trying to mix. A few people are discussing how the Avalanches are over hyped, an odd argument to make about a band that 98 percent of America has never even heard of. There is lots of handshaking, and everyone seems to be saying “I love your work” or “I love your book” to whomever they happen to be standing alongside. Some people are upset that EMP has only provided free cookies for the mixer (there had been a rumor about chicken wings), but the cookies are crisp. A graduate student from Bowling Green University and I talk about the Wu-Tang Clan’s obsession with kung-fu movies; when I tell this guy he looks like the lead singer of Nickelback, he threatens to punch me.

  There aren’t many women at this conference. I see one tall female with pigtails who looks mildly attractive, so I saunter up and try to make conversation. It turns out she’s a twenty-four-year old freelance writer from San Francisco, and she’s not even actively involved with the conference; she just wanted to hang out with rock journalists (!) and meet Simon Reynolds, the British author of a drug-friendly rave book called Generation Ecstasy. I try to talk shop with this woman, but her shop appears to exist in Narnia; she tells me her ultimate goal is to publish a fictional biography about Alex Chilton built on the premise that Chilton was actually sired by a sexual tryst between a woman and an alligator. “The research is totally kicking my ass right now,” she tells me. “Basically, I need to learn more about alligators. And about the Delta blues.”

  Tonight, Solomon Burke is speaking in a room the EMP staff refers to as their “sky church,” but I elect to go to some dive bar four blocks away from the museum. I meet an amazing blond girl from a local Seattle alternative paper, and we do not drink orange juice; we end up having somewhere between eight and four thousand cocktails, and we play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone” on the jukebox in order to slow dance without leaving the comfort of our booth. I go to bed around 3:30 A.M., confident that I have rocked more than enough for my juice-drinking brethren.

  Friday, April 12, 9:40 A.M.: I just woke up. The conference apparently started at 8:30 A.M. What kind of self-respecting rocker gets up for anything at 8:30? Doesn’t anyone here own Appetite for Destruction? Do these people not realize that even if you wake up around seven, you’re not supposed get out of bed until nine? I wander down to the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott at 10:05, assuming there will be several other panelists feeling exactly like me, which is to say “below average.” But there’s only one guy, and he’s reading the newspaper. It appears that everyone else made it to the 8:30 A.M. welcoming remarks. There’s an upside to being juice drinkers, I guess.

  The first three-person panel I si
t through is titled “Self-Image.” The initial presenter is New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, and his paper is sort of funny. Of course, what’s even funnier is watching the audience when he plays snippets of N.W.A. to illustrate his points; suddenly, the room is filled with old white people bobbing their heads along with Ice Cube, desperately trying to show everyone just how much they love hip-hop. That’s one of the unspoken prerequisites at this conference: You must overtly love whatever music seems the most detached from your own personal experience. Apparently, this proves you’re a genius. As a consequence, all the white people talk about how much they love rap, all the young females insist they love misogynistic cock rock, and all the aging academics praise Pink and the Backstreet Boys. Other sentiments that are essential to publicly express at a rock conference are as follows: All unpopular music should be more popular; all popular music should be less popular (unless it’s aggressively vapid, which thereby makes it transcendent); authenticity is essential; authenticity is ridiculous; music is the sound-scape through which we experience reality; there will never be another Trout Mask Replica. It’s also essential to have a “mentor,” or at least to claim that you do. Former SPIN writer and current EMP program manager Eric Weisbard tells me he’s an “unapologetic Robert Christgau protégé.” I meet at least two people who openly describe themselves as Chuck Eddy rip-off artists. A writer from Austin tells me his mentor during college was Rob Sheffield. All the academics give props to older academics no one else has ever heard of. And most peculiarly, an unnamed woman with a tragic hairdo asks me if I’m from “the Greil Marcus school of criticism or the Lester Bangs school of thought.” I say the latter, but only because I like cough syrup.

  DePaul sociologist Deena Weinstein follows Sanneh, and she compares the social contract within a working rock band to the fictionalized existence of the jackalope. I must concede that this is a clear example of “thinking about music in the abstract.” Later that morning, I attend a presentation titled “Duran Duran: Video Band?” It turns out the answer to that particular query is, “yes.” This strikes me as significantly less abstract.

  Jon Pareles of the New York Times is the “star” of an afternoon symposium mysteriously dubbed “Dos and Don’ts,” and he makes references to the Heisenberg Principle and the formation of Zaire. Pareles follows an affable presentation from University of Iowa’s Thomas Swiss (he discusses Jewel’s poetry) and precedes a boring British academic who drones on about reggae before advocating the death of capitalism ( “I am a socialist,” he said during the Q & A portion of the symposium, “and I think we need to change society”). I’m not exactly sure what any of this has to do with pop music, but I do learn that Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years. At least she’s not a socialist.

  I eat lunch at Turntable, the Experience Music Project restaurant. Now—if someone wanted to be critical of EMP as an inadvertently “antirock” entity—this meal would have been a perfect metaphor, as it was the epitome of ruining something visceral. I ordered “old fashioned” chicken and dumplings, but I ended up getting the horrific modern incarnation of what some book-smart Seattle hippie imagines the Deep South should taste like. I almost felt like I was being punished for ordering something simple. And I suspect that’s how anti-intellectuals feel about things like the EMP Pop Conference. They would prefer consuming the philosophical equivalent of McDonald’s, which would be asking a fifteen-year-old kid why Hoobastank kicks ass. And it turns out I could have literally done both of these things; EMP is two blocks from a McDonald’s, and Hoobastank was playing with Incubus that very night at Key Arena.

  However, I ultimately do neither. I just eat my dreadful dumplings and wait around to hear Robert “The Dean of Rock Critics” Christgau discuss whether or not American pop music is still exceptional, although the only part of his speech I remember is when he says, “I don’t see any new Nirvanas lurking around, and I don’t plan to.” I guess he doesn’t like Hoobastank, either.

  Saturday, April 12, 11:00 A.M.: Right now I’m listening to Sarah Dougher, and she seems deeply offended by something (and possibly by everything). Dougher is a musician and a teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, and she’s taking issue with the fact that her symposium, titled “Personal Stories,” is the only panel at the conference composed exclusively of women. It appears she also has problems with the way her panel is named: “I make music in a sexist world that views the male experience as general and the female experience as personal,” she says. To me, the latter designation actually seems preferable to the former, but what do I know? Dougher later mentions that academia and music are “two of the most sexist professions that exist,” further solidifying my suspicion that people attend Evergreen in order to avoid attending life.

  This sense of utter unreality is a problem with several of the academic papers at this event; they’re often written from completely detached perspectives. Yesterday, some dude from Middle Tennessee State gave a speech about how the threat of terrorism is not worth the chilling effect the recently legislated “Patriot Act” could have on political artists like Sting. This might be true…although I’m guessing it’s considerably easier to downplay the threat of terrorism when you work at Middle Tennessee State. I don’t see a lot of jets crashing into downtown Murfreesboro.

  Still, it would be disingenuous if I didn’t mention how innovative (and how clever) some of these presentations truly were. Craig Seymour of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution talked about “boy band slash fiction,” outlining how certain fans of ’NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ. And the aforementioned Wolk’s juice-fueled explanation of how CDs are inappropriately remastered for pop radio was fascinating and insightful. These are all examples of people who truly did think about music in new, unconventional ways.

  But here’s the depressing rub: You know who’s not thinking about music in new, innovative ways? Musicians. At least not the musicians who came to this conference.

  You see, Saturday night was supposed to be the big collision of sound and fury; this was when local “rock stars” were going to take part in a high-profile EMP symposium, simulcast on public radio. The four participants were Mark Arm of Mudhoney, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, Sam Coomes of Quasi, and all-around indie rock impresario Calvin Johnson.

  And they all had nothing to say.

  For two hours, I watched four people stare at the audience, all trying to prove they were cool enough not to care about the attention. None of them had any prepared statements (well, Brownstein claimed she did, but then she elected not to read it). None of them wanted to answer any of the moderator’s inquiries, and they made fun of half the audience members who dared to ask them questions. Coomes spent all 120 minutes trying to act confused; Arm preferred to play surly; Brownstein opted for a nervously bookish vibe; Johnson just tried to seem weird. At one point, Calvin bemoaned the fact that—since the end of the World War II era—Americans won’t even sing “Happy Birthday” at parties, apparently because our willingness to sing in public has become “atrophied.” Clearly, Calvin Johnson has never been to an Olive Garden.

  “I try not to analyze the process of listening to music,” Brownstein begrudgingly said. “The less I think about my art, the better,” reiterated Arm. If you take these artists at their word, there is no intellectual element whatsoever to rock music; all you do is walk out on stage and emote. According to them, there’s never anything to think (or write) about; in fact, attempts to do so sully the entire creative process.

  Luckily, hardly any of the visiting critics or academics attended the musicians’ panel, as it happened to be scheduled during suppertime. And honestly, I’m glad they didn’t go. Who needs to hear that your life’s work is irrelevant? I prefer to imagine all of America’s rock geeks brea
king bread together, talking about Silk-worm songs and Clinic b-sides and forgotten Guided by Voices shows and—maybe for the first time in their lives—feeling completely and utterly normal. I’m sure their orange juice never tasted so sweet.

  Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise. It’s quite reassuring: At least at my imaginary funerals, it’s amazing how many of my female friends were secretly in love with me.

  Some people think this habit makes me a freak, but I disagree. I’m always shocked when friends tell me they don’t like to think about death; I think about dying constantly, and I think everybody else should, too.

  I recall once sitting around a bonfire and asking all the folks staring into the flames what they fantasize about more: dying or having sex. I thought I knew what was going to happen: I thought everybody would immediately answer “sex,” but—as we talked about the question in detail and slowly lowered our shields of enforced normalcy—the honest people would admit that they actually thought about dying a lot more than they thought about fucking. Much to my surprise, everyone insisted that they fantasize about sex constantly and never dream about being killed, which seems insane to me. Relatively speaking, having sex is so easy. People do it all the time. It’s so pedestrian; fantasies about making love are rarely necessary and usually contrived. However, dying is always original. It’s always a onetime limited engagement, and (depending on your theology) it’s either the defining moment of existence or the final corporeal sensation in the universe’s most remarkable coincidence. How can anyone not be consumed by that? I’m constantly thinking about how bullets would burn into my lungs, or if my eyes would remain open if my skull shattered a windshield, or if cancer cells itch, or how it will sound if and when I drown. I cannot shake the notion of my head being swatted off by a grizzly bear, or of my rib cage being pulverized by a madman with a ballpeen hammer, or of being buried alive. There has never been a day in my life when I didn’t day-dream about having both my collarbones crushed into powder. And these are not things I necessarily want to happen; these are just things that warrant consideration (certainly more consideration than how I’d most prefer to orgasm).