In High Fidelity, Rob Gordon asks the audience, "Which came first, the music or the misery? Was I unhappy because I listened to pop music, or did I listen to pop music because I was unhappy?" Take this philosophical paradox, expand it to two hundred and forty pages, and you might end up with Chuck Klosterman's new collection of essays, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.
Plenty of essayists have tried to define modern society through their scholarly analysis of life changing events, politics, philosophy, or any of a number of high culture concepts. Some have succeeded. Others have failed miserably. Klosterman, one of the senior writers for SPIN magazine, has realized that approaching modern society through the lens of high culture is like opening up a phone book to a random page when you want a make a date for Saturday night. There's a chance that you might get lucky, but more likely than not, you'll just end up making a fool of yourself. Generation X, more than any previous generation, has been defined by our entertainment. Television was our babysitter. Rock music sang us to sleep at night. Tabloid news told us everything we need to know about the world around us. The internet expanded our boundaries, while simultaneously kept us from having to interact with anyone else in real life. If you want to know what makes Generation X tick, look at what entertains us. Look at the low culture with a sense of irony and sarcasm, mixed with sense of reverence, just like Chuck Klosterman has done.
This isn't to say that modern, young hipsters and serious philosophical issues are completely incompatible. We can certainly understand the concepts, but we need this pop culture concept to help us understand the ideas in our language. Plenty of college freshmen have struggled to grasp the point of something like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic, but ask them to explain what's going on in The Matrix, and they can rant for hours about how Neo finds enlightenment and power when he is ripped from his "artificial reality" and shown the "truth" that he previously couldn't fathom.
Like a hipster pied piper, Klosterman leads along a pop culture path, making stops at some of these standard philosophical way stations. Why bother trying to grasp the idea of Nietzsche's Superman, when we can explore the social strata of Saved by the Bell to see Zach Morris can get away with any questionably moral actions because he's the "coolest" person in school. Why turn to the Greek myth of Tantalus to explore why we want what we can't have, when we already much more familiar with the characters of the Trix Rabbit and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird. (In fact, Klosterman goes so far as to point out the Sonny's tortured existence and how children will "endlessly taunt him with heaping bowls of C-Puffs, almost like street junkies waving heroin needles in the face of William S. Burrows.") Why ponder over the fact that every significant issue in life can be reduced to black and white arguments, when it's more fun to take every two-sided argument and find parallels in the Lakers/Celtics rivalry of the 1980's. (Case and point: As Klosterman explains, Celtics people think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Lakers people believe in the conspiracy. Laker people are into Ice Cube's rap music, while Celtic people should listen to Eminem, since he's the only white guy who can keep up. Neither Celtic people nor Laker people, though, should find Adam Sandler funny.)
Quite a few of the essays that Klosterman has collected put an irreverent spin on some weighty philosophical issues, but other pieces aim more towards simple entertainment. In Appetite for Replication, Klosterman recounts his experiences traveling on the road with a Guns 'n Roses tribute band, while in Ten Seconds to Love, he makes a pretty strong case that Pam and Tommy Lee are the Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio of our day. Other essays seem like media reviews (albeit incredibly witty, smartly written ones). Among other topics, he explores Reality Bites as a thematic successor to The Empire Strikes Back, and why Billy Joel is the only popular artist whose popularity has noting whatsoever with his coolness.
The topics covered in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs are entertaining enough, but Klosterman's writing style is what really makes the book sparkle. The writing drips with an oily sheen of sarcasm and puffs itself up with a mixture of self-importance and self-deprecation. Each page is packed with dozens of pop culture references, juxtaposing topics as diverse as The Cosby Show, Bridget Jones' Diary, Lloyd Dobler, and they way Coldplay manufactures fake love the way the Ford corporation manufactures Mustangs all within the space of a paragraph. It's a safe bet that no one is going to catch every cultural curve ball that Klosterman throws, but it's even more likely that every few pages you'll run across some obscure cultural nod that most people would scratch their heads at, and you'll feel a guilty sense of pride for knowing something so insignificantly obscure.
Granted, since this writing style goes on for almost two hundred and fifty pages, it can get a tiny bit grating. Klosterman occasionally comes off as too smug, as if he's trying to justify his hipper-than-thou attitude. The writing can feel a little too glib for some of the subject matter, such as when he explores America's obsession with serial killers. He also throws in a little too much "golly, I'm just a humble grown-up-nerd from Fargo in the crazy world of popular culture" confession. The first few times this attitude surfaces, it helps to establish where Klosterman's is approaching everything from, but eventually we just wish he'd get back to making fun of the over hyped from today's world and praising the obscure facets of our youth that we haven't though about in twenty years.
Fortunately, the whole book moves along at a very quick pace, and none of these minor flaws in the writing ever stick around long enough to get under our skin. The essays are the perfect length to digest in a free moment, whether it be waiting to head out to a movie, relaxing before turning out the lights at bedtime, or spending some quality time alone in the bathroom. It's like having access at any time to the mysterious guy across the hall in your college dorm who was in the middle of his seventh year and still hadn't picked a major yet, but could walk into any conversation in the hallway and raise the socio-intellectual bar two or three notches with his wisdom. And since it's just a book, you don’t have to worry about him opening the door to your room at three in the morning looking for something to snack on.
It takes the right kind of person to appreciate what Klosterman has assembled here. Those born before 1960 or after 1980 might recognize the myriad cultural references, but they won't have grown up ingrained into their minds as part of the formative process. Those people will smile and say, "that's nice, but I just don't see the big deal here." To really appreciate the book, you have to be from the part of society that, as Klosterman says, "has more media than intellect." If you're one of the people that believe that all of life's mysteries are answered in the movies, and that there's a perfect song out there for every single moment in your life, this is a book you have to read. Never again will you have those lingering feelings that a life spent entertaining oneself has been a life misspent.
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