A Fan’s Notes

A review of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, a book of essays by Chuck Klosterman.

by Andrew Hearst • The New York Sun • August 26, 2003

Everyone has an indefensible but harmless affection for some cheesy rock band or idiotic television show or nutrient-free food, and most of us have a lot more than one. What makes Chuck Klosterman unusual, at least as far as smart, thoughtful people go, is his ability to immerse himself in dozens of these guilty pleasures without feeling guilty, and his insistence that unpacking lowbrow culture can be, on its own, a legitimate way to make sense of the world. “The goal of being alive,” he writes in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, “is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways [sic] to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It’s certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein.”

If that sounds ridiculous ... well, it is, and Mr. Klosterman, a senior writer at Spin, surely knows it. But the author, who is in his early 30s, does have a voracious appetite for all things lowbrow, and not really in an ironic “isn’t it fun to love this stupid thing” kind of way. His specialty as a writer is a sort of endlessly recursive personal essay in which he cops to a high level of expertise about some much-maligned scrap of pop-cultural detritus — the brainless high school sitcom Saved by the Bell, for instance, or kiddie cereal, or hair-metal bands — then explores how he developed that expertise and what it says about our culture that he developed it.

Mr. Klosterman’s 2001 debut, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta, was a hilarious and oddly touching memoir of his headbanging adolescence as a skinny hair-metal fan in small-town North Dakota. Charmingly self-deprecating and filled with inspired, funny riffs on the nature of fanhood, the book argued bravely for the cultural significance of Mötley Crüe, Ratt, and other bands that few hipster rock critics have ever taken seriously. Those bands may have been silly, Mr. Klosterman explained, but they had a huge impact on the lives of countless kids, including himself, and we can learn something by trying to figure out what that means.

The subtitle of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is “A Low Culture Manifesto,” but the book is not really a manifesto at all. Rather, it’s a grab bag of essays, criticism, and reportage inspired by the author’s countless lowbrow obsessions. Like many members of so-called Generation X — a label he doesn’t shy away from — Mr. Klosterman has had few life experiences that haven’t been distorted by the funhouse mirror of popular culture. He’s watched every episode of all 12 seasons of MTV’s The Real World at least three times, and he now has a habit of reflexively categorizing new acquaintances into Real World personality types. Ten years ago, when he was a college student in North Dakota, he often spent two hours a day watching four syndicated episodes of Saved by the Bell, a show whose unsophisticated and predictable narratives were weirdly comforting to him and his friends.

In one essay, he theorizes that Saturday-morning cereal commercials are “the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters,” because Trix the Rabbit and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird teach kids that “anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary.” In another, he argues that Billy Joel’s 1982 record The Nylon Curtain contains two songs as good as most of the White Album. In yet another, he admits to thinking Pamela Anderson is hot, and he explains why. (For the record, he likes her for more than just her breasts.)

In one of the book’s best and funniest chapters, a reported piece that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Klosterman hangs out with members of a Guns N’ Roses tribute band, at one point getting uncomfortably stoned with them as they careen down a Midwestern highway on the way to a gig. The piece is a thoughtful and amusing exploration of the ways pop culture can both feed and satisfy people’s desire to be anyone but themselves. If the various pieces in Mr. Klosterman’s book share a theme, it’s something close to that.

Alas, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is only occasionally successful. For every entertaining paragraph about the size of Tommy Lee’s genitalia, or the difficulty of forming close relationships in a world corrupted by unrealistic media portrayals of romantic bliss, there are as many paragraphs that merely barrel on toward the next. For every good piece like “Appetite for Replication” (the story about the Guns N’ Roses tribute band), there is ephemera like “The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise’s Shattered, Troll-like Face,” which, despite its amusing title, is merely a pedestrian and unconvincing defense of the film Vanilla Sky.

Mr. Klosterman’s work is funniest and most coherent when it’s driven by his own personal experience. When he tries to write more or less straight cultural criticism, he often ends up spinning his wheels. He has compelling insights into various weird little corners of our culture, and he has a seemingly endless supply of quips, but he’s rarely able to develop a strong, coherent argument over the course of an entire essay. I’m sure he’s a lot of fun to drink with, though.