Klosterman’s ideas on pop do pop
In a 20-year career that’s led through Esquire, Spin, GQ and Grantland, Chuck Klosterman has become a cultural observer of our time. He roams the junk drawer of popular culture, providing shockingly keen insight into how our absorption of culture reflects on us.
Klosterman cautions that his 10th book, “Chuck Klosterman X,” “is not a portrait of what the world is or what it could be” as much as a map of his interior world. But there is wisdom in his essays on, and interviews with, Kobe Bryant, Jimmy Page, a forgotten basketball game and more. He may even have predicted our current president. This conversation has been edited.
You get pegged the pop culture guy a lot. Is that a correct term to use? Isn't “pop culture” just “culture”?
I got a newspaper job at the Akron Beacon Journal in 1998 to be a pop culture reporter. At the time, that was kind of a radical idea. It wasn’t that long ago that pop culture was shorthand for “dumb culture.” But pop culture is the main culture that America makes. We create stuff that’s the most acceptable, the most consumable and the most popular. Rock, hiphop, Hollywood films, television … this is what we do.
You’re a big Van Halen fan, but in your inter view with Eddie Van Halen, he comes across as very abrasive. Does it hurt the 13-yearold version of you?
For whatever reason, that doesn’t happen to me. When I meet someone, it tends to make their work more interesting to me, regardless if I liked the experience or not. On paper, he does come across as kind of abrasive and unlikable, but that might be to my journalistic detriment. When I talked to him, he didn’t seem mean-spirited. I think he’s just kind of socially inept. I do believe that he is some kind of authentic genius. I’ve interviewed many talented people who understand how genius operates. They have an understanding of what is viewed as brilliant work, and they have the talent to replicate that. I think Eddie Van Halen is a natural genius. Music sounds different to him than it does to anyone else, and that manifests itself in the way he plays guitar.
I think people with authentic genius tend to lack a social sensibility. There’s this give-and-take that may exist with their skill.
Is Kobe Bryant the loneliest man on Earth?
There’s a point in my interview with him where Kobe says he has no friends. He says, “Well, not the kind of friends you see in movies,” like he’s trying to figure out how friendship works.
I think that he probably is a little lonely. But he’s also probably reached a point in his life where he’s sort of turned the tables on his own emotional state. He’s kind of decided that his loneliness is central to his greatness.
In a 2011 article, you wrote that faith-based arguments are difficult to defeat, imagining a presidential candidate who runs on “have faith, I’ll do it.” Did you accidentally presage Trump?
I’m not going to sit here and say I predicted this, but it is interesting when a hypothetical becomes true. I think what we’ve really seen is that all realities are happening at once. The postmodernists have been obsessed with this forever, that we create our own reality; reality is how I perceive it. But the last year or so has made it very clear to me that every possible American reality is happening simultaneously. And that’s where we get this problem. We sometimes would see this with things that Kellyanne Conway would say. She would begin by conceding that some accusation was true, but she would talk through it, and her conclusion would be, “It’s true, but only in the way you want it to be true.”
Taylor Swift came across as intelligent and self-aware.
She is amazingly self-aware. She’s also highly involved in technology and very interested in media. So she’s constantly reading about herself, just constantly. That probably does generate an almost hyper self-awareness.
I think she was 25 when I talked to her, and she’s very mature for her age. She sees the media as an extension of her art and probably thinks that they have to work in orchestration with each other to achieve her goals.
You write that you really like thinking about the band KISS. Would you rather sit and have a good think, or shoot some hoops?
[Long pause] I would rather sit and think about something. I mean, I’m married, I have two kids, but fundamentally I live inside my own mind. Writing is a solitary act.