emusic interview: chuck klosterman

“I guess I’ve just really become comfortable with the idea that none of this is real, and that we’re not quite in the Matrix but it’s close, and that all the things we’re doing are constructions.”

How many times have we posted Q&A’s with musicians and authors on 17 Dots without really thinking about what these conversations mean? How they’re artificial creations, perhaps not real at all. But still, there’s a certain art to them, as eMusic’s Sam Adams displayed in his thoroughly engaging interview with bestselling author, rock critic and pop culture philosopher Chuck Klosterman.

Things got meta right away, as the two had a lively conversation about, well, the art of conversation. But that’s not all, of course. With his signature blending of high and low, Klosterman discusses his latest book of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, along with Pearl Jam, Katy Perry and the process of writing–and reading–criticism. The complete interview is after the jump!

If linking Nirvana and the fatal handling of the Waco siege seems like a stretch, then you probably don’t know Chuck Klosterman. Especially since the publication of 2003’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman has staked out his territory as a writer capable of making audacious and often inspired links between ostensibly unrelated cultural artifacts, applying quasi-academic jargon to Saved by the Bell without coming off like a slumming graduate student. Eating the Dinosaur, his sixth book and his third essay collection, covers the waterfront, ranging from an appreciation of the hidden-in-plain-sight sincerity of Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo to the inherent conservatism of football.

This is probably an obligatory opener, but it’s impossible to avoid: The first chapter of the book is devoted to your contention that your experience as a journalist has basically convinced you that interviews are not real conversations in any meaningful sense of the word. The good, or well-crafted, ones may read like two people sitting around talking, but it’s an inherently artificial situation, and so nothing anyone else can really be interpreted as true. I tend to think of them in terms of the original definition of cinéma vérité, which is that they produce their own kind of reality, what the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who coined the term, referred to as “the truth of cinema, not the cinema of truth.” Has confronting the fact that interviews can’t be normal conversations had an effect on doing press for this book?

I think it probably affects the person interviewing me more, because I think they have this assumption that because I wrote this piece about the interview process, it’s going to make our interaction more complex. For me, it’s actually in a way made it more straightforward. I guess that essay’s sort of the culmination of having interviewed people for maybe 15 years, and then having spent 5 to 10 years being interviewed a lot. I guess I’ve become comfortable with the idea that none of this is real, and that we’re not quite in the Matrix but it’s close, and that all the things we’re doing are constructions: the way you’re asking questions, the way I’m answering them, the idea that this is going to be published, the premise that somehow this is only happening because I wrote a book. We wouldn’t have this conversation a year ago or two years from now. So because all of these things are at the forefront of my consciousness, now, it actually sort of makes doing interviews easier.

Add to that the fact that, whether or not I’d do it for free, I’m being paid to talk to you right now.

And it’s not that it’s not enjoyable. Let me give you an example. Based on what you do, the way you were talking just now, I would guess that we probably have quite a bit in common. And under other circumstances if we met, we could very easily become friends. If this was the first meeting we had, if I went to Philadelphia and I went to a bar and you were there, I can’t imagine that we’d be talking about cinéma vérité so quickly. But because this is an interview, not only is it acceptable, it’s actually kind of good, because it frames what the discussion is going to be like.

If this were a normal discussion, we’d be talking about something like the fact that you recently got married, or about the friends we have in common.

More like that it would be something that’s happening in the present tense there. We’re watching a sporting event and maybe we’d talk about that. Or we would talk about the weather. Or something that was actually happening to both of us. When you do an interview, you’re really only talking about one person’s experience. If somebody does an interview and they spend too much time talking about themselves, it ends up destroying the whole piece. That’s the first thing you learn. So that alone, whenever people say, “A good interview is just like a normal conversation,” it’s not. That’s not how it is. A conversation would be a really weird interview, because both people would be asking as many questions as the other.

Even in purportedly edited Q&As like this one, there’s a degree of reshaping that goes on. I’ll edit out the parts where you fumble for an answer, and rewrite my own questions to make them more concise. The cruelest thing you can do is quote someone verbatim, which makes even smart people sound like idiots.

There’s this interesting advantage in a Q&A, where you can ask a question in conversation that can be 780 words, and you can turn that into a sentence and it makes you look like a very clear thinker. But you can’t really do that to the person you’re interviewing, even if they’ve sort of been rambling. If you try to boil it all down, you’re in a weird position, where they’re sort of assuming they’re you’re going to represent them in a way that’s, if not verbatim, at least as accurate as possible. So then you’re sort of obligated to put in all the diversions. It’s weird. I don’t really know what the best answer is. It’s hard for me to dismiss it because it’s so much of what I do for a living. But I’ve come to a conclusion that interviewing people is probably not the best way to ascertain reality. Or, let me rephrase that: It might be the best way, but it’s not a good way. Even if it’s the best way, it’s still incredibly inaccurate.

The historian Daniel Boorstin wrote about what he called “pseudo-events,” which are events that exist solely for the purpose of being covered by the media, which I think we all understand now. But he included interviews as well, which we might not. The point is it’s a conversation that wouldn’t be happening were it not going to be printed.

You could say that about any press conference. It’s an interesting point, although that really probably constitutes 98 percent of news. If you remove pseudo-events from the equation, the only news would be the few occasions when a reporter happened to actually see a building on fire or something.

That’s kind of the point. And it brings us back to the book, where you write about how many layers of experience and interpretation artifacts of popular culture pass through before they get to us, and how a lot of what they mean to people actually resides in those layers rather than in the object itself. When did you get a sense that was emerging as an underlying theme?

When I start doing a book of essays, I don’t have a clear idea of what the unifying element is going to be, even though I think that when a book of essays is successful, it’s because that unifying element is clear. What I do is I start writing essays about things that are interesting to me, and then after writing two or three of them, I start looking for what element connects them. What are the largest thematic ideas that seem present in both or all of them? And then I start to realize that this is what I was writing about; even though I though I was writing about specifics, I’m really writing more about abstractions. So for this book, I wrote the Kurt Cobain/Branch Davidian essay first, and then I think I wrote the Ralph Sampson essay, and then I wrote the essay about literal messages, about Rivers Cuomo and stuff. So then was I was reading through this stuff, and I thought, “Why are these things interesting to me?” I think that for whatever reason, during the period I was writing this book, I became interested in how preconceived perceptions and retrospective cognition, how these two things — what we assume the reality of something is, and the way we remember it — how they impact the event in a way that’s so central, that we’re so comfortable with now, because we all assume that media is omnipresent, that we are sort of underestimating how unreal almost every experience we’re having is. This is a really hard thing to describe. If I could really describe it in a few sentences, I don’t guess I would have written the book. It’s not as though there’s singular point I’m trying to make and as long as people get this point, it’s successful.

It’s like Elvis Costello says: “If I could say it another way, I would have written a different song.”

Exactly. In part, I think one of the reasons I started realizing how strange interviewing and being interviewed was is that over the trajectory of my whole writing career, I’ve always been asked to explain things, conversationally or anecdotally, that I attempted to work through. And it’s hard, because on the one side, I feel I should be able to do this. He’s asking me a question about my work; if I can’t answer this question, I can’t answer anything. But at the same time if I really could answer it, the book would just be like a pamphlet. And maybe it could have been anyway. Maybe I should just write books and then go back and boil them down to pamphlets. Like Thomas Paine or something.

You write at one point, “I don’t know what I think until I’ve written.” Otherwise, writing is just stenography, transcribing what you already believe rather than any kind of self-exploration.

I think some people are that way. I think some people’s primary reason for writing essays or writing criticism is to actively and tangibly persuade people to think like they do. And I gotta say, I never do that. It’s odd, because most of my friends here in New York, almost all of them are critics of some sort, or they cover popular culture in some degree, and I was surprised by how normative that feeling is — that feeling that you really, really believe, that you want to persuade people to think like you do. I look at the whole culture of tastemaking, and you really see through the internet how badly people want to convince other people that their specific personal taste in music, film, sports, politics, whatever, is not only important but correct. And I never feel that way. When I write record reviews or film reviews, I have no interest in the person reading it adopting what I have said. It’s because I have this perspective where I like writing, and I like thinking about ideas, and I sort of like the idea of grappling with these ideas in a public setting so that other people can come to similar or different or contradictory conclusions, because of that, I’m very comfortable figuring out my feelings as I go along. Whereas if I were the kind of person who had a very clear aesthetic mission, like I wanted people to listen to indie rock as opposed to mainstream rock, I would basically just be writing things that I already believe to be true.

The other approach seems awfully impoverished. If your mission is to convince people to like Animal Collective, you’ve failed if they don’t.

I really feel that criticism, more than anything else, is a form of intellectual entertainment. I like reading criticism. Sometimes, I will admit, if a writer writes in a way that is particularly dynamic or interesting, or I’ve read all of what they’ve written in the past, it can impact what I listen to or what I watch. But for the most part, I actually like a review of a White Stripes record very similar to the way I like a White Stripes record. It’s an enjoyable thing to read, and if the person does a good job, it can change the way you think about something that you’ve only thought about in one way. A lot of the things that I have written about, particularly in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, but also in this book, if there was any real motive, it was to take things that have only been perceived as being valuable as a commodity, and saying, It doesn’t really matter what you think about this; it’s how you go about thinking. That’s as much of a motivating factor as anything else. I also assume that my motivations are different from most people who do what I do.

Are there any essays in the book where you were surprised where you ended up? Where you ended up thinking something you didn’t realize you thought?

I wouldn’t go that far, where I would say that I was actually surprised by what I thought. What I mean more by that is that I sort of imagine the human mind–all of the thoughts and interests and arguments we have–are all in the mind interwoven, almost like a ball of yarn. The process of writing is removing the ones that you think are valid and putting them in order. So when I say I don’t know how I feel about something, that’s not exactly true. I don’t know how I think about something in a way that I would deliver it in public. The tonality of essay writing is just as important as the actual content. Nobody wants to admit that, because it seems if you admit that, you’re somehow fooling people, or that somebody who has a lot of energy or a lot of emotions can sometimes be very convincing even if what they’re saying doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I guess this is almost a cliché now, because I say it all the time, but I think there are only three important qualities when it comes to writing: being interesting, being entertaining and being clear. Everything else is secondary. Try to be interesting in the sense that it’s fun to read, because why the fuck are people gonna read it if it’s not fun? I’m not a teacher. My books aren’t issued by the state. It’s not a class. I want people to enjoy the experience, and writing’s a communicative art, so I try to communicate ideas as quickly as possible. The most effort I put in, in terms of the amount of work that goes into the writing, is clarity. I want people to be able to access the ideas quickly. My hope is that it will almost feel to the reader as if they’re thinking the essay while they’re reading it, that they buy this kind of blank book, and as they’re reading, the sentences are just appearing. I want people to feel like the author is only one step ahead of them. Is that manipulative? Sometimes I think it is. Sometimes I think it’s manipulative to write in a way that gives people the sense of propulsion that they’re actually creating themselves.

Is that why you structure the chapters the way you do? You divide them into sections like an outline, labeled 1A, 2A, 1B and so forth, as you jump around different subjects.

That was an attempt to reflect how the human mind works, or maybe specifically how my mind works. I’ll be thinking about something, and that will cause me to think about something ostensibly unrelated, but because the thoughts came in that order, or because one thought created the second one, there is a connection there. But it’s still its own separate thing. So what I tried to do is almost map out how I would start thinking about Chris Gaines. It’s like an outline out of order. But you can follow the numbers. You can read in some ways a very small essay about the subject, in very linear fashion, or you can read it in the kind of spiderwebby form. Also, I just know that’s kind of how people read now. I’m cognizant of the fact that the internet has drastically changed how people consume information, how they want to consume information, and I actually thought that this would make the book easier for this new kind of person to read.

How much do you think about your audience when you’re writing?

There’s two parts to this. There’s writing and there’s publishing. Writing I’d do for free. Writing is fun. I get paid to publish. When I write something, you can’t really be in a vacuum, but I sort of imagine that I am. The reason I like writing books so much, as compared to magazine and newspaper writing, is that there’s so much more freedom, and you can actually write the essay the way it appears in your mind. So I do that, but then once I have the material, I know that its purpose is now different. Its purpose is to be a book, and for people to enjoy reading it. If people are going to invest money in this book, I want them to feel they got something in return. And to be totally honest, I’m very aware of the fact that if my books do not sell, I will not be able to keep doing this. That the only way that I can have this opportunity, to be able to do this thing I really like doing as a living. There’s got to be an audience for it. So once I get done with the writing, the publishing side begins when I start thinking of the structure of the book. When I start deciding what order the essays are going to be in, the lettering and numbering, that stuff, the interstitial chapters, that I feel is connected to the publishing side, and not to the ideas that are on the writing side.

I do feel like there is a certain act of will in becoming successful, even with a band like Nirvana, who you write about. Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt reading “Corporate rock still sucks” on the cover of Rolling Stone, but he still posed for the cover of Rolling Stone.

The driving aesthetic of that band was how uncomfortable they were with their success.

But no one has to be famous. Pearl Jam proved that if you try hard enough, you can actually get people to stop paying attention. They stopped making videos and practically stopped touring, and they really did disappear from the landscape for a while.

They did. Although by the same token, their music after Vitalogy just wasn’t as interesting. You’re totally right about Pearl Jam. I admire the fact that they almost made this conscious decision to be less famous. But it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if their fifth record had been like Ten. I don’t mean the songs would sound that way, but whatever songs they did resonated with people in the same way. I wonder if they would have had the ability to do that.

They’ve certainly gotten their audience back, but it doesn’t seem like the same people.

What they did, the thing that they have really proved, is that over time, if you use the machinations of culture to artificially expand your audience, that’s always going to disappear. It’s always going to go back down to the size that your audience really is. By always putting music out consistently, seemingly not betraying what their fanbase wanted to like, their actual fanbase is much larger than bands who technically seem more famous.

They play to much bigger crowds than, say, Katy Perry, even if they’re not on TV as much.

Because she’s successful for lots of different reasons. She’s successful because some people like that song “I Kissed a Girl.” Some people may not like that song, but they like the one about being hot and cold. Some people find that she’s very attractive. Some people find it very interesting that she’s dating that British comedian. All these different things are artificially amplifying her fame. Those things will disappear. Whereas Pearl Jam at one point decided, ‘We only want to be famous for music. And we don’t want anybody to have an opportunity to create a new reason for liking us.’

Their shows are very bare-bones compared to most acts playing arenas: no lighting effects, no video screens. There aren’t a lot of bands who just come out and play.

Because often you go to an arena show and that’s the case. If the band just comes out and plays, the assumption is you kinda got ripped off. Now, there’s the preconceived notion of what arena rock shows are like. We all have to understand when somebody says they’re going to see a show, there’s a real relationship to show business. When people have a memory of big arena shows, they rarely talk about the songs themselves. You talk to somebody who saw KISS in the ’70s, or Fleetwood Mac, or in the Drive-By Truckers song where they talk about going to see Blue Oyster Cult, he talks about the lasers. Those are the kinds of things that people remember about these experiences. So the actual experience of music itself tends to be seemingly not essential. Interestingly, for Pearl Jam, it is still the most essential part of their live act.

It’s interesting, because very few people who write about live shows seem to take that into account.

I did live reviews for eight years and it was frustrating in the sense of, ‘What do people want from the review of a concert?’ This is a one-time event, so basically here’s what they want: They want to know what the size of the audience was. They want to know how big it was. They tend to want to have some positive mention of the opening act, and if the critics felt how they felt about the show — which 85-90 percent of the time is super-positive, because if you only go to a rock concert two or three times year, the experience is a lot more fun than it is to a critic who goes to them all the time. That’s why any time you write about a concert, there’s going to be a ton — it used to be a ton of letters to the editors, now it’s a ton of comments on the site — any sort of negative take on the concert is very upsetting to people because the way they look at it, 90 bucks is a lot of money, and they bought two tickets, so that’s $180. They bought tickets for AC/DC or whatever several months in advance, and they waited a long time, and maybe they got a babysitter, and then they went to a bar with their friends before the show, and maybe they hadn’t done that in a long time, they reconnected with these people, they went and saw this band, it was awesome, and they really hate the idea of someone saying it was kind of boring, they played the wrong songs, I don’t like “Black Ice” or whatever. At one point, at the end of my tenure in Akron, I was wondering, “Why are we doing this?” And I sort of concluded that if someone’s doing a retrospective piece on the venue 25 years from now, or if one of the band members dies in a plane crash, they can go back and there’s a record that this happened. Nobody really cares if the show was good or not.

The downside of the extent to which the internet has made it possible for people to find others who share their specific tastes is that there are a lot of people who only want critics to validate their tastes rather than encouraging them to rethink them. Where does that leave you as a writer?

I don’t know if I should say this, but one of the things that drives me crazy about Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, even though that book obviously was more successful than all of my other books combined and it has changed my life in many ways — it’s probably the single best thing that has happened in terms of the conditions of my life. But I hate it when people come up to me and say that they love the book because they also hate Coldplay. That wasn’t the point. I was trying to illustrate how hating Coldplay as a way of dealing with this girl who wasn’t in love with me was fucked-up and crazy. And how people use culture in this way–we can’t help it because it’s so omnipresent–but it’s actually a way to misplace the feeling of being alive, placing it on something else. A lot of the things in that book did exactly what I was talking about. People felt validated. I like something, now here’s a book about it. Or I feel a little better about this. After Fargo Rock City, a lot of people, I couldn’t tell if they liked the book, or they liked the fact that there was a book about heavy metal that was popular. So I’m pretty cognizant now of the fact that if I really liked something or I really hated something that there’s going to be a percentage of the audience who’s going to respond to that solely on taste. People who really love soccer will never like my writing.

The book is essentially bracketed by essays that deal with David Koresh and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Is there that something that draws you to those kinds of figures?

A few people read the early drafts of my book, before it was even in galley form. One of the complaints they had was that there are too many qualifiers in those essays, that I am too often apologizing for writing about Koresh, or making it clear that I’m not actually a fan of Ted Kaczynski. But I left them in. And I left them in for two reasons. One is that I didn’t want to seem like I was trying to exploit the controversy or doing it for some kind of commercial reason. I think that audiences are pretty sophisticated about being able to deduce when a writer is trying to be controversial, and the internet has helped them become even more savvy about this, because that happens so often. So I thought I’d keep the qualifiers in, even if it makes the essay quote-unquote less successful in a literary context, because it seems as though the writer is nervous about his own perspective. I thought that was better than being controversial on purpose.

The other thing is that I didn’t anticipate that people would take my work as seriously as they sometimes do, probably because I didn’t anticipate that the audience would be the size and demographic it is. I imagined that they would be read by 5000 people almost exactly like me. So when that changes, I think it’s irresponsible not to be conscious of the fact that if I’m going to write these books in a way that’s going to put them in the mainstream culture, that you have to make sure there is some responsibility on the creator of the work. I was reading Revolution in the Head, this Ian MacDonald book about the Beatles. He basically goes through and talks about every single Beatles song. And one thing that really surprised me, and I read this after I wrote this book; I finished my book, I was reading this Beatles book, and he was talking about how the Beatles, and particularly John Lennon, enjoyed confusing their fans, especially over the last half of their career — all the “Paul is Dead” stuff. There’s one point where John Lennon misspeaks a lyric, he sings the wrong words, and he decides to leave it in, and says, “Oh, the pseuds will love that.” The pseudo-intellectuals will love trying to figure out what that could mean. What Ian MacDonald later says is that if the Beatles are the biggest artists in the world, then the fact that they seem to enjoy confusing people, some of the blame of, like, Charles Manson thinking “Helter Skelter” is about a race war, or the guy reading Catcher in the Rye shooting John Lennon — if you’re going to really enjoy the lack of clarity of your work, that confusing people makes it more interesting, you’re somewhat culpable when people get it completely fucking wrong.

So I just thought to myself, if I’m not clear about this, even if 99.9 percent of people know that I’m not supporting Ted Kaczynski, the .01 percent who might think, “Oh wow, I’m a young person, and this guy’s writing about a murderer, this guy’s really cool.” That’s the kind of person who then becomes Ted Kaczysnki. And even if it’s not someone misreading it and doing something crazy — obviously, I’m using the Beatles as an example. I’m not comparing myself to the Beatles. It’s a totally different thing. But I used to want to feel like if people misinterpreted a work, it was their fault. If some kid kills himself because of the song “Suicide Solution,” even though the song is not about committing suicide, it’s kind of on the kid. But as I grow older, I realize the song is called “Suicide Solution,” and kids are dumb. So I guess it was those two things: the fact that I didn’t want to seem like I was being controversial on purpose, and I also didn’t want to be controversial accidentally.