If You Must Blame Someone, Blame John Cusack

My brother daniel went to college at a small liberal arts school in New Hampshire and his Major was, and I swear I am not making this up, "Great Books." He's since gone on to achieve success in finance (or maybe accounting--he's never really been able to explain to me what he does), but he obviously still loves books and often recommends particular titles to me.

His latest suggestion is Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which I picked up yesterday. Now, I know "Book Clubs" are sort of lame and never really work anyway unless they involve Oprah. I've tried getting quasi-literary discussions going on this site before and it's never worked. But perhaps this book is different. It's a collection of meditations on Pop Culture and it's written in that breezy, Douglas Coupland-like style that's so popular these days (see, for example, this blog) and is what publishers like to call "very accessible", i.e. not hard to understand. So if anyone out there wants to read and discuss this book in the comments section, I'm all ears.

So far I'm about six chapters in. I became familiar with Klosterman a couple of years ago when I heard a radio piece--on NPR, of all places--about a game of sorts he created called "Monkees = Monkees" in which, as this book also recounts, you try to figure out "which television show is the closest philosophical analogy to a specific rock 'n' roll band" based on "a combination of longevity, era, critical acclaim, commercial success, and--most important--the aesthetic soul of each artistic entry." So Molly Hatchet equates to Petticoat Junction, U2 is M*A*S*H (mostly because they both got insufferably preachy toward the end), etc. This is the milieu in which Klosterman works. His publisher says that "countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one does it quite like Chuck Klosterman." If that's true, the generation for which Klosterman speaks--which by coincidence would also be my generation--thinks about Pop Culture more than all other possible subjects put together.

So far this book is greatly entertaining. I particularly like the chapter in which Klosterman recounts his trip to a gig in rural Virginia with Paradise City, a struggling but apparently very content Guns N' Roses tribute band. Mocking these guys would be easy, but Klosterman is actually fascinated by them and the whole "tribute band" phenomenon. He notes, with a certain amount of glee, that Paradise City, a fake version of Guns N' Roses, actually got just as good a response as the REAL version of Dokken who played the same venue a week later. His genuine affection for these professional pretenders is obvious. "Paradise City may not always look like Guns N' Roses, but they certainly sound like them; when I go to the bathroom and hear music through a wooden door, it's impossible not to imagine that this is how it would have sounded to urinate on the Sunset Strip in 1986."

Klosterman's encyclopedic knowledge of Pop Culture will probably amaze you, even if it's bound to fly right past you at times. This is especially likely if you weren't a fan of whatever his subject is. I got next to nothing out his chapter on the pervasive influence on young Americans of the MTV reality show The Real World, because I've never seen an entire episode of the show and don't know any of the people he's referring too (I don't "get" reality TV and I never will). Still, it's an engaging book, and "very accessible." And I particularly like his idea that blame for the romantic disappointments and failures of pretty much everyone under the age of 38 can be laid at the feet of John Cusack, or more specifically on Lloyd Dobler, Cusack's character from Say Anything. Read the book and see if you agree.