Chuck Klosterman: I am the music man

MT: My name's Matt Thorne. I'm a novelist, critic and occasional music writer. As much as I love your stuff, I disagree with some of your arguments and thought that it might be fun if I tell you what I like and what rubs me up the wrong way and you can call me an idiot and explain how I'm wrong and it'll be fun for everyone to read. Because we're going to be mainly arguing about music, I'd like to open the conversation by asking how you think your writing and music taste has developed over the course of your four books and also whether you could tell me what you think of these artists: Prince, The Fall, Sonic Youth, R Kelly, Jandek, Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Smog.

CK:We can certainly do this. However, I never really have a response to people who agree or disagree with anything I write. I view cultural criticism as a form of autobiography, so my opinions and thoughts are exclusively my own. As such, I probably won't dispute anything you say about my ideas. I think my writing has significantly improved over the course of my four books, but maybe it's actually gotten worse. Who knows? My most commercially successful book (by far) is Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which (among the four books I've written) is the one I like the least. As for my musical tastes... well, of course they have changed since I wrote Fargo Rock City. I wrote most of that book in 1998. Everything about my life has changed over the past eight years.

Prince is one of my favourite artists of all time. I don't like The Fall, but I don't dislike them as much as the bands they appear to have influenced. Sonic Youth is OK. I enjoy the video for "Teen Age Riot" a great deal; they seem like interesting people, although their social posture is usually depressing. R Kelly is one confidant lunatic. I don't have any especially strong feelings about Jandek, Bonnie "Prince" Billy or Smog, beyond my personal frustration over the fact that those are probably my girlfriend's favourite musical artists. Some people just kind of exist, you know?

MT: Thanks for agreeing to play along. While I appreciate what you say about cultural criticism as a form of autobiography, at the same time there's a difference between a book like Fargo Rock City, where you take a genre (hair metal) that has commonly been critically despised, and talk about the joy that the music of Kiss has brought you, and a collection like the new one, which brings together essays you've written for US magazines like Spin that have a huge cultural impact and reach an enormous audience, and celebrates bands like U2 or Radiohead who already reach a huge audience. I understand that when you're writing for a magazine which needs to sustain a massive circulation there is a pressure to put bands on the cover that already have a large fanbase, but, at the same time, for me, one of the most depressing things about the development of music magazines over the past 10 years or so is that the big magazines mainly cover the big bands, or run endless pieces about the Beatles. I realise this is getting away from your work a bit, so to pull it back together, my question is, when you're writing about Radiohead or Britney Spears or U2, what is your ambition in doing so? Is it purely autobiographical?

I mentioned the artists I listed at the end of my last email mainly because they all strike me as the sort of artists that have an independence of vision that U2 or Radiohead, say, don't. It also seems significant that Jandek was one of Spin's artists of the Eighties, but, I imagine, wouldn't get a look in today. I wonder what you mean by "some people just exist"? Does these artists' lack of commercial success render them irrelevant to you?

CK:As a fan, I am interested in what music sounds like. As a writer, I am more interested in the audience for art and what a record (or film, or TV show, or a book) suggests about the culture at large. I am interested in how people use their engagement with mainstream culture to understand their own lives, and I tend to write about entities that are interesting to me personally.

Your question implies that the media should somehow provide more coverage for someone like Jandek and less for someone like U2. That's interesting to me, because I don't see how anyone could argue that Jandek is an underreported cultural figure. I mean, here is this hermit-like outsider musician from Texas who rarely gives interviews, and self-releases difficult, non-commercial music, and yet we can casually discuss his relevance in a British newspaper interview. How does that happen?

MT: Not to turn this into an article about Jandek, but surely the reason you and I have heard so much about him is that almost all of the most interesting indie musicians of the past 20 years (Smog, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Cat Power, Royal Trux, Mountain Goats, Sonic Youth, Silver Jews, you name it) have had some connection or interest in him? As with The Fall or the Velvet Underground, his influence on musicians has been so big that it's almost irrelevant how many copies he's sold or not sold. Whereas U2 have inspired... what exactly? Coldplay?

CK:U2 have designed part of the soundtrack for the experience of living for millions of people, many of whom would not even define themselves as fans of U2 (or even as fans of popular music). U2 are a central component for the culture at large. Basing a band's influence solely on how much they influence other bands is crazy logic. Does Franz Kafka only matter to other writers who want to write like he did? Is Muhammad Ali's significance dependent on how many boxers attempt to emulate his style? I'm sure you've heard the cliché about how only 1,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but all of them decided to form bands. Well, 18 million people bought the first Boston record, and they all remained part of the human race. Who fucking cares if they started bands or not?

The one thing that people need the least from rock critics is the one thing rock critics are the most preoccupied with: taste. The only thing just about anyone can do is listen to a record and decide whether or not they like it. I have zero interest in tastemaking.

MT: I'm not entirely sure that it's true that you have zero interest in "tastemaking". The British pop critic Paul Morley wrote the following about you in a review of your last book:

"Klosterman is a North Dakota farm boy turned New York opinion deformer. He is dedicated to affectionately and/or aggressively subverting conventional interpretations of cool and credibility. Roughly speaking, not being cool is cool, give or take certain conditions he makes up as he goes along."

How would you respond to this?

CK:I would agree that I'm from North Dakota.

MT: Let me backtrack a little. I feel I haven't really got enough about your work into the piece. My editor is a huge Led Zeppelin fan and when she commissioned the piece she asked me to get some Robert Plant stuff in here, so were you disappointed when he was reluctant to classify his music as heavy metal and was disparaging about the hair metal bands that were an important part of your youth?

CK:Oh, Absolutely not. What's so great about Robert Plant is that he no longer cares how his thoughts are interpreted by writers; he basically just says, "You can think whatever you want about Led Zeppelin. I don't give a damn. I know the reality of what our motives were (and what our consequence was), and your perspective is arbitrary and meaningless." That was one of my three or four favourite interviews of all-time. He was really funny.

MT: My favourite essay in your new collection is the one about people who are "advanced". [Klosterman argues that certain artists reach a point where they often lose their audience because they've advanced beyond normal comprehension.] I love what you write about Liz Phair heading towards "advancement" as her music becomes harder for an audience to cope with, or how Lou Reed became advanced with his album Animal Serenade. In that essay, you really seem to define something accurate and true about pop culture. What inspired this "theory of advancement"?

CK:It's not my theory. I just explained the theory as it was explained to me. I'm still trying to figure it out in totality. But it's essentially a way to understand the nature of genius, particularly in situations where that genius is not self-evident.

MT: And finally, alongside the journalism, the new book features your first short story. Is a novel on the way?

CK:I hope so. I'm certainly trying. But fiction is difficult. Maybe I'll write a novel, but maybe it will be boring and forced and nobody will publish it. I've been incredibly fortunate over the past five years. I can't believe things have worked out the way they have. However, past performance is no indication of future returns. We'll see what happens.

To order a copy of 'Chuck Klosterman IV' (Faber £12.99) for £11.50 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897