Fargo Rock City

I read Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs about three months ago and found that it is more than just the bit of cultural commentary that I expected. It is a book full of witty, almost ramblings that really do work best when being read after midnight. To me though, the best part of the book was the way in which Chuck Klosterman provided bits of his experience, not as factual experiences, but more like feelings of the past. I honestly wish I could have been his friend getting drunk watching The Real World with him back in the day.

In the hope of finding more of this companionship I went to his previous work Fargo Rock City. Here he seems to be out to prove something that I had no idea was a real problem. People think heavy metal from the pre-grunge era is stupid. He then unfolds an argument that seems to be saying, "Yeah, so what?" In this he is successful. His point is not to prove that the music he grew up with is stupid so much as it is to say that music doesn't have to mean anything as long as it is meaningful to someone who hears it. This was glam metal.

I am not really a metalhead, but I surprisingly recognized most of the bands and songs he talks about within this book. While at first it might seem like he didn't do that much research into the metal scene for the book, really he only wanted to talk about the music that touched him. This is why you cannot read this as a history of the genre so much as one guy's look back on his life and how music affected it.