Loud Reading
FARGO ROCK CITY
(Scribner)
Once upon a time, way back in 1983, Chuck Klosterman, a skinny fifth grader living 65 miles south of Fargo, North Dakota on the family farm in extremely rural Wyndmere, made a revelatory discovery: his older brother's cassette copy of Mötley Crüe's second album Shout At the Devil. It had loud, speaker-shredding guitar riffs. It had vaguely Satanic lyrics. It allegedly had backward masking. It had a bunch of guys wearing makeup and shock therapy hairdos. In short, it had an aura of bad boy psychosis the like of which the kid had never before experienced. Young Chuck's life was NEVER THE SAME.
This book is the story of Klosterman's musical coming of age. It was the 1980s and what Klosterman calls glam metal was what little boys of all ages (well, those between 10 and 18) listened to. It was what they loved. It was certainly what Klosterman loved and, in fact, still does. To him, Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite For Destruction and the Crüe's entire 80s catalog are as relevant and meaningful as Nirvana's Nevermind. Probably more so.
Glam metal helped
an awful lot of kids
get through their
dreary lives.
This wouldn't be an issue if Klosterman hadn't grown up to be a rock critic. Now he's forced to defend the music he adores. Fortunately, he's able to do it in this well-written, highly entertaining and thought-provoking book. After all, with the exception of scholarly tomes like Robert Walser's Running With the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music or Chuck Eddy's wacked-out but useful Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, there aren't many pieces of literature on metal of any type, let alone the hair metal Klosterman favors. He saw a need and assuaged it. He even has his own nifty subtitle, A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta.
I can hear the snorts of derision already. I can imagine every person reading this shaking his head in dismay. "Why would anybody bother writing a book about Poison, Ratt and Winger?" you're asking yourself. "Why waste time on such trivial music? After all, that shit didn't mean a damn thing."
Not to you, maybe. Or even to me. But those records sold in the millions and they must have meant something to someone. They meant something to Chuck Klosterman, and still do. And the beauty of this book is that he's able to explain why without claiming the stuff is anything that it isn't. Klosterman's a smart guy—he knows the glam metal of the 80s was meant to be disposable, meant to shift a respectable amount of units and then disappear into the recesses of a young man's wild youth. But it didn't—for millions of kids, especially midwestern kids, glam metal offered a glimpse into a lifestyle those bored, spiritless farm sprouts couldn't imagine ever achieving. It may have been a fantasy world, but it was a fantasy Klosterman and the kids like him couldn't even conceive of, let alone aspire towards—until they heard Mötley Crüe or Poison. And while he admits that few, if any, of those millions of kids ever took the glam metal image so seriously that they saw it as something to emulate, he's adamant that it helped an awful lot of kids get through their dreary lives. That it meant something.
Changing minds
is not this book's
intention. Making
us understand is.
Which isn't to say he's defending it, exactly. For all his self-deprecating humor, he's clearly smarter than he lets on. He knows that to argue for glam metal's musical merit in comparison to other, more critic-friendly bands is a battle he'll lose (due more to indifference, if not outright hostility, on the part of his opponents than on merit of any counterarguments). Rather, he argues that this music stirred the hearts of its intended audience in ways other, later music has not. This may be as much because of the youth of the boys who consumed the stuff and he admits as much, but that doesn't make the effect any less valid. It bears repeating: for many, many Midwestern teenagers, especially males, this music meant something.
Ultimately, the heart of this book is less an argument that glam metal is good than it is an assertion that any music that moves you is valid. Rock critics, including me (hell, especially me) tend to forget that most folks respond to what moves them, whether it's their butts or their souls in ambulatory motion is irrelevant. We can talk about our latest obscure discovery until we're blue in the faces, but unless someone who's never heard the artist, never caught the buzz, never cared one way or the other, is moved by the music, it doesn't matter, at least not to that person. No matter how we argue otherwise (and I do, and I'll continue to), music is purely subjective, and if Warrant helped some kid get through his stultifying high school education and his crappy night job at the mall, we have to honor that. As much as the music itself might turn our stomachs. Klosterman recognizes that, and he articulates as much with insight and humor. That's more than most of us can say.
Reading Fargo Rock City didn't make me want to "rediscover" any of the bands he writes about.* I would normally consider that a failure in a book about music. But changing minds is not this book's intention. Making us understand is. And at that it succeeds brilliantly. Michael Toland
