Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility.I read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs when it first came out, and even though that has lingered in my mind for a decade now as a funny and interesting skewering of pop culture, I didn't pick up another Chuck Klosterman book until now; and I think it would have been better if I had let him remain in my memory as a funny and interesting guy. Finishing Killing Yourself to Live, I can only report that this book felt forced and pointless, and even if Klosterman went on to write the next big thing, I don't know if I feel like giving him another chance. Maybe in another ten years.
The concept: Klosterman's editor at Spin magazine decides that he should write something epic, and she sends him on a road trip to the sites of famous Rock and Roll deaths, despite the fact that he hates driving, has contempt for sightseeing, and doesn't care very much about these particular dead rockers. The article that resulted from the trip was reprinted in August of 2015 (as part of Spin's 30th anniversary year), and Klosterman felt the need to add an introduction:
This is the piece that (eventually) became the skeletal structure for Killing Yourself to Live, a book some people love and many people hate. The principal reason certain readers dislike that book is that they feel betrayed — they go into the process assuming it’s going to be about the locations where rock musicians died, and that’s not the point. Killing Yourself to Live is a memoir about all the spaces in between, and the relationship between the past and the present and the imagined. Thematically, it’s totally different from this original story, which is only about the places I visited (as opposed to how I got there).So, what actually happens in the book is that Klosterman drives to the various sites of crashes, ODs, and suicides, overtly searches for something metaphorical to tie these sites to higher truths, and arranges the road trip so that he can visit his family back in Minnesota and spend time with the three great loves of his life, scattered as they are across the country. He is so focused on these three women that he includes a longish imagined scene in which he is having an argument with all three of them in the car; each of them explaining why he's incapable of an authentic relationship; Klosterman himself getting the last word; of course. (And I suppose this is what he means by the book being about “the relationship between the past and the present and the imagined”?) In the end, he realises that these women explain his abiding love for KISS as they (and another, older, woman to whom he lost his virginity in college) represent the founding members of the “discometal” band, and he's able to extend the metaphor by explaining how every other woman he's had a relationship with is just like one of the other, temporary, members of KISS; including a one night stand that can be perfectly represented by Anton Fig (of Letterman's Late Show band) who sat in on one KISS track. Does that seem deep or even interesting to the average reader? Because that's the climax of his thought process here.
As a rock critic, Klosterman has expectedly strong opinions on music that he's not afraid to state as fact (Elvis only had one good song; Rod Stewart had the greatest male rock voice of all times; Eric Clapton was incredibly boring and a mediocre guitar player), and while he annoyed me with every reference to obscure bands, there were a few pearls in the muck (and I don't regret Googling “Camel Walk” by Southern Culture On The Skids; that's pure fun.) And I know that the subtitle of this book is “85% of a True Story”, but whether the following actually happened or not, it felt too cutesy to have included:
Flipping back and forth on the car radio between an “80s Retro Weekend” and an uber-conventional classic-rock station, I hear the following three songs in sequence: “Mr. Roboto”, “Jumpin' Jack Flash”, and a popular ballad from the defunct hair-metal band Extreme. Well, that settles it: Styx and Stones may break my bones but “More Than Words” will never hurt me.And I know my final complaint makes me look totally square – as I am, after all – but I could have done without all the drug use in this book. After explaining that the office of Spin magazine divides itself into the cocaine camp and the marijuana camp (Klosterman is in the latter and thinks of himself as superior for it), he's happy to do a few bumps of coke off his car key when it's offered to him at the site of the Great White tragedy; despite explaining that pot is nonaddictive, Klosterman outlines how to get a decent (and desperately wanted) high off of the “shake” in the bottom of his baggy with a car lighter and a plastic straw from the hotel lounge. And the following scene (a recounting of his only bad drug experience) reads like the medical report from a Rock and Roll overdose:
Having never taken Dexedrine before, I expected big things; unfortunately nothing happened. And since I was drinking beer quite heavily at this party, I decided to take two Ritalins as well. After I swallowed the Ritalin, the host of the party began serving some kind of elaborate rum punch, of which I consumed several glasses. Around midnight, a woman named Sharon showed up, and she told me she had a great deal of cocaine in her purse; not surprisingly, a few of us went into the bathroom and did rails of coke every twenty minutes for the next three hours. I also switched over to brandy and ginger ale, ostensibly so I'd be better at arguing. At 3:00 AM, someone decided we all needed to chill out, so everyone who was still partying stood around the kitchen and smoked four bowls of dope.This was only a “bad” experience because the coke left him depressed, the pot wouldn't let him fall asleep, and he was so dehydrated from the booze that his legs cramped up and he couldn't even cry about it. Yes, yes, I'm square, but a chapter like this doesn't make me say, “Right on dude, you so know how to party!”, it makes me say, “What a loser this guy is, mixing chemicals like DuPont.” I don't tend toward judging people who use recreational drugs (we're not talking about heroin or meth here), and I especially don't tend to judge people who write about drug use in books, but something about the way that Klosterman casually wrote about his frequent attempts to get high (while on the road, alone) seemed like he was daring the reader to react negatively; and I did.
In the end, I can understand why even Klosterman himself acknowledges that this is “a book some people love and many people hate”; and it's not because it's not the book I expected it to be: when he removed the point of it being about visiting the sites of rock deaths, Klosterman wasn't left with much of a point at all.
And for anyone who doesn't want to follow the link, here's Camel Walk:
