[.ca] Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota (ISBN 0743406567)

How kitsch is our sincerity.:
My roommate lent me this book, which I believe he bought on a lark in Union Station (DC), to distract himself during the nine-hour train ride to Boston. I also believe he liked the book, though I'm not sure. It's an awful book. Maybe, if you're into heavy metal (or any of its derivative sub-genres, which requires pedantry of the worst sort to know), this book will appeal to you. Even then, I'd bet not. Musical taste isn't determinative here. No, it's something much more basic than that. Ultimately, writing style aside--and Klosterman's is brutish, equal parts Ben Greenman and Saul Bellow, i.e., leaden and sleep-inducing--obsessions over obsessive insignificantia of American Youth, circa 1984, just aren't that interesting. Worse, Klosterman probably doesn't think they're interesting either. But, oh, how it sells. Such is the hipster set. The pre-emptive "just kidding" is the most powerful marketing device of the last 15 years. Celebrations of the banal, studious glorifications of the arcane. Eat your Eggers, drink your This American Life. The diet of the regret-filled 34-year-old living in a gentrified 3rd-floor Brooklyn walk-up. Full disclosure, in light of the recent review scandals: I don't know Chuck Klosterman, nor do I try to get published anywhere, in any form. I think the ULA are small-time heroes, and Mark Ames was exactly right in his NYPress evisceration of Klosterman. Give me James Kunstler's deft, relevant prose or Michel Houellebecq's biting, angry fiction. It's time our generation became a little more serious, a little less sincere. Sorry, "sincere."

small town bustout:
As an '80's kid growing up in rural Indiana, there weren't a lot of ways to imagine the world outside. T.v. was stupid, the movie theater was forty minutes away, and even the local library wasn't all it was cracked up to be. My conduit for fantasies of a faster, more glamorous life was the radio. It was the same for Mr. Klosterman, as told in Fargo Rock City. The glam-metal bands of his time set out a full plate of crashing chords, easy women, and free-flowing booze. He (nor I,)never tasted any of those things personally, but the bands painted a vivid enough picture to focus on a better life in the wide world - after high school, when your mom could no longer dictate your hairstyle. This is a light read, certainly. Mr. Klosterman's book is meant as no more than a remembrance of things past. Even his dissection of what separates "poseur" bands from the "real rockers" is a throwback - what is easily recognized as rock marketing today could get you in fistfights with your Slayer-loving brethren back in '88. So scratch your itch for "serious" lit elsewhere - Fargo Rock City is meant for fun, and Mr. Klosterman does an admirable job of providing it.

Why yes, I am ready to rock. Thanks for asking.:
This is one of the best metal-related books I've ever read. It focuses on the 80's hair metal scene and it's affect on pop culture, as well as seeing how that music reflected the society of that time. It's interesting material, and it also happens to be one of the funniest books around. This book made me laugh out loud several times, earning me some interesting looks from my fellow metro passengers. Imagine all of the times you and your buddies have joked about Kiss's shameless self-promotion, Axl Rose's antics, or Kip Winger's teeth, and factor in some witty social commentary, and you have the spirit of this book. If you grew up with 80's metal, Fargo Rock City is required reading.

One of the best I've ever read:
Never having had the slightest interest in metal when I was growing up, I had no reason to pick up this book until someone I trusted actually sent me his copy. I've since loaned it to another guy who was into metal in the 80's and 90's. He says it was the first book to articulate -- in eloquent, common style -- what it was that made such a lowly regarded musical form so connective with kids, and how not to be ashamed of it as if it were some curio from the past. Having finished Fargo Rock City, I can't understand why anyone would be ashamed of it either. The book starts off as an apologist act, but eventually justifies hair metal alongside any other cultural movement that got "credit" from the critics. Klosterman's book is so persuasive and sure-headed -- even as it describes typical teenage doubt and identity crisis -- that it inspires both admiration and astonishment that nobody has tried it before. And after years of massive resistance on my part, it actually made me want to go and check out Motley Crue and Cinderella. And it's extremely, extremely entertaining. I don't laugh out loud much when reading books; by my count it happened about six times with this one. ANYWAY....

Big Hair, Little Substance:
With a title like "Fargo Rock City," and especially with a subtitle promising "A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota," I was excited about this book. I was psyched to read about what it was actually like to be a teen head-banger in the homeland of Lawrence Welk. Serenading the cows with power ballads in the milking barn? Starlit, wheatfield PBR-fueled dissections of Led Zeppelin album covers? However, there was not so much of that anecdotal gold as protracted, self-righteous, even (God forbid) *intellectual* defenses of glam metal, or hair metal, or whatever you want to call it. The genre, by definition, defies such analysis; I'm sure that David Lee Roth or someone similar would be the first to tell you that he was an entertainer, not an artist. So, what you get with this book is, unfortunately, not so much of an "odyssey" as a diatribe. What works in "Fargo Rock City" are the rural-life anecdotes that the author does choose to include, like his first slow-dance to a Poison song. What does not work are the attempts to rationalize the borderline-misogyny, faux-Satanism and other prevalent aspects of the genre, and to ridicule those who might actually find such aspects offensive. Worse still, the author seems to believe that those who generally would rather have listened to U2 and REM during the same era entirely lacked a sense of humor: I liked those bands, and others that seemed to have more than half a brain amongst them-- but I also thought that Ozzy, David Lee and some of the others were a hoot. The "darker" groups like Danzig and (later) Marilyn Manson were never really my cup of tea, but I certainly didn't look down my nose at those who chose to buy their records. It would have been a far better book if the author had quit hiding behind his rationalizations, but instead had shouted from the mountaintop (a difficult task in his exceedingly flat home state): "Hey, I freely admit that hair metal was really, really, stupid- but so what!" In the end, "good" music is whatever you like, nothing more: a sentiment that seems to be lost on the author.