Worn & Wound
Watches, Stories, & Gear: A New Chuck Klosterman Book, A Gorilla-Shaped Pencil Sharpener, and the Dumb Phone Argument Continues
Rock* by Chuck Klosterman I was first acquainted with Klosterman’s work when I was in high school, doing absolutely everything I could to seem cooler than everyone around me. I figured a book called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto gave me the street cred I was looking for among my Pitchfork-reading, Urban Outfitters-wearing peers. And you know what, dear Reader? It absolutely did. I haven’t thought much about Klosterman since around 2009, but his new book, Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music, sounds intriguing. The premise begins in 1967, imagining a world where The Velvet Underground & Nico becomes a massive hit and the Velvet Underground supplants the Beatles as the defining band of the era. The book runs roughly from 1967 through 2002 and is narrated by a fictional version of Lester Bangs who survives into the 21st century and becomes a successful older rock editor. Klosterman tells GQ writing it required him to first work out a conventional history of rock over that period and then “reverse engineer” it around the Velvet Underground’s altered success, accounting for how one change would affect everything that followed. Though I do have a mental allergy to most modern books (this is another pretension of mine, of course), I have to admit the premise is pretty intriguing. And anywhere that Nico is preferred over Yoko is a universe I want to live in. GorillaSharpener I have to be honest with you, I have mi...
