Fargo Rock City

If you had functioning ears during the 1980’s and lived in the USA, there is little chance you were able to escape the musical phenomena that bombarded the FM airwaves. Beginning with the release of Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil and ending with the release of the first grunge album (Nirvana’s Nevermind), which heralded the end of an era, the 80’s pop music scene was dominated by heavy metal music. As a middle and high school student in the 80’s, Chuck Klosterman was witness to it all. In this part memoir-part historical treatise, he traces the rise and fall of heavy metal music with tongue planted firmly in cheek. The result is an intelligent but hilarious analysis of the music, the individuals that made it, and the culture that spawned it and supported it.

Fargo Rock City is entertaining because Klosterman freely admits early on that heavy metal—especially the “glam metal” of such big-haired bands as Def Leppard, Poison and Motley Crue was not so much a work of musical art as an example of marketing genius—figure out what the masses want, and then deliver it to them in massive, loud, obnoxious quantities. And metal bands, Klosterman points out, were the kings of excess. “The late 70’s felt had felt the crunch of the oil shortage,” Klosterman writes, “By 1985, those days were over. America was back, and so was the sweet pleasure of gluttony. The explosion in hair (and fashion, and volume was the other side of consumerism.”

Klosterman’s appreciation of heavy metal is funny because it acknowledges how ridiculous it was but also treats it with complete sincerity, analyzing everything from the artists’ lifestyles to their musical ability and their lyrics. His funniest observations are sprinkled liberally into his most serious arguments—arguments which are often decades-old fights between music fans, such as the eternal debate about who is a better guitarist, Eddie Van Halen or Eric Clapton. Klosterman settles the dispute once and for all: they are both geniuses. They’re just different types of geniuses. “Listening to Clapton is like getting a sensual massage from a woman you’ve loved for the past ten years,” he writes, and in comparison, “listening to Van Halen is like having the best sex of your life with three foxy nursing students you met at a Tastee Freeze.”

Not everyone will agree with Klosterman’s pronouncements, but that’s part of the fun. The Beatles, he claims, were the most influential rock band ever, and that isn’t exactly a controversial statement. But his contention that KISS is the number two most influential will undoubtably raise hackles. The Rolling Stones may have introduced the attitude that rock starts were supposed to have, and Led Zeppelin the way they were supposed to act, but according to Chuck Klosterman, the members of KISS made the most indelible mark because they were rock stars. “The guys in KISS were walking metaphors for everything that came before and everything that came after,” he writes, adding, “KISS made a few million kids want to pick up guitars and pretend to be someone they’re not. And that is rock ‘n roll, 99 percent of the time.”

Perhaps the most humorous part of the book is Klosterman’s list of “desert island CDs”—the list of those works of heavy metal he would take with him if forced to leave civilization. And next to each CD, he includes the amount of money he would have to be paid to never listen to that CD again, just so you know how important each one is (or isn’t) to him. Among his choices is KISS’s Animalize, which contains the song “Burn Bitch Burn,” which, according to Klosterman, “is the closest [Gene] Simmons ever came to writing a straightforward joke song.” Its most memorable lyric: “When love rears its head, I want to get on your case/Ooh baby, I wanna put my log in your fireplace.” Klosterman also selects Warrant’s album, Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich, justifying his choice as “a yummy kind of vapid,” and he chooses Poison’s Open Up and Say…Ahhh! in part because even though “C.C. DeVille played lead riffs that even I could figure out (and I don’t play guitar),” he was “better at sucking than almost everyone in the world.” And he selects Def Leppard’s Pyromania for the list, despite the fact that it contains the song “Photograph,” which Klosterman calls “the best Journey song every written.”

“The great thing about rock ‘n roll is that it’s an art form where the audience is more important than the art itself,” Klosterman writes in his conclusion. “And the one thing I wanted to show with Fargo Rock City is that pop music doesn’t matter for what it is; it matters for what it does.”