If you've never heard of Chuck Klosterman, I'm about to do him the favor of spreading his fame a little farther.

Chuck Klosterman writes essays about music and popular culture. He writes these from the perspective of someone who grew up in North Dakota and listened to various forms of metal, before developing an appreciation of other strains of rock n' roll. He then peppers his perspectives with metaphysical philosophy wherein he tries to show how some seemingly insignificant song or artist relates to the Big Picture of contemporary society. If that sounds dry and boring, that illustrates why Chuck Klosterman is getting famous and I'm not.

During my weekly or bi-weekly trip to Barnes & Noble I saw one of his books and picked it up and leafed through it. I read a few paragraphs of an essay about a cruise where the customers pony up big money to see bands like R.E.O. Speedwagon in a Love Boat setting. "What I realized," Klosterman wrote, "was that there is an audience out there that thinks bands from R.E.O. Speedwagon's time know how to play, and bands today don't, and they're willing to pay big money to see that." Actually that was a paraphrase from memory, not a real quote. It interested me that someone was writing with such enthusiasm and at such length about things most people consider juvenile and stupid and don't waste one brain cell thinking about. I was bemused, but put the book back on the stack.

Then recently I posted Don's essay, "Growing Up Metal." When I told Don I thought it was one of the best-written things I'd ever read, he said, "Can you tell I've been reading Chuck Klosterman?" There was that name again!

So I looked him up. Chuck Klosterman seems to be on fire with popularity to...somebody. The thing is, I can't figure out who. I can't figure it out not because of sour grapes (well, maybe partially), but because I tried music journalism for awhile, and in my experience, most music fans are waaay too dumb and/or disinterested in mental activity to read anything like what Chuck Klosterman is writing.

Back when I was 19 my band, the legendary Zen, made fliers for a show we had coming up and took them to the mall. We had thoughtfully included the words WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN in bold letters, followed by the relevant info. Despite this we found we the first questions a potential fan asked were, "So, what is this? Where you guys playin' at? When?" Check the bold letters, shithead.

Then I started a fanzine. A guy who contributed photos told me, "I don't know how many people want to read about music cuz, I mean, when I read something, it's got to be something like American Photographer where I can learn something from it." I figured he was saying this because we were in Atlanta, a city where the big radio show is a guy telling you to clip coupons and pay for things in cash, not credit. Everything has to have some sort of dry, pragmatic angle to it. You can't judge anything's chances for success by what a bunch of dullards in Georgia think!

Later I wrote a few things for a national jam band magazine, things that drew such a response that I could've been a contender, on the brink of Chuck Klosterman-level fame. But to my amazement, the reader letters that came in were rife with bad sentence structure, bad punctuation, and a disregard for spelling. And those only came in because I had written something that directly insulted the audience. When I wrote something more "normal," less incendiary, the letters slowed exponentially. If I had written, "There's the hard reality, that we're in this room and there are walls and a ceiling, and then there's the soft reality, created by the interaction we all have in here together," like Klosterman says at some Q&A session on YouTube, well, I can't imagine most of those rock fans could even make it to the first comma.

So hats off to Chuck Klosterman and his big success, even though he's over a year younger than me. I just can't figure out where he's drawing this audience. Maybe it's because he resembles Trey Anastasio.

* I finally accessed one of Klosterman's books on Google Reader. Man, this shit is boring! That's not sour grapes, that's a fact!