Chuck Klosterman is best known for his work as a music journalist and pop cultural critic, having worked for “Spin,” ESPN.com, and authoring books like “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs,” and “Fargo Rock City.” Klosterman will come to campus tomorrow to discuss popular culture and his life as a critic, The Daily Bruin’s Devon McReynolds spoke with Klosterman about growing up in North Dakota, the current state of culture and the media, and interviewing ornery celebrities.
Daily Bruin: How did growing up in North Dakota influence the way you looked at pop culture, and how do you think it would be different now, especially given the fact that the Internet can reach people anywhere? Accessing pop culture isn’t limited to big cities.
Chuck Klosterman: When I was growing up there, it didn’t seem weird to me. It actually seemed like I had a lot of access to media. … I realize now as I’ve gotten older the advantage I had coming from North Dakota was that the only sort of culture I was getting was the most mainstream stuff. … And because of that I thought about stuff like the band Poison or really blockbuster-type movies and mainstream television, I thought about that the way other people or critics were thinking about fringe culture. When I became an adult I was able to understand the meaning of populist culture in a way that was more realistic than the other critics. I think that if I had not been raised in North Dakota, my writing would have been similar to everyone else’s.
DB: So how do you think the media has changed since you were growing up in the 1980s?
CK: The biggest thing about how the media is now is that there really isn’t a dominant mainstream culture anymore. Everything is sort of a niche culture. The most mainstream thing, musically for example, would be “American Idol.” It’s incredibly easy for someone who’s interested in rock and pop to never watch that show or know anything about any of the other people who are on it. … So a lot of what I have done with my writing has sort of been to think critically about art that was generally considered too popular to be meaningful. … Nobody would think about “Saved by the Bell” in a serious way. It just seemed like something the critical community assumed dumb people consumed. I don’t know if it’s like that anymore. If I was 19 or 20 now, I would probably be blogging. I don’t know what position I would have adopted. I don’t know what the adversarial position is now.
DB: In your final column for “Spin”, you said that the Internet has made people more boring. What did you mean by that, and do you feel like that’s changed in the three years since you wrote that?
CK: Any technology has a huge benefit in the short term, and a detriment in the long term ““ that’s … anything that’s a media-driven technology. At first it’s going to be good because it’s going to give people more access to things they couldn’t experience. Over time, it’s going to change the way people experience those things. The intial idea with the Internet is it’s going to make media, and by extension, the world more diverse. It’s going to allow more people to express themselves, get their opinions into the cultural bloodstream, and it was going to make the world more different. But what it has done sort of is created more of a monoculture in the sense that when I troll around the Internet, I’m shocked by how similarly people on the Internet tend to write and how similar their opinions are … I think that actually the Internet has done the exact opposite for what people thought. It’s actually made America more the same.
DB: In what ways did your hard news experience in working for a daily newspaper inform your later critical writing and music journalism?
CK: The biggest benefit to working at a newspaper is very often; in fact, most of the time, you’re writing about things that don’t naturally interest you. You just get assigned something, or news happens, and you’ve got to cover it. One of the mistakes (young writers) they make, is they only want to write about things that they already like or already understand, or already feel like they’re an expert in. Because of that, they think about it in a very dogmatic way.
DB: You’ve given advice to younger journalists to ask hard questions when you’re interviewing people. Could you expand on that?
CK: This is particularly true with celebrity journalism. …. A lot of people when they do this, they tend to make one of two mistakes: They either try to become friends with the person they’re interviewing … and the other mistake they make is that they just ask all the questions that they think a journalist is supposed to ask. … When I’m interviewing somebody, I know that it’s a very inorganic situation. We’re only meeting because I’m a journalist, and they’re only there because they’re promoting something. I just think to myself, what’s the only thing I actually want to know, and I ask it immediately. I don’t mind if there’s a little tension in the interview. …. When I’m interviewing somebody I want it to be clear that I’m interviewing them. I’m not promoting them, I’m not excited to be meeting them even if I am.
DB: But I’m sure you’ve had to interview some sensitive, prima donna type of celebrities who may not enjoy being asked a tough question. What do you do if they take offense to a question you asked and how do you keep that interviewing going?
CK: Honestly, that never happens. Sometimes the person anticipates that the interview is going to be really softball, and then if you ask hard questions, they’re not offended by the questions, they’re offended by the fact that they misinterpreted what they thought it was going to be. …. If you ask them a real question … ultimately I think they respect the writer more.