Klosterman's debut makes a deeply earnest case for heavy metal as the defining cultural experience of growing up isolated and rural in the 1980s — arguing that the music wasn't escapism but identity formation, and that what looks like bad taste from the outside can be the most honest thing about a person.
Klosterman's first book, and the one where he figured out what he was going to do for a living. Fargo Rock City is a serious defense of hair metal — Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt, Warrant, the whole glammed-up late-eighties catalog that a certain generation has spent the last thirty years pretending not to have loved. Klosterman doesn't pretend. He grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, and this music was his. He argues that it was actually a good soundtrack for growing up isolated, that the bad taste people accuse it of was more honest than most coastal bands' good taste, and that dismissing it says more about the dismisser than the music.
The reason the book works is that Klosterman is not writing a defense in the academic-rock-critic sense. He's writing a memoir that happens to have a bunch of record reviews in it. The best passages are about what it felt like to be a kid in rural North Dakota with a cassette deck and four usable cassettes and absolutely nothing to do but listen to them until they wore out. That's the argument. The music wasn't escapism. It was the one place a teenager in a two-stoplight town could go to feel like his life was large.
Bring this book up at the river when somebody's looking down their nose at a cultural thing somebody else loves. Klosterman's framework is useful: the question isn't whether the thing is good, the question is what it was doing for the person who loved it. That's a better question, and it'll change how you have the conversation. It'll also make you more generous about the crew member who will not stop playing Def Leppard on the dry box speakers.
The writing is funnier than it needs to be, which is the Klosterman signature. He'll sneak a brilliant sentence past you in a paragraph that's ostensibly about Tommy Lee's drum kit, and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it. The book is also, quietly, a small classic of rural-American writing, because it takes farm-kid experience seriously without making it precious. That's rare, and it's one of the reasons the book has outlived the bands it's about.
Read it on a long drive out west. The soundtrack writes itself. And if you find yourself halfway to a launch with Cherry Pie unironically in the rotation, Klosterman has already forgiven you.
