Chuck Klosterman Book Report

IV IV by Chuck Klosterman is an assortment of eclectic anecdotes and interviews collected throughout his career as a journalist. The book itself revolves mainly around pop culture and perception. At first it may seem that every story in Klosterman’s book is very different in its own right; that is in fact true, but they also have quite a few similarities in regards to their themes. Perception is primarily one of the main themes throughout the book. The stories collected are of vastly different people who do different things, but they all somehow harmoniously intertwine to create one body of text. Klosterman himself is very opinionated and has his own perceptions of the celebrities he’s discussing. In the article Viva Morrissey! he perceives
the majority of The Smiths/Morrissey fans, at a Morrissey convention in Los Angeles, to be completely different people than who they actually were. More specifically, he thought he would be confronted by white Goth kids or maybe flower children derived from the hipster subculture; when in fact they were rockabilly Latino teenagers. The section revolves mostly around trying to analyze why young Latinos are so attracted to an effeminate British white guy “best known for reading Oscar Wilde and sporting his espoused sexuality on his sweater sleeve…” (48). People perceive Morrissey to have these typical gloomy white kid fans because of the type of music he plays.
It’s melodramatic and melancholy, which isn’t really what young Latinos are stereotypically in to. A twenty-three-year-old junior high teacher stated “…We see things within his songs that we can particularly relate to. He sings about loneliness. He sings about solitude. Those are things any minority group can relate to. (51)” She derived this assumption from the fact that Morrissey’s family immigrated to England from Ireland, and were socially segregated; similarly to most Latino immigrants. Then again, if it does have something to do with minority groups that can relate to certain music because of the songs of isolation and such, then why is it just the Latinos? They are of course not the only minority group to ever exist. Morrissey is a strange and eccentric person, people see him as vain and that he wants to alienate his older fans and wants nothing to do with them. He’s aware of his young Latino following and lets them know he appreciates them; he does so by saying that he wishes he was Mexican and other subtle gestures. The world may never know what Morrissey is trying to accomplish; all this makes him even more intriguing to young Latino
followers. Bands and musicians like Morrissey are strange characters, they are perceived by everyone to be one way or another. In the article No More Knives Klosterman interviews Radiohead, a diverse band from the U.K.; who are surprisingly smarter and more pleasant than Klosterman anticipated. Not that he thought they were dumb, but that they were what people actually perceived them as. More precisely what people perceived Thom Yorke as, which is, to put it simply, a jerk, or as Klosterman put it, “They will suggest that the likelihood of him speaking candidly is roughly the same as the chance of him unscrewing two bolts from his neck and removing his cybernetic faceplate, suddenly revealing a titanium endoskeleton that was built by futuristic druids.” (132) Implying that most people see Yorke as sort of a robot, stoic, and maybe even a bit boring, however he is quite the opposite. Thom is a strange person, Radiohead is a strange band, and their music as Klosterman puts it is “smart on purpose.” Their music is different, an anomaly of sorts, a mixture of different instruments and sounds that don’t really seem like they should mix well together but they do, and they do it harmoniously. The lyrics in Radiohead’s songs don’t seem to make much sense at first, but the reality is that they actually make complete sense. They have a different meaning to different people. According to Yorke he uses certain words because he just likes the way they sound. People try to find the true meanings behind Radiohead songs, but maybe there are no exact meanings; at least no intentional meaning. “Sometimes you can’t find the meaning behind a metaphor because there is no metaphor.”(140) Thom Yorke himself has a perception of what his music is, but it’s completely different than anyone else’s. Their album Hail to the Thief was perceived as a political record. Yorke claims that it’s not supposed to be political at all; that it’s actually a very sexy record. “The rhythms are very sexy. It’s where the beat falls. It has its own sexy pulse.” (142) People who’ve actually heard Hail to the Thief would probably disagree with the creators own opinion of his own album. So maybe Thom Yorke is just being funny? Is his strangeness all an act? When it comes to celebrities you can’t really tell what’s real and what’s not. For example in Klosterman’s article Mysterious days, he interviews U2, and spends a day with Bono. They take drive in his Maserati Quattroporte through Dublin. They at one point encounter some teenagers nearby and Bono “…opens the trunk and throws the teenagers bags inside. Suddenly, there are four pale kids climbing into the backseat of this car.” (23) This type of gesture leads people to wonder if Bono is actually sincere or if he was only doing it because Klosterman was there? Would he have still done it if there was no journalist present? Many people perceive Bono to be arrogant and cocky. He talks a lot and knows what he’s talking about. He’s incredibly self aware, he states at one point “I don’t think anyone who’s famous didn’t want to become famous.” Bono is famous because he wanted to be, he knows what he’s doing, but is it all an act? Maybe, but it’s all a part of his plan. He’s exactly where he wants to be. U2 has been around for a long time. They keep up an image that people want to see and they change their image when they know they need to. Celebrities remain something of an enigma, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s why people are so obsessed with pop culture because they perceive what they want to perceive. In Klosterman’s article Bending Spoons with Britney Spears, Spears seems almost oblivious, and she doesn’t see herself as a sexual icon. She’s just making music and having fun. There are no underlying sexual innuendos to her songs, it’s just simple good fun, but the rest of the world would beg to differ. Is Britney Spears really that oblivious? It might be just an act. Maybe Thom Yorke isn’t as strange as he seems, he probably sits around laughing at people who take him seriously. He’s smart though, he knows how to make music, and he has a technique. Bono has a technique, even Morrissey has a technique. Morrissey may not have been directly interviewed but it’s stated that he directly acknowledges his young Latino demographic, because they’re the ones that are giving him an actual career. Bono’s technique is to keep up the times; U2 will change their sound and their image if that’s what the people want. The way people perceive pop culture continues to vary. One thing is for sure, celebrities are strange, some are possibly unaware of what’s happening, and some know exactly what they’re doing. The world may never know who these people, who are hated and adored by many, are. It’s simply up to our own perception of what we see in the media, that’s all we have to go by.

Work Cited
Klosterman, Chuck. IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. New York: Scribner, 2007. Print.