Why Things Become Popular With Chuck Klosterman

In the following excerpt, Derek and Chuck Klosterman discuss “critics bands” vs. “commercial bands” and how the music industry has changed over the last few decades.

Derek Thompson: So your new book is Rock* with an asterisk because it is an alternative history of pop music. Where did this crazy idea of writing an alternative, which is to say fictional, history of music come from?

Chuck Klosterman: I don’t think there is any singular inception point. It was just the kind of thing for 25 years that me and various friends of mine have often joked about where we talked about music so much that at some point you have to start talking about things that didn’t happen or could have happened. And I can’t really answer the question. I think that the question almost suggests there’s something I’m trying to really prove with this. And what I’m mainly trying to do is just make a book that is entertaining and funny for people who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about music and maybe have run out of ways to think about it in a way. It was just a fun thing that I was compelled to do and I don’t really know why.

Thompson: There are all sorts of alternative histories that you could have written here. You could have elevated any number of bands of sub-Beatles fame to super-Beatles fame and said that they’re going to be the new sun around which the solar system of the music world revolves. Why did you choose The Velvet Underground & Nico, that album?

Klosterman: Well, see, I don’t think there was a bunch I could have chosen. I think it had to almost be this one because in my view, The Velvet Underground are kind of ground zero for the idea that there are critics bands and bands for serious music inside people. And then there are commercial bands for the world at large and there’s this chasm and that has over the last 20 years, has actually sort of come together. You see less of that now. But through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, there was this dissidence between the meaning of things that were very popular and things that seemed to be more avant-garde, or art-based, or almost consciously cultic. So I think it really had to be them. I mean, you could argue this book doesn’t work as it is, but it wouldn’t have worked with anybody else. It had to be them.

Thompson: Why do you think that chasm closed? I know where you’re going with this, but I’d love to hear you unspool this a little bit, this idea that there used to be a valley between the critics bands and the commercial bands. And over time the tectonic plates of moves that that valley has shrunk, and shrunk, and shrunk, and now it’s just one big poptimist plane. Why did this happen?

Klosterman: I think that it probably had to do sort of with the decline of the traditional music industry or what we talk about as the music industry, the idea of going back to a singles-based world as opposed to an albums-based world. It’s just very clear now that the bands that a critic is going to write about is most likely the biggest band possible. I think we can all recall a time when the idea, it’s like, well, you would not take Foghat as seriously as some artist from the ’70s, Laura Nyro or somebody who’s doing these supposedly more meaningful work. And that doesn’t really … The New York Times is much more likely to write about Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or something than the idea that there is this music that you might not be hearing about that’s real important. They’re almost more talking about the cultural impact of things as opposed to the thing that it actually is. Yeah.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Chuck Klosterman
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman