Chuck Klosterman’s ‘Rock*’ is an exercise in fantastical pointlessness

It only weighs about a pound when you first pick it up, and yet Chuck Klosterman’s book Rock* was hard to lift when I went back to it. It grew heavier and heavier. It became a brick, then an anvil. Klosterman is one of my favorite nonfiction writers — our leading Gen X pop-culture critic. Yet I began to dread returning to it. I was tired. It was late. I had another assignment due before this one. I had to walk the dog.In short, I wanted to do anything rather than continue my reading journey, which amounted to a swim through wet cement. This is a bafflingly bad book, a work of pure exasperation that should not exist. It can hardly even be read. It’s similar to Finnegans Wake, a book that gives you nothing except a tour of the author’s cluttered-attic mind.I’ve read a lot of Klosterman’s nonfiction books (though not his novels) and enjoyed them all immensely. They’re frivolous on the surface, with aggressively lighthearted titles such as Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. But they burst with ingenious analysis and out-of-nowhere insights. Rock*, on the other hand, goes plop. It goes thud. Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music; By Chuck Klosterman; Da Capo; 288 pp.; $32.50 The full, headachy title is this: Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music. Got that? The premise is that, in an alternate universe, in 1967, the Velvet Underground, instead of the Beatles, became the defining force in popular music. The book catalogs the downstream effects visible in every precinct of the culture. The Upright Citizens Brigade might be able to get a 10-minute sketch out of the idea; Klosterman kneads and braids and stretches it out for 255 interminable pages that intermingle true facts, mostly of minute trivia, with fake history born of Klostermania. Example: The magazine that became Rolling Stone (which, as he notes, alludes to three different examples of rock lore) is, in Klosterman’s alterna-verse, instead called Velveteen. Instead of full-body dancing, shaking, and screaming, the thing for young people to do at concerts became to stand perfectly silent and still.The problem is that, even if you are a reasonably well-informed observer of pop culture, you are almost certainly out of your depth compared to Klosterman. I had to keep putting the book down to check which parts were true trivia to figure out which bits were jokes. You certainly can’t tell the jokes are jokes due to their being funny, because they’re not. For instance, I knew that Tom Wilson was the Columbia Records producer who added the electric guitars, bass, and drums to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” hence reviving two careers that were going nowhere. I also knew that Wilson was black. But I didn’t know that he went to Harvard, as Klosterman informs us, nor that he died of a heart attack in 1978. I learned a little, which is nice, but only because I looked up the relevant Wikipedia page. Klosterman’s deadpan style toggles back freely between fact and fantasy, and the mention of Wilson leads into a discussion of whether he or Andy Warhol was the main producer of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 album (featuring a Warhol banana on the cover) that was famously said to have sold only 10,000 copies, though every one of them was, according to legend, bought by someone who started a band.Trying to get to the bottom of this genuine controversy, Klosterman includes remarks attributed to Warhol in an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. The pop artist did indeed appear, I have just learned, on that classic boomer talk show. Cavett and Warhol were friends and neighbors in Montauk, New York. But I only know this because I looked it up, not because it’s possible to learn anything from a book that makes a smoothie out of real trivia and made-up trivia.Klosterman quotes Warhol as telling Cavett, “My name is on the record. I don’t know what that means, exactly, to have your name on the record. It’s my first name and my last name. Both names. Two names, but only one banana.” This does sound like the kind of thing Warhol would say. He was a runic little fellow, an art goblin. But did he say it, or is this one of Klosterman’s little fictional riffs? Google doesn’t deliver a match. Should I try some other deep-dive research method, given that ancient Dick Cavett shows might possibly never have been transcribed for posterity? Do I want to spend the next two hours watching Cavett and Warhol’s conversation to figure out whether the passage is facetious? Do I care that much? If it is fiction, is it even funny, given again that it’s exactly the kind of thing Warhol used to say?“The veracity of the riddle is further obfuscated,” Klosterman writes, “by ‘Wilson’s fatal heart attack in 1978, Reed’s murder in 1983, and Warhol’s death from gall bladder surgery in 1987.’” Everyone who picks up a Klosterman book probably knows that Reed — that’s Lou Reed, guitarist and lead singer of the Velvet Underground — was not murdered in 1983 or ever (liver cancer ended him, in 2013), but the other two deaths occurred when and how described. As it turns out, the Reed reference is part of Klosterman’s alternative history. Because the Velvet Underground was so much bigger than the Beatles in the Kloster-verse, it was Reed, not John Lennon, who was murdered; the Beatles, forgotten and forced to play small clubs in Eastern Europe, stayed together and even added Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney to the group. (Lennon was actually murdered in 1980, not 1983.)There’s an extended gag about how Creedence Clearwater Revival songs connected to the Vietnam experience (“Fortunate Son” appears in Forrest Gump) because John Fogerty wrote them as commercial plays to sell to G.I.s, inverting the usual claim that such tracks were “countercultural” not mainstream. There’s a creaky, tasteless, multi-page joke about how the New York post-punk band the Strokes secretly engineered 9/11. Also, Karen Carpenter lived and went on to marry Steve Martin. Thin Lizzy was hired to play the closing theme for Star Wars. MTV was renamed ROCKSPAN. Laughing at any of this?SALUTING AMERICA’S MOST AGREED-UPON BAND, TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS In one especially weird digression — if it’s fair to use that word for an entire book of digressions — the Velvet Underground is blamed for plummeting churchgoing (didn’t that also happen in reality?), but that trend led to a vigorous rebound that made rock fans seek out Christian meaning in unlikely places. One result is that they began to idolize U2 and Madonna as Christian rock. But … U2 really is driven by Christian imagery and worship, so what’s the joke? And while Roe v. Wade was not overturned in 1988, and not because of Madonna’s 1986 hit “Papa Don’t Preach,” the song genuinely is pro-life. It’s hardly absurd to imagine (some) Christians liking (at least one) Madonna track.Each page heaves with such tortured efforts to be funny. The sheer drab, voluminous pointlessness of the effort can’t be overstated. It stuns me to picture one of our most astute culture writers wasting his time on it. If this book were a classic rock act, it would be called Dead Zeppelin. Or maybe The Why.Kyle Smith is a film critic and columnist for the Wall Street Journal.