Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman

Dur­ing unend­ing hours in the back of a con­ver­sion van and brief respites on land in Cana­da I read Chuck Kloster­man’s Far­go Rock City. This book was rec­om­mend­ed to me by Nate Scheible dur­ing a dis­cus­sion out­side of Parish Hall while wait­ing for a noise show to start and over a few Com­modore Per­ry IPAs. He found out that I was a met­al fan of old and rec­om­mend­ed that I read it.

The book’s essence is how glam-met­al [bands like Möt­ley Crüe, Poi­son and Cin­derel­la] gave Chuck an entrance into the wide world out­side of North Dako­ta. His point is, that no mat­ter how derid­ed glam-met­al was, is and prob­a­bly ever shall be, since it was an impor­tant part of the growth of a gen­er­a­tion it should­n’t be. Now, this was­n’t the kind of book I was hop­ing it would be. I hate glam-met­al. To me there is noth­ing real­ly met­al about dudes with with flam­ma­ble hair nanc­ing about in span­dex and singing about bang­ing. That’s fine, but it’s not met­al. I’m more of the Iron Maid­en, Metal­li­ca, Megadeth, Slay­er, Ozzy fan for first-gen met­al and Pan­tera, Anthrax and oth­ers for sec­ond-gen. I hate nü-met­al, [Korn, Linkin Park, Limp Bizk­it] and tech­ni­cal-met­al noodlers like Yng­wie Malm­steen and Mastodon don’t do much for me either.

So basi­cal­ly, like every oth­er met­al fan, I’m a huge jack­ass about what I like.

Chuck­’s book is good, although he men­tions fly-fish­ing for wall­eye, which I think, while not impos­si­ble, is utter­ly inef­fec­tive. ANYWAY, there are digres­sions, tan­gents, anec­dotes and the sore­ly desired lists and name-drops of ran­dom bands to dig for, but mixed in with all of this is some excel­lent­ly pen­e­trat­ing com­men­tary on both met­al itself and its place with­in the zeit­geist of the 80s and 90s. These are the best parts. The most inter­est­ing parts of the book came at the end for me; when he got away from the hair and Axl Rose and start­ed talk­ing about what qual­i­fies a band as met­al, what bands are car­ry­ing on the met­al torch [still, for him, in terms of glam] and how grunge killed it off.

He’s good at putting things in con­text, giv­ing depth to what appears to be shal­low­ness and rub­bing his the­o­ries against pos­si­ble crit­i­cisms to see what holds and what tears. He does some straw-man­ning, but hey, he’s a jour­nal­ist. The book is often hilar­i­ous, as when he lists the kind of women each band likes to fuck, and geek­i­ly earnest, as when he lists his favorite met­al albums and how much you’d have to pay him to nev­er lis­ten to it again.

One area I think he missed out on was talk­ing about Euro-met­al and its con­tin­u­ing mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty over there. That’s prob­a­bly a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent book though. If you’re even a slight fan of met­al, or a fan of 80s glam or some­what ana­lyt­i­cal dis­cus­sions about Tawny Kitaen hump­ing a Corvette, this is the book for you.