chuck klosterman coldplay essay

Where do I begin with this book? Its oddity, obscurity, (and so funny) amazingness is endless. Things that you didn’t know were essay-worthy is indeed essay-worthy after a churn through the high-speed brain of Chuck Klosterman. He is sharp, he is funny, and his writing fluctuates between poignant awareness of pop culture to scathing diatribes of modern behaviors, all of which is thoroughly entertaining. He gives significance to the mundane. In the first essay of this collection, This Is Emo, Klosterman writes for the Common Man – the nerd, the dork, the underdog! How does someone like that find love in the overly competitive mainstream world for hot chicks (or any chick for that matter)? He writes: I notice that [Americans] all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I’m going to blame John Cusack. The inauthenticity of these media templates of “authentic love” is what Klosterman is getting at. And he launches into music too: Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first US appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I’ve ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where.
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Sign in with Facebook Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman 53,366 ratings, 3.75 average rating, 3,093 reviews Open Preview See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. Problem: Details (if other):   Thanks for telling us about the problem. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs Quotes (showing 1-30 of 74) “But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I'm going to blame John Cusack.” ― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto “Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that.