This was one of the first books I purchased once I branched out from Stephen King and Expanded Universe Star Wars novels in high school. It had an enticing title (especially to a teenaged boy) and it contained many hipster insights which, years later, would have me questioning if I read them in this collection or heard them from some drunken pretentious friend-of-a-friend scene kid at a house party at which my band was playing.

I haven’t reread this, but I got curious a couple nights ago if I still had it. I do. And I wanted to confirm if a quote I spontaneously recalled—speaking of Star wars—was indeed from this collection. It is. And it is as follows, from the essay Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth:

In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.

Millennials and Gen X-ers, help me out. I’d provide further context, but there isn’t any. Was this statement supposed to mean something? Was it an early ingress of the soon-to-be dominant LOL so random brand of humor (remember eBaum’s World? PeAnUT bUtTeR JeLly TiMe!!)

The only link I can draw is that Jeremy Bulloch played Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy, and Pearl Jam had a song called Jeremy. Is that the extent of the cleverity on display here? Why has this one line about one of my favorite fictional characters and one of my not favorite ‘90’s bands stuck with me so long? Why does it haunt me so?

this is exactly the kind of book so-called hipsters cling to, namedrop, and reference when they gather together dressed in their bright eyes t-shirts, black-rimmed glasses, jeans, and chuck taylors. you know the type, the 'i'm-cooler-than-you-are-because-my-tastes-are-better-than-yours.' you know who i'm talking about? good. continue.

what initially drove me to read this book was his opening 'essay' in which chuck klosterman refers to coldplay as a facsimile of travis who was a facsimile of early-period radiohead or some other band i don't remember. i loathe coldplay, so that made me laugh. i was hoping for more of the same. boy was i in for some disappointment.

instead of some clever or comedic insight, we get pretty some pretty vapid 'analysis' of 'saved by the bell,' pornography, and well, i really don't remember what else (that's the impact this book had on me). klosterman just tries way too hard to extrapolate meaning and signficance out of the banal of subjects. sorry, chuck, but 'saved by the bell' was just a geeky, silly tv show for kids, nothing else. don't read too much into it. really. don't. sure, i get it that hipster-wannabees like to discuss the cultural relevance of pop-culture phenonmenons, but why [aside from stroking the old ego]? does it really matter? i guess it does for some people, but i'll never understand why.

i have to admit that sometimes klosterman does write the occassional zinger [but he's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is]; but most of the time he comes off sounding like a poor man's douglas coupland, he who wrote the two definitive 'gen-x' novels, 'generation-x,' and 'microserfs.' one page of either of coupland's books shames any of klosterman's 'essays.' also, i don't know who served as his editor, but most of the essays, while occassionally interesting, where shambolic, rambling, poorly organized, and frustratingly unrealized. klosterman would be well-served to get himself an editor capable of keeping him on track and keeping him focused.

in the end this book a sometimes pleasant diversion from the rigors of everyday life, but it is little else. it's not hip, it's not clever. instead, justlike it's titular reference point, 'sex, drugs, and cocoapuffs,' is a sugar-coated book with little substance or nutritional value.

I found myself arguing with Chuck Klosterman a lot as I read these extremely entertaining essays. He likes to take a premise and run with it, and you find yourself going along for the ride, only to realize at the end that you don't agree with what he just said. Girls love the false romanticism of Coldplay, and that ruins relationships in the real world? Hahahahaha!!! Uh, wait... really?
It was when I got to his essay on journalism that I realized his essays followed the pattern he outlines there - get a starting idea, and build your story from there, without additional quotes or research, because there's no time for it.
And sure, informing his reader is not the point, he's not trying to be Malcolm Gladwell, he's trying to be ironic and amusing, and succeeding. And why not, if you can write as humorously as Chuck does about The Real World , ironically hip t-shirts, the popularity of country music, or mix tapes and John Cusack.
This was my first Klosterman book, and I enjoyed it a lot, although it was a little strange to read this right after having just read David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster And Other Essays. I kept wondering where all the footnotes had gone... ;)