Rating: 
Summary: Chuck's take on 80's Heavy Metal--Like goin' to the Shrink!
Review: Here's a really great book about 80's Heavy Metal that takes the subject beyond the usual clichés. Chuck writes it from his perspective growing up in a rural town where these rock maniacs where part of his upbringing and served as a way to break free from ordinary "boring" life. Chuck delivers his opinions straight-up on how he sees things--and lists tons of bands in the genre that sucks and why! Like he say's a lot of the music was crap, but (with a big but!) the stuff that didn't --were amazing! From GNR to Van Halen to Mötley Crue read about their importance for kids growing up--at least get the authors take on it and bring out those records and cassettes again!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time or money...
Review: I have a different background and upbringing than Chuck Klosterman, but we are the exact same age. Much of what he wrote about in "Fargo Rock City" I can relate to: replace "Pyromania" with his beloved "Shout at the Devil" album when we were both young lads, and he might as well be describing the musical aspects of my early life. The early '80s were indeed a burgeoning time for up-n-coming metal bands, and Klosterman was correct in pursuing their history from a true metalhead's viewpoint. Laugh if you will, but the arena-ready acts Klosterman describes sold millions of records, and some enjoyed extended careers - 10-15 years, 5-7 albums. (Puddle of Mudd and Bush got nothin' on that!)ANYWAY, I have a dim take on this book; I didn't enjoy it, which is unfortunate because I was psyched to read it, based on the subject matter and glowing reviews up front (not counting Stephen King's accolade, since King has been known to love the CRAPPIEST of horror novels). Klosterman lays it all on the line. His style is severely rambling - thought to thought, group to group - but that's not even the biggest problem. I mean, I expected a rambling memoir about '80s metal when I bought the book. The author is passionate, no doubt, but passionate about what? I'm not sure even he could answer that question. The guy self-conciously changes his mind or condradicts himself nearly every other sentence, like some teenage girl who's worried what her popular girlfriends will think if she dates the class geek. (You know, like those Molly Ringwold flicks created during the years of Klosterman's discourse.) Many of the author's observations are absurd, and I suppose that's his right since it's his damned book. Nonetheless, calling Def Leppard "faceless" during their heyday makes no sense to me, and worse, the guy calls half of Nirvana's "Nevermind" album "filler" in a footnote. (Later in the book he praises both Kurt Cobain and "Nevermind" - see what I mean about contradicting himself?) The author claims to love rock music, which I certainly don't doubt, but simultaneously scoffs at CDs in their entirety, saying dics were invented for the masses to simply "skip ahead" to whatever one or two songs they want, then leave behind forever like so much pop culture trash. Such sentiments seem strange to me, given that Klosterman is an accomplished music journalist who has indeed talked with many famous musicians. I don't know. The author rightly puts down guys like Metallica's James Hetfield, who seemed to him humorless and ugly back when '80s metal was in full throttle, but to me, Chuck Klosterman himself is pretty humorless and mean spirited. I didn't find this book to be funny, despite its opinionated attempts to be so. Towards the end, things get downright depressing - and long-winded. He injects a dull teenage story about his ATM card, then later drinks himself into oblivion. (Yawn.) No one cares about other people who drink themselves into oblivion, especially incoherent writers with baseless, meandering, lame viewpoints that an eighth-grader could formulate. (Maybe Klosterman DID write this in the eighth grade!!) There are interesting takes on later '90s bands, including an astute insight into the mighty and underrated Stone Temple Pilots, but it's way too little, way too late. Simply being ironic, negative and cynical does not make prose interesting or funny. This book drips with insecurity on every page, and I guess that's what bothers me the most in the final analysis. Dude, if you liked Cinderella, shout it from the mountaintops!! Be proud!! Shout at the devil!! And with that, I leave you with this: "For time is on our side/For time is an essence." "Overture" - Def Leppard, 1980
Rating:
Summary: One of the best I've ever read
Review: Never having had the slightest interest in metal when I was growing up, I had no reason to pick up this book until someone I trusted actually sent me his copy. I've since loaned it to another guy who was into metal in the 80's and 90's. He says it was the first book to articulate -- in eloquent, common style -- what it was that made such a lowly regarded musical form so connective with kids, and how not to be ashamed of it as if it were some curio from the past. Having finished Fargo Rock City, I can't understand why anyone would be ashamed of it either. The book starts off as an apologist act, but eventually justifies hair metal alongside any other cultural movement that got "credit" from the critics. Klosterman's book is so persuasive and sure-headed -- even as it describes typical teenage doubt and identity crisis -- that it inspires both admiration and astonishment that nobody has tried it before. And after years of massive resistance on my part, it actually made me want to go and check out Motley Crue and Cinderella. And it's extremely, extremely entertaining. I don't laugh out loud much when reading books; by my count it happened about six times with this one. ANYWAY....
Rating: 
Summary: Chuck is a Rock God -- Honestly
Review: At first, I was a bit disappointed by the book and then I read the epilogue. Why wasn't it more of a memoir? Why was it filled with so much analysis? Then, I realized that isn't really the point of this wonderful book. Klosterman has made me a fan for life. What wins me over his unbashed honesty. I've long held that the lowest critic life form is that of rock critic. Klosterman calls them on their pretension. He hammers away at what I have always believed is that music is important if it touches you. My MP3 collection has Sinatra and Warrant. Who cares who is better, both form the soundtrack to important parts of my life. Klosterman tells some hilarious stories and his takes on music and life is so refereshingly honest that I can't stop smiling. He isn't mean or nasty--just tells it as he sees it. DOn't agree? That's ok. I learned more than I ever imagined about '80s heavy metal (some which I finally realized I liked about 10 years too late) and I suspect I would have gotten more out of the book if I had understood all the references, but I loved what I read anyway. Except for the passage where he compares the Gospels to GNR Lies, this book really does rock. Isn't that the most important thing?
Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: I spend about half my time thinking and writing about music and this is the best damn book I've read in several years. Nothing written about metal comes close. It deserves a place alongside Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul, Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music, and Gary Giddins Visions of Jazz at the very top of the list of the best books ever written about American music. Its obvious virtues are, well, obvious: it's funny, entertaining, and true to its subject. What's not obvious until you let it simmer for a while is how smart the book is. The discussions of what irony meant in the 80s, of the not-so-useful discussions of sexism in heavy metal, and the razor sharp "sociology" of the rural midwest ought to attract the attention of a ton of people who hate (or, mostly, think they hate) Van Halen, Motley Crue, GnR. Yet and still, the best thing about this book for me is that it took me back to some music I'd half-forgotten about and reminded me of why it spoke to me in the first place. If you love metal, you gotta read this book. If you don't, you still gotta read it.
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Summary: Big Hair, Little Substance
Review: With a title like "Fargo Rock City," and especially with a subtitle promising "A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota," I was excited about this book. I was psyched to read about what it was actually like to be a teen head-banger in the homeland of Lawrence Welk. Serenading the cows with power ballads in the milking barn? Starlit, wheatfield PBR-fueled dissections of Led Zeppelin album covers?
However, there was not so much of that anecdotal gold as protracted, self-righteous, even (God forbid) *intellectual* defenses of glam metal, or hair metal, or whatever you want to call it. The genre, by definition, defies such analysis; I'm sure that David Lee Roth or someone similar would be the first to tell you that he was an entertainer, not an artist. So, what you get with this book is, unfortunately, not so much of an "odyssey" as a diatribe.
What works in "Fargo Rock City" are the rural-life anecdotes that the author does choose to include, like his first slow-dance to a Poison song. What does not work are the attempts to rationalize the borderline-misogyny, faux-Satanism and other prevalent aspects of the genre, and to ridicule those who might actually find such aspects offensive. Worse still, the author seems to believe that those who generally would rather have listened to U2 and REM during the same era entirely lacked a sense of humor: I liked those bands, and others that seemed to have more than half a brain amongst them-- but I also thought that Ozzy, David Lee and some of the others were a hoot. The "darker" groups like Danzig and (later) Marilyn Manson were never really my cup of tea, but I certainly didn't look down my nose at those who chose to buy their records.
It would have been a far better book if the author had quit hiding behind his rationalizations, but instead had shouted from the mountaintop (a difficult task in his exceedingly flat home state): "Hey, I freely admit that hair metal was really, really, stupid- but so what!" In the end, "good" music is whatever you like, nothing more: a sentiment that seems to be lost on the author.
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Summary: Remember the '80s?
Review: At the very end of his Midwestern memoir/history of hair metal Klosterman writes: "Very often, I inexplicably embrace the same ideas I just finished railing against: Part of me wants to insist that heavy metal really _is_ stupid. I make fun of the same people who loved the bands I loved (and still do). Social pressure has made me cannibalize my own adolescent experience." This serves as a remarkably self-perceptive summation of the book, and highlights its main weakness. The book veers wildly from hyper-erudite wink-wink, nudge-nudge mockery of hair metal (Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Van Halen, Guns N' Roses, et al), to heartfelt declarations of its centrality of meaning to Klosterman during his teen years. The same tension pervades his next book (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs), and it's a shame that just when it seems he's ready to fully commit to an idea, he spends the next several pages tearing it apart. This makes for often hilarious reading, but is also in a sense cowardly. That said, it's a remarkably entertaining read, even for non-metal fans like me. It does help, however, to have grown up at the same time as him (graduating high school at the end of the '80s), and my reading was enhanced by memories of one of my closest friends having rather inexplicably been a hair metal fan at the time, right down to the Lita Ford and Skid Row albums. Right from the start, Klosterman links his heavy metal fandom to the utter boredom of his small-town surroundings (despite the book's title, Klosterman grew up in Wyndmere, ND and Fargo has pretty much nothing to do with the story). The fantasy lifestyles of hair metal bands were so far removed from rural life, and so predictably offensive to adult authority figures that there was a natural synergy with bored small town kids. This is hardly earth-shattering analysis, but Klosterman is presenting it from such a direct personal experience that it really resonates far more than any work of musicology or teen sociology could. The book unravels chronologically, presenting a sort of haphazard history of '80s hair metal. All the bases are covered (from roots influences like Sabbath, Kiss, et al), to hilarious analyses of album covers, videos, and especially lyrics. There's a lot of time devoted to explaining why some bands were considered metal and some weren't (such as the whole question of whether keyboards are an acceptable instrument for a metal band), and why some were classified into subgenres, and what constituted authenticity-all highly reminiscent of my teenage years in the hardcore scene. There's the required list of favorite albums, presented with the twist of listing how many dollars one would have to pay Klosterman to never be able to listen to the album again. Naturally, he addresses the charges of Satanism and suicide advocacy that the mainstream leveled against heavy metal and-as many before him have-utterly demolishes the notion. His take of heavy metal's sexism is that to criticize it is to miss the whole point: it's supposed to be outrageously sexist and offensive. While that may be true, it's also a clever way of sidestepping the issue altogether. One thing Klosterman does an excellent job of is reminding us (a scant 10-15 years later) how big metal was in the '80s, how bands like Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and especially Guns N' Roses dominated the charts. He blames the genre's decline on the rise of the "Seattle Sound" and Kurt Cobain's appearance on Headbanger's Ball in particular. Intriguingly, he points out that Axl Rose loved Nirvana and wanted them to open on the Guns 'N Roses / Metallica tour. Throughout the book, the prose is liberally scattered with the pop culture references Klosterman is known for. The danger in this is that he occasionally misses something you would think he'd know (for example, I'm surprised that in his mention of Junkyard he didn't note that their guitarist was in the wildly influential DC hardcore group Minor Threat), and occasionally errs (his definition of straight-edge is inaccurate, which is disappointing from someone who makes a living showing off his pop culture chops). I'm sure metal fans could do a good job tearing the book to shreds, but for the rest of us, Klosterman's done a very credible job of showing why metal was such a big deal to so many people back in the '80s. For all the book's flaws, it's hard to imagine a more readable account of heavy metal.
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Summary: And I didn't even listen to heavy metal (in public)
Review: Chuck Klosterman's book of heavy metal criticism is really a book about himself. He reveals, by writing about the music he loved growing up, all the attachments teenagers make to the music they glom onto. As a teen growing up a few years before Klosterman, I was much more likely to be listening to Whitney Houston and, later, Crowded House and old Fleetwood Mac. (See, you don't have to be a heavy metal / glam metal / hairband fan to be embarrassed about the musical choices made as a teen. Especially Whitney Houston.) Still, I couldn't deny the power of "We're Not Going to Take It", "Livin' on a Prayer", or "Sweet Child O' Mine". While I looked down my nose at those who had the AC/DC posters in their bedrooms or wore their Rush T-shirts, I can now see that they, like everyone else, were just finding a niche and a passion to make those years bearable. Klosterman is revealing himself - where he's come from and where he's arrived. The loss of his innocence seems to coincide with the rise of the Seattle sound (or, as he puts it, Sasquatch Rock). Perhaps my story could be told similarly (except my innocence would coincide with Whitney marrying Bobby Brown).
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Summary: Very funny autobiography/rock criticism book
Review: "Fargo Rock City" is an autobiographical look at how the heavy metal bands of the 80's affected the author, Chuck Klosterman, during his youth in North Dakota. It consists of a lot of rock criticism, defense of the heavy metal genre and unsparing self-revelation from the author. It is also very funny throughout. I freely admit that I really enjoyed "Fargo Rock City", but that I am biased because I am the same age as Klosterman. Even though I wasn't a big heavy metal fan in my youth, I'm still familiar with the bands he talks about and picked up most of his cultural references. If you don't remember seminal releases from Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, or Guns N' Roses, groups which are discussed extensively in the book, "Fargo Rock City" may not be that fascinating for you. Nevertheless, you can still enjoy Klosterman's funny stories (e.g. about trying to maintain his hipster credibility while his CD collection contains material from widely mocked hair bands like Poison and Warrant) and his analysis of the bands of his time and how they were slain by their flannel-clad successors. "Fargo Rock City" is an entertaining counter-argument to the convential rock criticism of 80's metal from a fan who grew up on Ozzy and Crüe. Klosterman is likeable and self-deprecating but also opinionated and knowledgeable -- the right combination for a rock critic. I thoroughly enjoyed "Fargo Rock City".
Rating:
Summary: We need more books like this one
Review: This book is great because it's so personal. If you don't like 1980s heavy metal, you should read this the same way you'd read about tribal customs in central Africa or Irish pub manners --- a first-hand account of a subculture. And if you like that kind of music (like me), it's fun to read about someone who shares your guilty pleasure listening to Kiss, Motley Crue, and Judas Priest. Klosterman is good at blending his own life with his commentary on the pros and cons of the music, the antics of the bands, the videos, and the concerts. This book is easy to read and sincere.
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