The Klosterman Files : Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs

This is going to be complicated.

I suspect the ideation, writing and publication of Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs weren’t complicated at all. It is Chuck Klosterman most resounding success and the reason why he is who he is today. This never happens without a certain amount of easy decisions. Things that come naturally and are easily loved tend not to be overthought. The result is an organic and thematically loose portrait of what it meant to be an adult in 2003, analyzed through the pervasive influence of pop culture in our lives. It has moments of sheer brilliance and some idiosyncratic dead ends too.

The world Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs was written in has disappeared at long time ago. Some of the essays explore moments in pop culture that are largely forgotten today. For example, Ten Seconds to Love is about the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape and how celebrity has become conceptual in modern America. Klosterman establishes an outrageous, but accurate parallel with the Marilyn Monroe-Joe DiMaggio couple, stating that celebrity has upstaged success in collective consciousness. It was largely prescient of 2020, although it discusses marginal figures.

Pamela Anderson hasn’t worked in anything relevant for over a decade and Tommy Lee survived as a footnote in popular culture because of the Mötley Crüe biopic, but they were trail blazers for a brand of celebrity that is prevalent today. The line between being success and popularity has been blurred by the internet. Traditionally, the former brought the latter. People loved you because you were an athlete, an actor or signer, etc. It is not the case anymore. People love you (or hate you) because you’re hogging the headlines with outrageous behavior.

The world might’ve changed but this has remained the same.

Another essay I enjoyed that might be gibberish to people under 30 years old is Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink about the singularity of Billy Joel’s presence in the rock n’ roll landscape. Outside of the Netflix documentary Hired Gun where he’s depicted to be a gigantic asshole, I don’t think Joel’s been a mere thought in the back of anybody’s mind since Barack Obama was elected president. But there was an honesty and a bareness to his artistic presence that made him truly unique and there qualities have basically disappeared.

In the essay, Klosterman argues that in rock, the medium is the message. The image you project as a band or an artist is as important as the music itself. Bruce Springsteen songs wouldn’t have the same weight they do if you didn’t think he went back to New Jersey and worked in a car wash between albums. Billy Joel lacks this quality that’s both his blessing and his curse. He’s just a guy writing songs about how he feels and that’s what makes him both forgettable and relatable. Despite its forgotten subject, the point of this essay still resonates in out image-saturated society.

So, what is the point here? What is the glue that makes Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs a cohesive unit and a book worth reading in 2020? I believe it is Chuck Klosterman’s first earnest attempt at chronicling the experience of reality. His ideas and methods have refined since, but what’s interesting about Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs is that he treats pop culture as a mirror reflection of our reality and something we can learn from. He treats with the utmost seriousness something that is largely perceived to be pervasive, omnipresent and meaningless.

But isn’t that (erroneous) perception the reason itself why we perceived our lives to be meaningless. The our refusal to treat reality television or sitcom reruns with any seriousness whatsoever the reflection of why we’re afraid of our depth? Popular culture is what we have. Is it the world that shape who we are. It was Chuck Palahniuk who said: “Human beings don’t cultivate ideas. On the contrary… ideas cultivate us.” Although Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs was written well over a decade before Palahniuk even thought that, it is the very embodiment of this idea.

What I’m trying to say here is that the idea and the method used in Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs is more important than the essays themselves, which are a scatter shoot of different ideas on different subjects you would’ve never dared to consider with any seriousness before. Some work, some don’t. I still think that the essay on Kelloggs cereal is terrible. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Chuck Klosterman looks at and thinks about things no one ever thoughts about before. The fact that he thought about the sexual politics of cereal alone is a triumph.

Don’t get me wrong. Pop culture is being seriously discussed today. But it isn’t being discussed the way it should. Everything is seen and analyzed through an ideological lens today. There’s a “proper” take people need to have on media in order to get approval. Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs is a great reminder that in order to be efficient and entertaining, pop culture analysis need to be personal, which involves taking risks and revealing things about you. It didn’t exactly age well, but it is still interesting and highly singular.

Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs is what our relationship to pop culture should be.