Chuck Klosterman, on the emotional connection sports fans have to their teams, in The Monarch Review.

Chuck Klosterman, on being the new Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine.

The Huffington Post on how Chuck Klosterman’s critique of the Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration album Lulu may have been more influential than the record itself:

Chuck Klosterman’s barbed piece for Grantland crediting Lulu for opening his eyes to the value of pushy record execs, because artistic freedom produces “records like this,” went more viral than Lulu.

From the aforementioned Grantland piece:

As a rule, we’re always supposed to applaud the collapse of the record industry. We are supposed to feel good about the democratization of music and the limitless palette upon which artists can now operate. But that collapse is why Lulu exists. If we still lived in the radio prison of 1992, do you think Metallica would purposefully release an album that no one wants?

Chuck Klosterman makes a great point about video games and hyper-velocity. New video games are always better than what came before them—which is not an argument you’d make about novels or films or virtually any other entertainment genre. Via CollegeHumor.

Chuck Klosterman on nostalgia, over at Grantland.

We love getting new books from our speakers. Here are a bunch we’ve been sent in the last few weeks: Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man, Randall Kennedy’s The Persistence of the Color Line, Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows, Tina Rosenberg’s Join the Club, No god but God, from Reza Aslan, and Susan Cain’s Quiet.

Chuck Klosterman’s first memoir, Fargo Rock City, about his unabashed love for ‘80s metal, that most discredited of musical genres, was named to Pitchfork’s list of Favorite Music Books. With insanely riveting prose, Klosterman makes a personal case for the importance of this thoroughly uncool music that had a profound effect on him—and on millions of other teenagers during its commercial peak. Fargo Rock City, soon to be a major motion picture co-written by the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, is not simply a memoir about a musial genre; it is—like much of Klosterman’s writing—about the unexpected ways that pop culture, evenly lowly hair metal, can shape a young person’s life and bring meaning to it.

From Pitchfork:

Fargo Rock City is essentially Chuck Klosterman’s long-form love letter to hair metal. And while he didn’t invent the idea of personal narrative-as-music criticism, it’s hard to imagine a lot of our finest think-piece depositories existing without the admirable standards its tangent-prone prose set before the dawn of Tumblr. It’s as anti-authoritarian as any book on this list without wallowing in self-satisfied contrarianism or academic pomp; independently voiced but accessible and nostalgic while still maintaining a salty, unromantic edge.

It doesn’t hurt to have a working knowledge of the BulletBoys’ discography or an adolescence drinking cheap beer in a rural outpost going in, but it’s hardly necessary. The import of Fargo Rock City isn’t so much what’s said about “November Rain” or North Dakota so much as flipping the script on the common gripe about music criticism that “it tells you more about the reviewer than the album”: being an authority on one’s own experiences gives anybody a right to be a part of the conversation. Klosterman’s writing here has the passion, humor, and empathy to not only excuse the solipsism but justify it.