The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
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Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.
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The Jack Factor - Chuck Klosterman
The Jack Factor
An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
Chuck Klosterman
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This essay was previously published in the book Fargo Rock City copyright © 2001 by Chuck Klosterman
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First Scribner ebook edition September 2010
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Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-4516-2450-2
The Jack Factor
Heavy metal’s finest hour:
The three best-selling records on the planet
are Bon Jovi’s New Jersey, Guns N’ Roses’
Appetite for Destruction, and Def Leppard’s
Hysteria.
Every time I invite a hipster over to my house (and this happens far more often than I’d like to admit), I put myself in a precarious position.
At some point in the evening, the visiting hipster is going to look at my CD collection—the single quickest way to assert any individual’s coolness quotient. I do the same thing anytime I’m in another person’s home. My problem is that (obviously) I am an ’80s metal fan, and that devastates my indie rock cred. Since I’m not a musician, I’m not sure why this should matter; it certainly seems ridiculous that private citizens should need indie rock cred. But it always seems important, especially if I’m trying to sleep with the aforementioned hipster. And CD collections don’t lie: No matter how many times you mention Matador Records, you cannot consistently explain why Poison is nestled between Pizzicato Five and Polara.
Of course, this situation can be played to one’s advantage. You can out-hip a hipster by taking things to the next level—you can promote yourself as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, the Jedi Knight among trendy rock fans. Being an Ironic Contrarian Hipster is rather complicated; it forces you to own over a thousand CDs, and you have to hate all of them. In fact, the only things you can openly advocate are artists like the Insane Clown Posse and Britney Spears.
Once you get the reputation as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, you’ll suddenly have a lot of freedom. You can sit around and watch Roadhouse and Footloose all day, and you can eat at buffet restaurants and wear stupid clothes and smoke pot before work because it’s wacky
to be a bad employee.
Most importantly, you can throw away all your cool records by Stereolab and Built to Spill and listen to stuff that’s actually good. This mostly equates to classic rock, new wave groups with female vocalists, Fleetwood Mac, any band from Sweden, and hair metal. If questioned about these choices, you simply scoff and smile condescendingly at your accusers. It also might be a good idea to tell them they need to think outside the box
(or something like that), but you must say it in a way that indicates you would never actually use that phrase in a real conversation, despite the fact that you always do.
Unfortunately, there will be