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    The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
    The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
    The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
    Ebook48 pages32 minutes

    The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City

    By Chuck Klosterman

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    About this ebook

    Originally published in Fargo Rock City and now available both as a stand-alone essay and in the ebook collection Chuck Klosterman on Rock, this essay is about Chuck's favorite heavy metal albums.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateSep 14, 2010
    ISBN9781451624502
    The Jack Factor: An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      The Jack Factor - Chuck Klosterman

      The Jack Factor

      An Excerpt from Fargo Rock City

      Chuck Klosterman

      Scribner

      New York  London  Toronto  Sydney

      SCRIBNER

      A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

      1230 Avenue of the Americas

      New York, NY 10020

      www.SimonandSchuster.com

      This essay was previously published in the book Fargo Rock City copyright © 2001 by Chuck Klosterman

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

      First Scribner ebook edition September 2010

      SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

      For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

      The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

      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

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