Sex,
Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:
A Low-Culture Manifesto
Review
by : Li
Rapkin
Written
by : Chuck Klosterman (Senior Writer for Spin)
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If my
good friend Doug were an armchair sociologist from North Dakota,
this is probably the book he’d have written, which goes
a way towards explaining why I liked it. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa
Puffs is part pop-culture spelunking and part biography. The
book is a collection of eighteen essays, with an underlying
common thread of the author’s awareness that he’s
entirely inundated by media of all kinds, and how that media
creates his reality. I suspect that this is one of the few
books that really does make more sense if you’re Gen-X
or younger, not so much because of the pop-culture references,
but because of the zeitgeist. The only problem with getting
so deeply into a zeitgeist is that it’s hard to get
out. In ten or fifteen years, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs will
be just another period piece. It’s hardly a manifesto,
but the low-culture part is totally covered.
Klosterman
holds forth on Pamela Anderson as the Gen-X Marilyn Monroe,
why Saved by the Bell is awful yet compelling, how interpersonal
relationships are affected by the engineered unreality of
reality TV, and how the Celtics-Lakers rivalry “reflects
every fabric of male existence”, and manages to back
it up. Even if you don’t agree with his conclusions,
you have a good laugh as the author constructs the argument.
He’s got a sharp memory for entertainment; not the facts
themselves, which can be dug up with a little research, but
for his personal reactions to the events and products he’s
discussing, and how he sees the results reflected in his world.
He’s also got a great collection of anecdotes and tells
them well, but I think his real talent is being able to pull
a variety of seemingly-unrelated elements into a cohesive
concept.
In an
interesting display of media convergence, Klosterman has given
his chapters track numbers. I interpreted this decision as
an indication that the book is intended to be consumed as
an album; you can read the chapters in any order, skip the
tracks you don’t like, etc. The book isn't cohesive
in that the essays don't really flow into one another sequentially,
but I don't expect they're intended to do so. The themes are
consistent enough to hold the collection together.
I’ve
seen a variety of other reviews for the same book, and they
all describe Klosterman as either “ironically self-aware”
or “un-ironically self-aware,” which surely must
be significant, though I couldn’t tell you how. Personally,
my take on irony and Gen-X is that it’s like air to
us; taken for granted so that we don’t notice it until
it’s gone...and how often does that happen?
3.5 semi-ironic bananas.
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