Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto 
by Chuck Klosterman

The American writer Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, in addition to being one of the better essay collections of recent years (it was first published in 2004), is absolutely the best disguised. Klosterman's book subtitles itself "A Low Culture Manifesto", yet it's not a manifesto. Its table of contents sequences his chapters like the tracks of a CD, putting minute markings in place of page numbers; but only a part of the book has to do with music. To glue together what would otherwise be a disparate accumulation of introspective and journalistic pieces, Klosterman puts personalised "interludes" between each essay, in the manner of Hemingway's In Our Time.

As "America's best-loved semipro freelance conversationist" (self-proclaimed), Klosterman generates his odd brand of comfortingly low expectations making you feel that you could be talking to anyone, late at night, stoned, about familiar topics: reality television, computer games, Star Wars, MTV, Pamela Anderson and porn. He really is a good essayist, though, and strangely all the disguises add to the charm. Essay collections are notorious for being books that do not sell, yet Klosterman has attained cult status, his books joining the select and successful canon of reading for people who do not read, they are the sort of books that get sold in record shops - alongside works by Hunter S Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk, various rock critics, and historians of psychoactive drugs or gardeners offering instructions on how to grow them.

The work of turning philosophical topics into pop-cultural comic provocation is an art. Take an old-fashioned ethical dilemma: do you accept pain to loved ones or sacrifice yourself? This question gets framed with a hypothetical criminal who "will break both of your soulmate's collarbones" unless you swallow "a pill that will make every song you hear - for the rest of your life - sound as if it's being performed by Alice in Chains". The utilitarian challenge of pain to one, for the greater good of the many? It's turned into the choice of kicking a Clydesdale to death for the release of Amnesty International prisoners of conscience worldwide.

So is Klosterman a philosopher? He describes his work only half facetiously as "philosophy for shallow people". That means for people like himself who think about the issues of life through the difference of approach between Radiohead and Coldplay rather than that between Socrates and the Sophists. These people's references may be ephemeral rather than classic, but the faculty of judgment is no less urgent for that. Klosterman is definitely a cultural critic. He is not a cheery, brainless pop apologist. He has the hallmarks of the critic's negative view on what he chooses to call "mass media" (a more sinister phrase historically than "popular culture"). Mass media is "a sculptor of human behaviour", Klosterman insists. Yet it has a way of adding a sameness to all behaviour, "because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously", and it's not clear one can find a way out of the homogenisation.

In an essay on relationships, he does condemn the expectations of love and depth inculcated by fictional romance - an old charge indeed - when few relationships can reach or sustain such cinematic ecstasy. "[W]e need to worry about all the entertaining messages ... we try to turn into life." And Klosterman's relation to the academic critique of ideological fictions is simply to transfer it to a more sophisticated catalogue of "low culture" phenomena and render it in a profane argot; he remembers college courses on the "latent social code" of fairytales or classics, but cared instead for the overt "social code" of new work: "'The Three Little Pigs' is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like [the John Cusack film] Say Anything are fucking people up." Yet the difference between Klosterman and the academic curmudgeon is that Klosterman believes that it is finally preferable to live in a successful mediated world, even if you complain about it, than to suffer without it. He believes in media-savvy, but not "resistance". In the schema of the movie The Matrix, he would certainly rather live inside the illusory computer program than fight the good fight in real squalor outside it. Presumably in Brave New World, he'd very happily eat his Soma and have meaningless sex. Why not? "I'd rather be inside the belly of the beast," he says of an obscure Star Wars moment (when Luke takes shelter in the guts of a tauntan, an Arctic horse-like creature). He means it to stand for his whole worldview.

What is really peculiar about Klosterman's notion of aesthetics, however, is that he believes every artwork projects an image into which we try to fit ourselves - it has practically no other function, and little autonomy. In an essay on Billy Joel - whose significance is that he's a major pop musician whom no one, ever, can think of as "cool" or want to emulate - Klosterman declares that "the musical component of rock isn't nearly as important as the iconography and the posturing and the idea of what we're supposed to be experiencing" (an amazing and telling statement for a journalist who worked extensively at the music magazine Spin). The remarkable feature of Billy Joel's album Glass Houses is that "You can't characterise your self-image through its 10 songs". Aesthetic response doesn't exist for its own sake; only for self-fashioning.

And from this perverse perspective Klosterman creates his most perceptive essays, the ones that make the collection worth having: his reading of MTV's The Real World; a comic study of the video game The Sims; and a lone, richly reported piece following a Guns N' Roses tribute band across America. In reality TV Klosterman finds a battle of wills between those who want to project themselves as media divas, trying to acknowledge the apparatus of being viewed and seeking fame, and those who equally try to seek fame by agreeing to the fake simulation of an untelevised life. In the video game world he notes the amazing tendency to recreate one's own banal existence in bits and pixels: "The Sims," he writes of that game, "is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are."

Klosterman reserves his greatest admiration for the tribute-band players, those who give up their own identity, for neither remuneration nor steady work, and who, with great sacrifice, take on the strongest images of all, those of rock stars. As one of the Guns N' Roses fakers puts it: "Being in an original band ... mostly sucks. You don't get to tour. You don't get no money. You have to beg your own friends to come to the show. But being a mock star is awesome." This is the projection we might all rather live in.