Chuck Klosterman has written a column about the album w ho k i l l by tUnE-yArDs being named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll. 

I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people on the entire internet. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you probably tittered a little at that book Chuck wrote about heavy metal and can skip the rest of the piece. 

But there’s something about this situation I find pretty fascinating, even though it’s speculative and only partially related to Chuck’s career writing ponderous essays about minor aspects of pop culture. The man has spent so long taking a sideways look that he may, in fact, require wing mirrors. 

When (and if) you read Chuck Klosterman’s column about listening to w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs, you are reading two things: a passably written column and/or a pop culture critic that’s slow realisation he doesn’t quite get what those kids with funny haircuts are digging these days. Logic suggests the latter is more likely than the former because pop critics all go wayward eventually, veering into erratic orbits like malfunctioning Soviet satellites. Paul Morley had to be crashed into the Atlantic Ocean for the good of humanity. 

I’m not really in a position to argue for (or against) the inherit merits of Chuck Klosterman, simply because I haven’t read a damn thing he’s written since his essay about interviewing Britney Spears made me chuckle in the summer of 2008. I know some guys who think too much about the semiotics of the Brady Bunch and Garth Brooks’s ill-fated alter-ego Chris Gaines loved his book Eating the Dinosaur. I had no problem with it ideologically. I just never go round to reading it. 

Somehow, I hadn’t read a single thing Chuck Klosterman had written in the past three years before the internet vomited up a link to his piece about listening to tUnE-yArDs. I wasn’t even sure what class of writing it was supposed to exist in – it wasn’t a review, it wasn’t an essay, it was just some guy writing a series of confused sentences about an artist he hadn’t really listened to and didn’t understand anyway. 

The only thing I knew was that Chuck Klosterman has grown an ill-advised beard, which seems like reason enough to ignore him. But then his article was published on the internet, which made me think, I basically have nothing better to do, I should at least find out what he’s babbling on about. 

This being the Internet, you can read for yourself. But if you don’t feel like reading it, here’s enough information to pretend like you did. You know, for when people ask you: “What do you think of Chuck Klosterman, ace cultural critic and bold wearer of beards?”: 

1. Chuck Klosterman is one guy, a somewhat scruffy looking guy named Charles John Klosterman. This is approximately his four thousandth column. I get the sense that over-thinking things is part of his hipster-but-not-a-hipster aesthetic, because I just looked at the Chuck Klosterman Wikipedia page and noticed that the writer put a lot of effort into mentioning that he writes for The Believer.
2. Klosterman once renamed his Ford Taurus “the Tauntan” after the four nostrilled creature from The Empire Strikes Back, if that sort of thing matters to you.
3. The sentences in Klosterman’s article about listening to w h o k i l l alternate between those long, looping clause-filled runs that people who want to seem clever delight in and short stabs at being funny. You could quote them but I can’t imagine a social situation in which anyone actually would. It doesn’t read anything like Woody Allen but sounds like the kind of thing you’d write if you’re someone who wishes Woody Allen was still awesome and not just making creepy films starring women who could be his daughter.
4. I have no idea what the article is meant to be about. The premise is superficially indecipherable. There’s one part where Klosterman rabbits on about the use of pronouns in a Wikipedia entry. There’s another where he tells us about how much his wife likes the record. It may be the most grating point in any article published in 2012 but it’s early days. 

The takeaway from all this, I suppose, is that Chuck Klosterman is pretty good at picking at pop culture’s scabs. He had irrefutable talent but doesn’t think there’s really any point in properly listening to a record before penning a few thousand words about where it fits in the canon he’s been reordering in his brain since he was 15.

He could end up like Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace or some other Dave that people like. But it’s just as possible – in fact, more possible – that this will not happen. Chuck will probably just write a bunch more essay collections of varying quality until the notion of saying vaguely pithy things about cancelled sitcoms and old metal records is unworkable. 

Then Klosterman will end up with this bizarre 50-year-old life, where his singular claim to fame is as that pop culture critic who wrote that thing once that some people tweeted about a bit. 

I am rooting for you, Chuck Klosterman, I liked that essay collection, and I hope you write many more. I want you to be a genius, and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen one day. But maybe actually listen to the records a few times first, because, well maybe, you won’t come off so poorly next time.