Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota

This funny and enjoyable book is an answer to the pop culture elitists (such as myself!) who dismiss heavy metal as ridiculous junk. By relating the social and personal impact of metal on himself and his friends growing up in rural North Dakota, Klosterman makes a compelling case that this music has an importance and meaning far beyond how it compares musically and lyrically to Dylan, The Beatles, Springsteen, and other ordained members of the Rock Canon. The sprawling text is part memoir, part free-thinking criticism, part record guide, and always hilarious.

I guess that FARGO ROCK CITY falls somewhere between Dave Eggers and Chuck Eddy, but it's really too sui generis to be so glibly catagorized. This book is for the "Rocker within us all"! Check it out....

At first, I was a bit disappointed by the book and then I read the epilogue. Why wasn't it more of a memoir? Why was it filled with so much analysis? Then, I realized that isn't really the point of this wonderful book. Klosterman has made me a fan for life. What wins me over his unbashed honesty. I've long held that the lowest critic life form is that of rock critic. Klosterman calls them on their pretension. He hammers away at what I have always believed is that music is important if it touches you. My MP3 collection has Sinatra and Warrant. Who cares who is better, both form the soundtrack to important parts of my life. Klosterman tells some hilarious stories and his takes on music and life is so refereshingly honest that I can't stop smiling. He isn't mean or nasty--just tells it as he sees it. DOn't agree? That's ok. I learned more than I ever imagined about '80s heavy metal (some which I finally realized I liked about 10 years too late) and I suspect I would have gotten more out of the book if I had understood all the references, but I loved what I read anyway. Except for the passage where he compares the Gospels to GNR Lies, this book really does rock. Isn't that the most important thing?

I'm the same age as Chuck Klosterman, grew up in the same period. All that time, I HATED heavy metal. I knew all the bands he writes about, remember seeing kids wearing the T-shirts and having the names written on jean jackets, but I HATED the music.

All that aside:

I LOVED THIS BOOK!

The book is a series of essays about Chuck growing up and being a fan of different heavy metal groups. Going through artists careers, talking about the best CDs of the era, why the groups were popular, and how grunge killed them off.

You don't have to be an ex-metalhead to love this book. His writing is infectious.

I'll be honest, I only picked this up after reading his other two books (FARGO ROCK CITY is his first), and it is just as much fun as those others.

Will it make you rethink heavy metal? Maybe not. In recent years, I've begun to rethink it a bit, if only because I realize the current music scene makes heavy metal seem not so bad anymore. Plus, enough time has passed to make you seem nostalgic about some of these groups. But, this book probably won't make you run out and buy all the Poison or Motley Crue CDs.

It is just a whole lot of fun to read.

This book is the best a music fan can ask for.
It is filled with facts and moments in music and pop culture that most of us that grew up with MTV remember. It however DOES NOT make you feel like you are reading a serious essay about why one band or genre is historically significant (like: Why Kurt Cobain was a genius). Chuck writes talks to his readers as if he;s saying "Here's what I think, and here's some facts, and if you don't agree, that's fine"
It's the perfect blend of Heavy Metal's reality, truth and legends mixed with his own personal experiences along the way.
I would reccomend this book to anyone that feels a connection with eighties Heavy Metal. You'll walk away feeling like you visited a good friend you haven't seen in along time.
If you can still sing the chorus to Ratt's "Round and Round" and if you remember Tawny Kitane of the hood of a car, you HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!

Seriously, go read this book. You'll laugh about things you forgot about. But most importantlu, you'll remember how great heavy Metal was/is and how at times it was laughable.

Man you know you are getting old when the local bookstore starts carrying books that are retrospectives of your youth. I have read Deena Weinstein's "Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology" and enjoyed it, despite the fact that I think Ms. Weinstein gets a little too analytical about metal culture and turns a simple form of music into some sort of nuclear science. We listened to heavy metal in the 1980's because there was little else to do, it was the perfect vehicle for teenage frustrations and it really did disgust normal thinking people. That is excactly the point of Chuck Klosterman's book.
Being a child of heavy metal in the '80's meant that you had to defend yourself against those Geraldo Rivera specials about satanism, contend with those 20/20 shows about dysfunctional kids who happen to like Iron Maiden and explain to teachers and parents that because you liked Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest you weren't about to shoot yourself in the head or be found sucking on an exhaust pipe in the garage. We also had to deal with the blatant sexism of some of the genre's biggest commercial forces like Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Poison, etc. Klosterman deals with this topic quite frequently in his book. Rightfully so, because it is the sexual imagery that sold "hair metal" to legions of teenage boys and girls alike. Metal offered pure fantasy, girls wished guys like Vince Neil and Sebastian Bach existed in their hometowns and guys dreamed that scantily clad video vixens strolled Main St. like they did the Sunset Strip.
"Fargo Rock City" is an entertaining read mainly because Klosterman is very witty and a very amusing social commentator. The one thing I believe he tried to do in this book is offer up some sort of relative importance of the big hair metal explosion of the Reagan era. He does not succeed in doing this blatantly. If you were not affected by Guns N' Roses and Motley Crue in any way, you will never find any importance in that music. For those of us who lived it, we understand and already know how important it was. You see our generation didn't have the war and social issues of the sixties, nor did we have the freewheeling attitudes of the seventies. Casual sex and recreational drug use turned into AIDS and the crack epidemic and the whole world was "Reaganomics". So of course all we wanted from our music was cartoon satanism and "Nothin' But A Good Time".
One thing I wish the author had discussed more was the fact that metal was probably more visible in the heartland than it was in trendy big cities. Metal bands touring arenas in those days spent more time playing the local civic centers of Fargo, North Dakota and Cedar Rapids, Iowa than they did playing the L.A. Forum and Madison Square Garden. In the small cities, metal concerts became huge events and spawned heated fundamental debates between church leaders and local government whereas the big cities just looked at them as a way to keep the local sports arena busy between home games.
This book will guarantee a few laughs and maybe make you a little nostalgic. Highly recommended for anyone who spent a few Saturday nights watching "Headbanger's Ball" and wasted entire math classes drawing pentagrams on their school books.