‘Slow Horses’ Season 6 Is an Energetic Return to Form. Plus, Chuck Klosterman!

24:48Andy Greenwald:If you just move the little window a little bit, people fit more into the frame. Exactly right. Exactly right. All right, well, we're gonna have fun talking about this show this year. Yeah, I'm super into it. Six episodes, one per week. um we should get into my interview with chuck yeah uh this is an extraordinary book that chuck wrote called rock it's not only just because of like the imaginative sort of breadth of it and to rewrite rock history through this what if you know this this slight turn of events although i guess it's massive turn events of if the velvet underground had become the biggest band in the world in 1967 but the um reverberations it has through politics society culture youth culture it's just really like every chapter is invigorating because you just never know where he's going to go I also thought it was really interesting because it feels like a really personal book for Chuck in a lot of ways just because I know his relationships to a lot of these bands and his relationship to writing about music professionally anyway and it was great to talk to him about it I highly encourage everybody to pre-order it and to go out and get it when it comes out if you've read all of Chuck's books if you've never read any of Chuck's books.

25:59I think it serves, even though it is in a speculative history of an almost science fictional world, it still is actually like a great rock history book. And it was really awesome to talk to Chuck. So let's get into my interview with him. One of our oldest friends. One of our buds.

26:18Andy Greenwald:One of the best people. Thanks to Kai and Kyle. We'll be back next Monday with some lanterns and some other stuff. And I can't wait to do it. Do you think we should hit the Emmys again? I know you love it. Yeah, I really, I thought we left a lot on the table. Emmys 2026 rewatch. Talk to you guys soon. FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S. I've been everywhere, man. I've been everywhere, man. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places. I've been to Georgia, Houston, Cleveland, Minnesota, Buffalo, Lincoln, Chi-town, Arizona. Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel.

26:57Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. This episode is brought to you by Paramount+. On September 18th, prepare for Uncivil War. Mobland, the hit crime series from the underworld of Guy Ritchie, returns to Paramount+. The Harrigans are back and their empire is spiraling into chaos from the inside out. As power plays, fractured loyalties, and reckless decisions collide, Fixer Harry is left to clean up the fallout. Don't miss Mobland starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Let Chaos reign September 18th on Paramount+.

27:33This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Now, this is a player in the food space that has championed winning food standards and quality since 1980. That means no added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat and no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in their deli meats, hot dogs, or sausages. plus all their seafood is responsibly farmed or wild-caught. They've even banned some ingredients store-wide to make sure there's nothing to mess with the flavors you want. Shop Whole Foods Market in store or online. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo.

28:12Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy blackcurrant, central jasmine, woody cashmere, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo born in Roma eau de toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at Macy's.com. My guest today is Chuck Closter. What's up, buddy? Not too much, my friend. Chuck has a new book called Rock Asterix. How do you prefer to this book? Just rock? I just called it rock. He added the asterix almost as a design element. Okay. early enough in the process, I was like, I think I'm just going to keep it as the title as well.

28:53Although I suppose this could make it complicated for people to search for. I was going to ask you about SEO just right off the bat. Yeah. But I mean, it's not, you know, but I can't worry about such things, you know. How? People will find this book through fine podcasts like this. Exactly. Well, this will go up, I think, with a few days before the book is available in order to rally the troops to come send you into some kind of bestseller Valhalla. But how spoilery do you feel? I mean, this book has elements of surprise to it. There are, as you go through the book, and we can talk about the concept of it, there are aspects of it that I found to be delightfully surprising.

29:40And I'm curious whether or not you're like, I want to talk about that publicly or I want people to discover it on their own. well it's a strange deal because it's a fiction book involving almost exclusively non-fictional characters yeah so there's this temptation to talk about it like it's actually real like if i had written an actual history of rock it would be very sensible for people to be like well why do you think this happened with punk rock in 1978 or like what was your feeling about duran duran at the time now because it's not real it does seem strange to do that i i don't i'm kind of at a loss on how to talk about it in some ways but i have to try nonetheless it's funny it's like so chuck's book is essentially an alternative or speculative history what do they call these and like when it when they have is it is it speculative sci-fi or speculative histories when it's like what if franklin delano roosevelt never became president yeah well okay so you know i think probably that's what it would be classified is it science fiction i guess there's no science to it no i mean it's just it's like an alternative reality i mean you know the the there's you know historical fiction where it's like you know what was like john adams talking about or whatever it's like the things are real but we just sort of imagine how the conversation would have happened this isn't that obviously because people are saying things that they either didn't say or and they said it in a totally different context.

31:10It's just sort of an imagined world that is our world where everything is different except the release of music. Yes. And in this world, the Velvet Underground's debut album in 1967 becomes the biggest rock record of all time, has oceans of influence over American culture, a significant impact on American history, global history, and impacts all these other bands around them, sending the Beatles into essentially the dustbin of history, changing Elvis's career, and impacting a lot of behaviors and events in American history. It's a fascinating book, but I did read it as if it was a history. And I found myself at times being like, I feel like the Rolling Stones have been underserved in this book that's about something that didn't happen.

32:09And I was curious whether or not you basically approached it as such. Did you approach it as if you were writing like an almost objective history of something that didn't happen? Well, I mean, that's an interesting way of saying it, an objective telling of something unreal, because what would that necessarily be? But I guess that's what this is. I will say it was a complicated book to write because I had to essentially write a nonfiction history of rock. and then reverse virtually everything. But so it was almost like writing a book on top of another book because it's kind of, you know, sort of delivered like it's like an encyclopedia of music.

32:46And if you've got an encyclopedia of music, you probably would not read it straight through. Right. People don't read encyclopedias straight through, but because this is fiction, it kind of necessitates that. The other tricky thing was, so a lot of obviously, like the Velvet Underground, become a big span ever, completely changes the monoculture of the 70s and the 80s. And I had to write about sort of these insane things, but I couldn't write about them as if they were insane, because that's not how nonfiction would work. When we write about, nobody writes a history of rock and they mention the 80s and they go like, can you believe Reagan was president?

33:27They just were like, well, that happened. So I had to write everything as if these are things the reader should already know that these should be obvious things that that uh that you know uh uh that Yola Tango is huge or whatever and they would just know this automatically um but so that I think that they're like it's I mean it's certainly unlike the other books I've done how when you were deciding like the cause and effect of things that happen in the book how did you go about doing that because obviously like the rolling stones still make it's only rock and roll right like the songs are all the same songs the reception of those songs are different and even the artist's relationship maybe to their music is different but i was curious when it gets outside of music and you start playing around with what would be different about the world if the Velvet Underground had assumed the central place in culture that the Beatles did.

34:31How do you decide? I mean, I have a very specific example in this, but how do you decide how those ripple effects hit people and hit these events and these historical moments? Well, I mean, what's tricky about it is that when you're working in fiction, there is an expectation that events will happen for almost purely logical reasons. You know, that's just that we expect that. Like in a nonfiction story, you are not surprised if something arbitrarily happens or if somebody does the exact opposite of what sort of logic would dictate. But in fiction, that makes people bristle. They're like, well, he wouldn't have done that or he wouldn't have said that or that wouldn't have happened.

35:15so I was always just you know basically say I'm writing about what's going on in 1972 or 73 um I'm trying to I'm kind of recreating these events and then trying to think like well if that happened you know what would be the consequence of that with the idea always being that as you move through time the events get kind of more and more absurd and more attached from the reality like the beginning of the book from like 67 to 72 that's just like an alternative history it reads to someone like oh he's just sort of saying what if this happened instead of that but as it goes through time these things kind of sort of alter everything it's i i i do like how do you go about doing it i mean i guess that's just the creative part no i i think what i was curious about was whether there were certain things like for instance there there if there was like a master key of what has happened and then like there are certain things that are different like gg allen becomes hugely famous but then there are certain things that remain the same which is mark david Chapman still assassinates someone famous.

36:17It's just a different person. So do you sit around for an afternoon thinking, was Mark David Chapman always destined to do something like this? And it was just a matter of replacing John Lennon with somebody else. It's the only that it's hard to answer because there's also elements in this book where, you know, a lot of careers are completely reversed. You know, like Led Zeppelin is not like a critic's fan that has almost no commercial success but like ceiling dan's career is exactly the same as i know it's exactly the same they chart all the same everything is the same so what you know i mean i guess i was kind of thinking about i mean you know because the main thing i want is for this book to be entertaining and funny that is my main goal i'm not going to pretend that that isn't the main thing my main motive for doing this is that people who really like rock music will be able to read about bands that they've read about a hundred times before in this kind of this funny new way.

37:10But there are some questions I did think about. I mean, a big question that I thought about my whole life and that we have talked about many, many, many times is sort of like, well, why do things happen the way they happen? Why are things popular and why are certain things unpopular? Even if you listen to them in a vacuum, they might sound the same. And, you know, it's this it's this strange, like three pronged thing. To some extent, it is marriage. to some extent it is just chance but then the largest part is that weird kind of third rail where it's a little bit of both of those things that we have to sort of look back historically as reasonable or this was obvious how it had to happen or this must be true when it's you know it's it's just i'm just kind of fascinated by how these like when we talk about history we talk about sort of the outcome but i'm always sort of obsessed with sort of what made that outcome even possible and how capricious it was right and how much and how organized it was you know do you feel like the binary of the beatles and the velvet underground is something that's as um um capricious as a coin toss or as as as a if if weather systems had been different if it had been a different situation presidential like political environment that these bands were entering into like the the the planes could have been flipped like that like that we could have been on a different axis or is the point to make the velvet underground the sort of central like dominant force kind of to point out like how absurd all of it is you know i would say closer to that and also just i mean maybe you would disagree with this but i really think of the velvet underground as the beginning of the idea of a critics band of a band that is more appreciated by sort of the serious consumer or the person in the media who talks about music you know as opposed to just the consumer at the time.

39:18Now that doesn't feel that way. Now it is kind of, I am kind of curious how this book will be received by somebody, a younger person who reads it, who I think probably in their mind feels like the Velvet Underground are a super famous band. Yeah. The likelihood that they would have heard about or be familiar with the Velvet Underground is not that different than the likelihood that they would be familiar with the Rolling Stones or something like that. That was not the case when we were younger. It certainly wasn't the case when we first got into music. It was still sort of seen as this kind of aberrant thing that was like, you know, like this transgressive thing that, you know, what happened to this book?

39:55Like, I'm not saying like, this could have been our reality. Like, this couldn't happen. If we talk about the Beatles, I think it is, you know, a good question about like, did it have to be them or was it going to be somebody? Right. Like, was some band in the early 60s going to sort of create, make rock and roll and the idea of the counterculture, the mainstream culture. And it did have to be them. I think people who love the Beatles always want to say yes. I think a lot of people will be like, well, it could have been someone else. It was like, it's the ultimate time. I don't see a scenario where what just happens to the Velvet Underground could have happened.

40:28But, you know, I'm just saying like, you know, like it's not, there is an aspect to this that is, you know, fantasy, you know, like this is, And I just the whole idea that rock music becomes so important to the culture. I mean, that's like that's kind of a fantastical way to look at, you know, writing about music or thinking about music. But it's almost like, you know, we talk a lot about rock bands and we talk about, you know, what do they mean politically? What do they mean symbolically? For the most part, those are just kind of interesting ways to describe something. And in this book, it's like all of those things we say actually are happening.

41:07yeah like the political meaning of these bands is a universal political sentiment in the entire you know western world well you're scratching at something that i mean this book was very nostalgic for me because it felt a lot like arguments and conversations that we had when we first met back in the early 2000s i feel like i invented the first watch podcast did you really i met you and chris you and andy at greg milner's barbecue and then you had to walk a greyhound and then we went to the bar i did that's not a metaphor i actually did have to walk a greyhound trying to convince me to watch oz or something i feel like that's the beginning of that you know um but uh yeah you know i i know what you mean sort of that it's sort of like it does seem as though we've kind of had playful conversations like this yes um and in some ways like i think this book is almost a it's a reminder that there was a time in my life where i think i thought i understood what other other people thought and that i had uh a grip on the idea of like what my fellow person enjoyed or didn't enjoy or thought was cool or didn't think was cool And even though that sample size was like literally like 27 dudes in New York City, it felt like because we were discussing a lot of these things that are in the book that I I had like an idea of like a curriculum and a continuum of culture rather than just guessing.

42:41Like it seems like 20 percent of people think geese is Jesus. 20 percent of people have never heard of them. 20 percent of people think they're a psyop, you know, like and et cetera. Like you just have like this fractured landscape now. But it was it was in a nostalgic book for you to write. You say like maybe it was just like 27 dudes. But what was different, it was 27 dudes all operating from the perspective that there was a pre-existing consensus that either they agreed with or disagreed with. Yes. Well, ideas were pretty much, you know, the book ends in 2002. And part of the reason that that's when I picked at the time I picked is because so that's when I moved to New York.

43:22so I had that whole first part of my life in North Dakota and in Ohio where my relationship to rock music was heavily mediated like I was listening to the music and having an experience whether that was my own but I was sort of reading what you know what you know the Rolling Stones meant and sort of being like well okay I don't know if I necessarily believe this but this is what they are viewed to mean this is what the clash are viewed to mean this is what Mark Domet is meant to me. And I had to sort of kind of triangulate that information, my experience, and then sort of whatever the third kind of thing is that was dictating this.

43:59And then when I moved to New York, I realized, or I kind of saw how that mediated process works. I think I had sort of a naive view. I think prior to moving to New York, I was of the perception that we overrate the difference between, you know, life in New York and life in the rest of the country. And then I moved there and I was like, actually, I think it's underrated. And I think it's very strange how so much of what is understood to be true does come from a small group of people who are not like, it's not that they're not qualified or something. It's just that it starts there. And because that's the inception point, every reaction from that is an interpretation of this, whatever the, you know, what the original idea they express is.

44:47So that's, I felt like in some ways this book is, is it nostalgia? It's kind of nostalgic for me. I mean, I don't know, because nostalgia to me is when you look back on something and you inject your own experience into it and then hear something back that's different. Or you, you, you think of, you inject something into a movie and you watch an old movie, you remember your life from that period. So then you kind of re-experience in this different way. That's not really what this is, I guess, because when I'm talking about these things from the past, you know, many events, which certainly predate my life or, you know, um, it was, it was almost more like a, what I would imagine in my mind, listening to these albums, if I knew nothing about them, like if I, some, you know, and I do in some ways miss that experience.

45:38Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like you wanted to settle any scores that were like in your head do you think your treatment of certain bands in this book are consistent with how you actually feel about them like when you're a little bit dismissive about like the who or something like that like is it because you're like deep down I kind of think these guys are jokes absolutely not okay I mean I would say in fact if I talk about a group in this book or I talk about an artist in this book, it does mean to some extent I like them. G.G. Allen, maybe not. But at the same time, I like that G.G. Allen or something like that did exist, even though I had absolutely no interaction with it.

46:26So that was, you know, I'm glad you asked that because in some ways I was worried about this. Because, you know, I mentioned it's also like a lot of writers i mentioned in this book and i have i kind of turned my like david elberstein becomes a rock critic new york magazine to us yeah yeah um you know or like you know like get all these different people you know like pauline kale becomes a rock critic and stuff and i i had this fear that it was like well are people gonna see this and they're thinking that i'm like trying to mock these people their way and that's that's not what it is i mean i did try to pick people in fact, for the most part, writers who were dead.

47:04Yeah. Because I, you know, I was sort of like, you know, and I, and in a way, I guess it's a compliment because I'm saying that even in this alternative reality, you're still famous and successful, but, um, you know, and I'm kind of, you're trying to write in their style, but it's not exactly in their style. Cause I just, one thing that was the one easy part about this book is because it was all made up. if something was like not fitting together perfectly i was able to be like well i can do the best i can on this but sometimes things don't fit together perfectly yeah like there are you know there are puzzle pieces that don't fit yeah um i was curious whether the book changed your relationship to the velvet underground or what relationship you had with the velvet underground going into it well you know i i do i do i like the velvet underground absolutely are they one of my 25 favorite bands probably not although somewhere close in that area but they would be you know just outside the top 25 or whatever you know in part because you know there's just a lot of bands that i like i mean it's like you know it really isn't to say that you're not one something's not one of your 25 favorite bands is not a criticism if you like a lot of other bands um this book did prompt me of course do a lot more research about their origin you know and there is a insane amount to be found about that.

48:28In fact, there was a book about the Velvet Underground that came out earlier this summer. Yeah, and a couple years ago, Todd Haynes did the documentary. Yes, it was great. Because I started writing this book before I wrote the football book. Oh, right. So this book was written in like, and it was delayed and it didn't come out till now. So when that Velvet Underground documentary came out, I was already heavily into the book. And I was, you know, and I was, you know, I liked that film a lot. I thought it was really good, although it wasn't exactly, you know, it didn't really change my perception of the group at all.

49:05I went back, you know, I read like the Andy Warhol diaries and stuff like this because it was like now Andy Warhol, because he's technically the producer of that first Velvet Underground record, then kind of becomes like a Ted Templeman producer of the 70s, like the super producer. so i was trying to sort of think about how like where his interest would lead to like what he would be interested in producing right based on sort of what his interest is in visual art i i listened to velvet underground and nico yesterday for the first time in earnest like outside of like playlists or you know this some song randomly coming on in a long time like maybe i listened to it back when the haynes documentary came out it's so funny to go back and listen to it because there's about 60 % of it that you're like, to my modern ear, sounds like pop music.

49:56And, you know, it is plausible that something like this could be much bigger than it is. And I think a lot of like, when I moved to New York, like you, there was a lot of conversation about like, in a more just world, X band would be much bigger, you know, Big Star, Teenage fan club the posies you know what you know like you know if lucinda williams or jillian wiltsch would be as big as madonna like they were just there was a lot of um effort put towards that and i think in some ways like that kind of thinking probably like ushered in i was among the reasons that poptimism got ushered in like was like this sort of like not only are the the muso bands that write their own songs great but there's a whole other tier of these bands that should be even bigger than and then I think it was that kind of rhetoric that probably among other things helped optimism come along that's besides the point I I was struck by this Velvet Underground record that Femme Fatale and Sunday Morning and um Run Run and and and Waiting for the Man even in its own way you're like this is just like a really good solid pop song like I mean it's a really good you could imagine in a different world this being much more popular than it was but the thing that you point to as this kind of near religious conversion moment for the country in the world is venus and furs which is way the fuck out there both sonically and is a and is about a dominatrix relationship and i was curious whether you spent a lot of time listening to that record and what brought you to venus and furs to identify that as like the page turning moment for like all of culture well okay one thing i will say is i feel when i listen to the velvet underground now i think it holds up remarkably well me too me too i mean you know well i wouldn't necessarily say that one of you're one of my 10 favorite bands if you ask me what 10 bands from the, you know, from the 60s or even, you know, pre-1975 or whatever that sound contemporary.

52:05I feel like that record really does at times in a surprising way. The thing with Venus in Furs is, you know, that was that within even on this album, like that's like the most transgressive thing. And I was kind of looking for the most transgressive thing. But what is, I guess, a little strange is that, you know, so when the Village Underground come out in 1967 they seem completely disassociated from what music is popular at the time yeah like compared to the beatles or credence or things like that you know we're coming out and all these things i'm trying to think of other bands in that area you know that were uh that were you know the stones and we successful groups um like it seemed much more dissident the drone aspect to it was would have been seen as like very kind of adversarial or like it does all that music now when you get a long enough time when you move far enough away from it it all sort of fits together like the kinks don't seem that distant from you know uh uh the beach boys in some ways now but at the time they really did um so i i'm not exactly sure what why you know that song i just I guess in a way, because a big part of this book, the non-musical part of this book, is the idea that if the Velvet Underground were the biggest thing in the culture in the late 60s, the monoculture of the 1970s would advance basically to the point where it is now.

53:36Like a lot of the ideas that we're talking about in culture now are talked about on these Velvet Underground records. um so i was sort of trying to like i was looking for the opportunity to have that happen well this gets into that i mean we've had this conversation about uh mark fisher before and about like you know there's there's the guy from the 1975 has that quote about how if you play music for somebody in 2000 what was his point it was like 2010 if you play them music from 20 years before they're listening to like Autecra and Bjork and and all this like different kinds of like EDM and music that sounds so different up until a certain point if you go back 20 years the people of 20 years ago would be mind blown by what they were hearing 79 if you played the music in 89 they'd be like what the hell is this if you if you played people music from 1999 to somebody from 1979 they might say like this doesn't even seem like music to me right you know and now if you play somebody for the most part i think there are some exceptions to this rule but if you played somebody from 20 2006 if you played them 2026's top 10 or even maybe the critical most critically adored records of this year they would largely be like i'm familiar with this music like that there has been this some kind of like uh slowdown of cultural discovery or innovation or that are kind of we are now in a recycle mode of like going back through genres and going back through stances and i i that was what really leapt out at me about reading the book was like the idea that the velvet underground could have this profound effect on things being pushed up from for lack of a better term the underground like even widespread uh a heroin usage you know it was like that was like one of the most amazing parts of the book to me because i was like this is kind of a provocative idea but i do think it's it's quite quite possible well you know it is like all like this like this slow cancellation of the future stuff which i realize i kind of seem like i talk about on every podcast but it is i am obsessed with it i just think it's the most important idea in culture right now and the thing that people will often you know when they hear that they initially always want to push back against it and what they will push back on is they'll say like well you know music that's popular right now that that sounds different than the music did 10 years ago or that sounds different than like me i'm indian or whatever but what has changed is sort of the idea that the sequence of those records kind of needed to happen in a linear way that like you know like the the difference between music in like 1975 1985 and 1995 there is almost like this was attempted and then this went a little farther yeah and then it was attempted this one a little farther still and we sort of moved along as if like cultures like this river but now it's not now it's like the shallow ocean so yes like music and film and books and a lot of these things in 2026 it they're different than they were in 2006 but there's no reason that order has to be as it is.

56:53You could swap the stuff from 2006 to now, and you could take, say, you know, Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and stuff and move that back. And there's no way that there'd be like, well, that couldn't happen now. Like it has less to do not that things don't change. It's that the changes are not built on the past. That's why everything kind of feels sort of retro now because it's not something that is sort of moving on from the last thing we had. It's just sort of going back, taking part of it, taking part of something else and putting it together. You know, I was thinking about this a lot this weekend because I went and saw a new-ish or a contemporary band on Friday night and it was a fucking blast.

57:37And I realized, you know, I mean, this isn't, this is not like a unique perspective, but how much it, energy I get from like seeing bands that are active, you know, not just bands that are like, we're touring the 10 year anniversary of this. It's like bands that are like actively putting out records and changing their sound. And I was like, new music really does give me something. If the internet had never come along in the manner in which it did. And in your book, you address Napster. There's a section of the book about Napster, but I do think that part of the issue for a lot of people is that there used to be like, you'd have this period of your life where you were actively a music fan and you were seeking out new music.

58:19And then probably at some point, whether it's when you have kids or maybe you move somewhere where there isn't like a really vibrant scene, you're like, I have my records and my musical taste is essentially going back through the music that I already know I like and listening to that. That's what my parents were like. They would just listen to Billy Joel over and over and over again. At a certain point, though, in their lives, they were big new music fans. It's just that at a certain point that they stopped. And I think that if my mother or if anybody in 1989 had had all of music at their fingertips, plus a constant stream of information about new music, that they would have probably been pretty overwhelmed.

59:00but you would have seen a different kind of musical behavior that, that kind of collapsed what was new with what was old. And that's what I think is kind of happening now is that I often will be like driving into work and I can't decide between a brand new record or a Steely Dan record or a radio station that I found on the internet that plays like old BBC jungle mixes. And it's like, that's a an access to music that i think is unique in human history oh it absolutely is i mean i kind of this is a this is kind of a simple simplistic maybe thing you express but i am sort of of the opinion that every social change is ultimately economic and every cultural change is ultimately technological and i think that the way the relationship to music that has shifted with people is solely an extension of these technological changes.

1:00:01I mean, because when you say when you go to see a show, that is as close to the old experience as you can get. They're playing, here I am, you know, so that the way music feels to you actually is the same. But when you're in your car and you have this different situation where now you have the ability to listen to anything in the world, any music you want, it does, I think, sort of depress how meaningful that is. Yeah. like you know the the personal meaning goes down because you know it would just be like if in with anything if you have like if someone had the ability to like you know to date any person they want any person they can just do it just date any person they want i think that would change the depth of the relationship they have with the person they select yeah it would probably also change what they were looking for from relationships yeah and there's like you know you can sort of have like like buyer's regret just from listening to a song on spotify yeah like listening to a song i'll be like i should listen to something else and i'm going you know i i i don't like that feeling i i it's something you know and also i do think that the uh that one thing that people underrate when they say like well you know everybody's weird how everyone seems to think music got bad when they were like a sophomore in college or that they stopped finding music when they're 26.

1:01:23I think part of that is that the changes in the way the music is recorded, which might not seem on the top of your mind, you're super visible are there. People feel distanced from new music. Sometimes they're not sure why, because in their mind, they're being like, well, this actually, you know, this, you know, just go backwards. Like, like when Ace of Bass came out, people will be like, well, I don't like Ace of Bass. I like ABBA or whatever. And it was like, well, they're from the same country. They're doing the same thing why would it be different and the thing that was different was how those records were recorded and a lot of sort of the the intangible terms that we use like oh the warmth of something or the urgency of something it's like i feel like that as technology improves the main thing it does is shave those aspects off yes we're now sort of in a situation where the expectation of a song is that because it can be made perfect, we should do that.

1:02:19Now, like we were talking about Steely Dan, they had that same attitude, but it was very strange. We didn't hear like gaucho and it would be perfect because that meant it took them two years to do it over and over and over again. Like it was almost like novel and sort of like just weird that you would do that. But now that is how things can sound because you can do that entire two-year process in an afternoon. Yeah. And I think that a lot of the reason that a lot of people feel like, like even young people sort of feel like the music they're consuming might not like, it doesn't seem possible that new music necessarily will have the sort of the length beyond itself, the way like, say, rumors from Fleetwood Mac or some of these are Darylkins Tapestry or whatever.

1:03:05I do wonder if paradoxically it is the removal of the mistakes and therefore the removal of the humanity of these things that make them feel more disposable to people. It's impossible to say because I'm very nervous to say that anyone's relationship to contemporary culture is in any way less significant than my relationship was to what contemporary culture was when I was their age. right like i want someone to basically feel the way they feel about turnstile the way i felt about fugazi you know um i do think that there's some truth to what you're saying i also think that playing music now is like a much longer career than it used to be so there's a good possibility that we're going to still be able to have a chance to see fleetwood mac in some capacity play you know like and i think that changes like the idea of what's like who's an old band versus what's a new band because like this kind of constant in there's no there's no retirement anymore so there's no feeling like that thing is lost there's nothing to promote you you still have engagement with all this stuff and i mean i was curious you know you said that you feel like these changes are are technological or economic did you do you feel the same way about that classic rock period that's 67 to you call the end date period because the romantic idea that I had in my head especially when I started getting into rock criticism was that these records were all in conversation with each other and that people heard pet sounds or people heard sergeant pepper or people heard London Calling and completely changed what they were doing based on the artistic influence like the pure wave of creativity that they were getting rather than the way in which it was delivered or or what have you well it's tricky I mean you know when when we say like classic rock would generally mean i think like basically post sergeant pepper up through i mean maybe appetite for destruction is that the end of it maybe now i mean i know that almost gets extended out now because of how old we are but it wasn't back then so so 87 might be too far out or whatever you know but you know that's a period where there was also like the economic side was the realization of how much money can be made doing yeah that would be 84 right is like when you're like springsteen and madonna and michael jackson are happening and it's like well this is bigger than anything ever was before well although there was like like bands like lind zeppelin and elton john and all these things the amount of money they were making from touring at that time was you know it's just insane like because there was it was kind of a wild west scenario you know and there was a subtle understanding it's like boy if you get involved in the record business you can make a lot of money so it is justified to put a band in the studio for two years and buy them drugs and let them do what they want to sort of get this thing at the end um that obviously would not be true not it would make no sense to give any artist to give tame and paul or whatever two years and a bunch of wouldn't make say what they could do sort of just you know on their own or whatever it was sure so what was sort of what was kind of what you're asking was the like do you think that there was a period where culture was authentically being created by itself rather than outside forces like economics and technology.

1:06:41Because I guess it's not when you consider like the cassette comes along and the 8-track comes along and the CD comes along and all those things change. But my romantic idea of music at that time was that this was a conversation between artists and the works that they made. And even when I first heard the Velvet Underground in earnest, which was probably the box set, which I came to because I was told this is going to rewrite rock history is that when you listen to all of this music you're going to realize first of all the indie rock and punk that you like this is the big bang and second of all that this is actually as significant as the Beatles album run the classic Stones album run whatever you want to put up against it yeah you know that that's a complicated thing because in a way what you're describing is the thing that we were kind of talking about earlier which is this you know kind of gap between the mediated world of music and the individual experience of it because you're talking about records being in conversation with each other that necessitates that you know about a lot of records yeah and that you're maybe interested in albums you don't even personally like that much because you know that there's some significance to this like there's you know where's the individual experience and you talk about when you would talk about say you when you got into hardcore or whatever i always sense from your description of it that it was it was less a thing like conversation and more something that it was like you had realized something you felt something or you heard something that was individual to you well actually it's it's the opposite it was the first time i just felt like part of a community in that way so that what okay like in terms of like and i don't even mean like politically or uh in in terms of like uh a worldview it was like literally like when i found out that people were playing music music in basements or in vfw halls or in garages after the garage had closed at night and there were 17 people or there are 30 people there in a rented pa and it was completely unpoliced by like the all the stuff that comes along with modern music i was like i feel connected to this music in a way that i don't to like watching luna with 700 people you know and it was a really really really big change for me even though i would say i probably like luna's music more than most hardcore you know what i mean yeah you know it's just it's it's interesting to think about this i mean because like the experience you had like going to some of the shows you know and then your experiences you had like in boston and stuff like that you know like uh you know that was a really kind of rarefied experience you had because you were really in like a small world of people yeah you know my experience because of where i was growing up and stuff you know it was really like putting a rat album into a boom box and laying on my bed and looking at the boom box listening to the music and it was there was no community it was so then i'm so i'm listening to this and if it means something to me i am forming that meaning okay like i maybe i'm reading hit parader and circus and stuff like that but in the sense it's sort of like you know like i i would hear things in the music I was into when I was young that I am certain that the artist had no relationship to like I maybe thought because I would just play I had a limited you know there was scarcity I had like six cassettes or whatever and I would just play them over and over and over again you know um so I almost had like like it was like a community of one and I think that that is probably why I became the person still who like prefers records to the live experience I just um uh i i think maybe you know you asked earlier like you know are you trying to like settle scores or whatever like there is i wouldn't say i am but there's one section in the book where like the rock media comes together and like almost kind of creates a constitution about like what we're supposed to appreciate about music and in some ways maybe those are reflections of my well it's almost like what would happen if rock critics were who musicians thought they were which is this cabal of people who decide this is worthy of being in the front of spin magazine or getting best new music and pitchfork or being you know at the top of paz and jop in the village voice and that it seems like it's like in some ways they were right like a lot of these people were hanging out together and talking about music all the time but they were wrong and that we couldn't agree on anything and and the agreement didn't like i shouldn't say it didn't mean anything because it did sort of, uh, almost sort of craft or curate these artists sort of reputation, but it did have very little effect on how that experience was to the people buying the records.

1:11:48Yes. And it always happens like, and then over time that just becomes real obvious. I mean, it's sort of like, you know, the amount of negative reviews that black Sabbath got from, through, you know, in the seventies, like, you know, it was, it was almost impossible to find positive reviews. And now that it was like, well, I guess all the people saying that were wrong. The people who love the music knew what they were talking about. That, you know, that was a real thing. We, we, they, they, they weren't just like underrated in the past. They were completely misunderstood. And like time kind of, or like I mentioned ABBA before, same thing.

1:12:24I mean, it was like, I learned about ABBA in a weekly reader at school in like third or fourth grade like the little you get a weekly sure yeah for people who don't know it's like at school you would get like a it's like a little like a little newspaper for kids and for some reason when i'm in like third or fourth grade the weekly reader had a story about how disco sucks and the picture they used was ava that was i can still see this so vividly in my mind that's big you know i was like that's yeah but now no one thinks that way if something is remembered from the distant past in culture it almost always becomes positive you know like you know unless it's like you know like a you know like a super racist movie from the past for the most part though yeah um that that time does make everything seem kind of richer and more valuable it's interesting to do the rewatchables because even when i go back and read the reviews of movies that are universally beloved, I often don't find the reviews sufficiently positive enough.

1:13:30Like, even when it's like three and a half stars for Empire Strikes Back, I'm like, didn't this person know what they were watching? Like, and of course they didn't. And of course it didn't feel like that necessarily in the moment that people would talk about Empire Strikes Back as one of the best sequels ever made, one of the best movies like that ever made, maybe the best Star Wars movie ever made and it's only in retrospect that people are able to have that confidence of their kind of clarity of vision of culture you know because like they they have all of these different um all of these different landmarks to point at to say like well look what this happened since then you know and plus you know like if you consider yourself a somewhat serious critic you're very reluctant to be as enthusiastic as the thing might later justify like there was a period in the 1990s when a lot of times i would look at like the new musical spreads the enemy from britain you know and every you know like gay dad is the best band of all time over and over and over they would put a band on there citing it as the most important music that had ever come out like manic street creatures came out and they were like this is like guns and roses and public enemy in one band yes yeah and after a while he kind of was like well none of this means anything though right you know it's like the fact that they think everything is sort of changing the world means that the world is not changing you know um so when you know if you what i when i was a movie critic i i was i was much more willing to say a movie was incredibly terrible than to say it was profoundly good you always want to be more measured because in some ways like a like for example like uh do you remember uh me you and your wife going to benjamin button yes and then we all walked out and we thought it was like an amazing thing we couldn't believe how good it was because we saw a real early screen yeah yeah and somehow the next time we talked about it we were all convinced it was terrible yeah and like and i didn't but like i i always wonder about that it's like what if everything was like that what if everything i experienced was only that thing that i didn't hear anything else about it there was nothing before it nothing after it or like you know like right now i'm just obsessed with this nathan fielder movie coming out right and i'm going i'm working so hard to avoid anything about it avoid anything about it yeah like anything even someone saying it's interesting if i know the person what's interesting about it yeah i mean if i know what you're like and what you would find out um because i just i guess i really crave that still and it's so hard to do it's so hard to have experiences like that now yeah i mean i think that the closest experience i have to something like that is music because there's just so much of it and there's so little barrier of entry to checking it out that i find that my most sort of like i don't really give a shit what anybody else thinks i like this or i don't like this and i'm not going to listen to it anymore.

1:16:32And that's the thing I have the most fun with. I also just have almost zero connection to like what a critical consensus is around any given band, which I guess is a good segue to the last question I wanted to ask about, which was like you mentioned, the book ends in 02. I don't, I do not want to talk about how the book ends because I want people to happen upon that. But you mentioned you stopped it when you get to New York city and you start participating in perhaps the uh the critical hive mind that that you know you lampoon but also discuss in the book but is there anything did you have any impulse to like take the thread even further and see oh you know what does al gore get elected president if if we continue this thread I guess I didn't for a couple of reasons.

1:17:22One, I feel like writing an alternative history about things that are happening in the present is strange. It's strange because it's like, you know, it's not history yet. And maybe I'll say this and people will say, fuck you, I hate this guy now. office i kind of feel like that period of thinking about music in the way that we were sort of raised in and did i think that is kind of over oh i don't think that's controversial i i i don't think like this there are still tons of records coming out there's tons of good records coming out there are people writing about it but it is the the the this the history of this book sort of requires the old way to be the way that never ends.

1:18:08And it's not like it necessarily ended even in 2002. I think it probably ended before that. And we just kind of kept going in pantomime. Sure. I feel like, I mean, this is now no longer a controversial thing to say. I think the first time I said it, I thought I was being provocative. Now many people think that. I do think that, you know in the early 90s with grunge and nirvana and some of those acts rock music did sort of reach a point of self-awareness like that like the grunge artists were very aware of like what had happened in the 1980s in the sunset strip and they saw it happening to seattle and the idea of a rock star was not a positive thing it was a pejorative yeah and it you know that that you needed to have a degree of ironic distance from rocking.

1:18:58Like you, like, you know, Soundgarden would still rock, but not in the, I remember they were touring with Guns N' Roses and MTV was doing a piece on there. They were pre-metal rock. Yes. And they were like, what are you going to do on this tour? And they were like, well, we're bringing these books from the library. But it kind of kept going because I think that, you know, it was, it was set rock was such a kind of all encompassing thing. And it was so associated with the idea of what youth culture is that if you were trying to understand young people there was this idea that you understood it through rock music that had been the case in the 70s and the 80s and i think we kind of just kept going with it even though as sort of a like a lever controlling culture that kind of ends in the 90s but we just kind of kept going and kept doing it and like you know and kind of you know i was part of this i mean i was spanish were part of this is like we were we were still kind of i think attempting to keep what had the way rock had been as like an ongoing concern that was mattered in the same way and i kind of feel like that's kind of when it by 2002 we were it's it still exists they'll always be rock bands you know but it's never going to be the center of the culture again i don't think there is a center of the culture really i mean i think i think you can have a temporary kind of like placeholder like the odyssey or you know uh it can feel like something is a center of the culture like succession but in reality like the internet the center of the culture that's what it is the internet is different in the sense that it's a thing and it's a concept like we're on the internet it's a it's a you know it's computers connected with other computers and stuff but it's also like if you say someone's too into the internet or like they're too online like it sort of also suggests that your internet can be like a way of being sure that sort of a way that that your life is uh bifurcated between the life you're living in reality in this other life so in some sense i mean it's it's sort of a a sad idea in a sense because when we talk about say television is the center of the culture or rock is the center of culture or you know baseball is the center of culture, any of these things, there is like an artifice.

1:21:14There's like something to deal with. When we're talking about the internet, it's almost like we're talking about like a weather pattern. Like this thing that just sort of encompasses everything is somehow tied together. Like we know what it means when we talk about something only mattering on the internet. We all know what that means. Yeah. I was having this, I was thinking about this this weekend with the AI doomerism stuff. It's something that I only understand in the most, um, cartoonish aspects of like imagining Skynet happening, or I don't understand at all because like, I don't really know what agents do in AI when you're, you know, like, I don't really understand why people would use it beyond like, can you write a paper for me or tell me like what happens in chapter five of Moby Dick, you know, like the kind of like advanced Googling that you would think people would use it for.

1:22:06And I realized like you can, for most part in most of your social feeds, if you're, if you're seeing this news, opt out of that, you can just be like, I'm not interested in this and it'll stop telling you about it. And I was like, so even my relationship to this can be curated in a way that means it's not actually like central, like monoculture, but you're right that the platform that it is happening on is probably, and it's the closest thing we have. And it seems like the platform is essential to what the thing that's produced is. Like it can't, it couldn't be in any other way. Like things on the internet couldn't be in books or like, you know, like you could, you know, there was that, I think that period in the early 2000s when there was this belief that like, okay, we generate all these bloggers, all these, you know, these bloggers who are doing this brilliant kind of work that all these people are reading.

1:22:56That's going to be like the training ground for writing in the, like authors and book writing in the future. But as it turns out, those things were much more different than we realized at the time. The thing about blogging and writing about the internet is that it is overwritten every single day. You write something and the next day it can be overwritten. Whereas book writing is the complete opposite. You write something for a year and it takes another year to come out. The hope is that someone's going to care in 25 years. So it may have been that blogging in some ways did the opposite. It made people less able to write and possibly read books.

1:23:31And that seems to be happening with nonfiction. Well, I apologize for blogging.

1:23:39Thank you so much for joining me today. This book is incredible. This is one of my favorites by you. I hope people check it out. Even if they don't feel strongly about The Velvet Underground, I think they'll get a lot from the book. Chuck, this book comes out on the 22nd, correct? Yeah, next week. Okay. Well, people should cop it. And thanks so much for coming on, buddy. My pleasure.

1:24:08This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger, multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon.

1:24:47But this This summer, Mint Mobile has a better treat. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy.

1:25:08Andy Greenwald:See terms.