Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live is worth buying in hardback. I bought it and finished it about a day or two later. It’s not as good as his magnum opus Fargo Rock City, but then how many books are?
However, I would like to have seen a bit more about Bob Stinson. And Paul Westerberg, for that matter. But Westerberg is still alive, so that wouldn’t have been too relevant to this book. Although, Klosterman did have some nice thoughts on the Replacements.
While I’m sort of on the subject of the Replacements and Paul Westerberg, I’d like to propose a thesis of sorts… Just sort of float this idea out there… Aimee Mann and Paul Westerberg are the best pop songwriters since Lennon-McCartney or at least since Difford-Tilbrook. They’re also similar in some way or ways that I can’t quite put my fingers on. Maybe it’s because they’re both classicists. Both of them write songs that are in the classic pop song tradition—there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about either of them. Just verse-chorus-bridge, etc. (Nick Hornby actually describes this better in an essay on Mann than I can.) But, anyway, they’re both great. And I can’t really think of one without thinking of the other for some reason. Even though they’ve never actually wrote together (and I hope they never do, because that sort of thing always ends up being a bit of a disappointment), I kind of think of them as Mann-Westerberg (or Westerberg-Mann, if you prefer).
But, I digress. Getting back to Killing Yourself to Live. Ultimately, the author should have listened to his friend Lucy Chance.