The Perfect Chuck Klosterman Assignment

I am a huge fan of Chuck Klosterman. No. That's not true. I'm a huge fan of Chuck Klosterman's work up to 2006: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his Esquire column (with installments like this one about trust and Tom Cruise), and Killing Yourself to Live. Right about then, he became famous—like, girls at Borders asking him to sign their boobs famous—and his writing deteriorated into this weird parody of his own style. He tried too hard to be himself. Anywho, he has a review of Chinese Democracy for The Onion's A.V. Club today, and it's kind of amazing. This is likely because it is SUCH a C.K. subject. Guns N' Roses is right up his sonic alley, and, hello, since the album's been in the works since Full House was putting out new episodes, there's plenty of cultural meaning for him to swim in.

My fave chunk:

"On the aforementioned 'Sorry,' Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ('But I don't want to do it') in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the 'Sorry' vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, 'You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human.'"

Note: I chose not to include a picture because every press photo is a little disturbing. There's a weird hands-in-pocket, head-cocked thing happening.