Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, American author Chuck Klosterman dissects popular culture with his trademark wit and incisive anthropological style. First published by Scribner in 2003, this collection of eighteen essays tackles everything from Billy Joel to the Dixie Chicks, from When Harry Met Sally to Saved by the Bell, from the politics of sports to the ridiculousness of Evangelical Christianity. With his take-no-prisoners perspective, Klosterman presents the book as "a low-culture manifesto" of all the absurdities that make America what it is.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is structured like a compact disc of music, but instead of tracks, there are essays. A passage or blub, which Klosterman calls an interlude, links one track to the next. The result is nothing less than the music of the lowbrow cultural indulgences that define a nation, a thrumming rhythm of the distractions and entertainments that consume a whole society in the early years of the twenty-first century.

The first essay, "The Is Emo," is an excoriation of "fake love" as presented in romantic comedy films. "Fake love is a powerful thing," Klosterman writes and goes on to give examples from his own life that further illustrate how romcoms have come to define love for an entire generation. He takes particular aim at the 1989 Nora Ephron comedy When Harry Met Sally and what he sees as its innately unbalanced perspective. Klosterman essentially interprets all relationships as a power struggle, and the partner with the power is the one who likes the other partner less. When Harry Met Sally skewed this immutable fact by showing the less-adored partner winning over the other partner's affections in the end, thereby giving many people false hope in their own relationships. "Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives," Klosterman says.

Subsequent essays plumb even further into America's pop-culture psyche. Among them are "Billy Sim," in which Klosterman looks at the virtual reality game The Sims, its enduring popularity, and how it is "an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are." In "Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink," Klosterman celebrates singer/songwriter Billy Joel, especially his album Glass Houses. In "What Happens When People Stop Being Polite," Klosterman examines the lasting reverberations of the MTV reality-show pioneer The Real World and how it led to the creation of one-dimensional, camera-ready personalities and vacuous, pointless celebrity.

The Real World piece could be a counterpart to "Porn," another essay in the collection. Klosterman cites the sky-high popularity of Internet porn as indicative of the newfound but deeply human need to have celebrity in our lives, readily accessible at our fingertips at all times. With reality TV ostensibly showing the private lives of the rich and famous, there has sprung up an entire generation that needs that same unparalleled access to the fuel for their sexual fantasies. It's almost as if individuals cannot determine their own value, their own dreams and goals, their own sexual needs, without considering themselves in relation to some celebrity, either professional or amateur.

The concept of coolness is another theme that runs through several of Klosterman's essays. In "The Lady or the Tiger," he investigates the American breakfast cereal industry. Specifically, he looks at the evolution of Kellogg's, from its inception as a religious business to its current position as something of an arbiter of the retro-cool. Then there is "Toby Over Moby," in which Klosterman discusses how the teenage girls of today replaced the teenage boys that made up such a huge part of the demographic that made music popular and cool in the 1980s; this essay also explores how music has, and probably always will be, utilized as a measurement of a person's coolness. Coolness is an idea central to "I, Rock Chump," which chronicles Klosterman's attendance of a pop music conference in which rock-n-roll is curiously absent.

Other essays in this volume analyze the enduring appeal of Saved by the Bell and its central character, Zack Morris. Klosterman observes that "important things are inevitably cliché"; the popularity of the Left Behind series of doomsday books and what these books have to say about the Evangel Christian community and its beliefs; and an adoring tribute to tribute bands.

However, not all of the pieces take a lighthearted approach. In "33," Klosterman looks at the rivalry between the Lakers and the Celtics and what this discord says about racial, religious, and political divides in modern America. In "This Is Zodiac Speaking," he interviews three people who were intimately connected with serial killers. In "George Will vs. Nick Hornby," he criticizes the sport of soccer for fostering an environment that casts out players and scorns them. And in "All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers," he takes on the loaded subject of media bias and how most perceived biases by professional journalists are unintentional.

In the end, Klosterman paints a vivid portrait of both the garish façade and the murky underside of contemporary life. He holds a mirror up to all the eccentricities that define so many aspects of the modern human experience. Nevertheless, he goes deeper than that, too. He is interested in what makes humans tick and what, ultimately, it even means to be a human and what really matters at the end of the day. "In and of itself, nothing really matters," he finally says. "What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'"