In addition to my lovely wife, there are a couple other good bits already on the internet about how Mr. Klosterman completely mis-represents and doesn’t bother to get at why people have responded to tUnE-yArDs. I think this is probably the best, and the Village Voice’s Supplemental Reading Suggestions would probably have made for better reading in advance of Chuck’s piece than her Wikipedia page.

This side of the internet has agreed that casually tossing personal insults at tUnE-yArDs is dumb. And we should be able to agree that Chucky’s piece was more than a little tossed off, and ended up being about the last thing that Klosterman actually meant to discuss

Because Chuck Klosterman doesn’t really care about tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l, why his wife might like it so much, or whether or not she is androgynous or asexual (the difference between the two).

It is difficult to tell that this is what the essay is about, because Klosterman buries his thesis in his second footnote:

It now seems super-funny that so many people once believed Arrested Development was among the most important bands of the early 1990s. The idea of anyone advocating the merits of Fischerspooner now seems totally ridiculous. It somehow seems crazy that Cornershop was previously viewed as luminous, even though their songs still sound good to me. It’s just an impossible problem: We always want to reward art for being innovative, but most artistic innovations are not designed to hold up over time. They exist as temporary reactions to other things happening within the culture. And that means they will seem goofy and dated when the culture changes again.

What he wants to talk about is the weird critical revisionism that takes place as things become canonized—the phenomenon that leads us to giggle when we remember that Spin Magazine named Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque the #1 album of 1991, then called Nevermind (also released in ‘91) the best album of the 90s (If my memory serves, Bandwagonesque did not appear on that list). Or, to pick on Spin again, that OK Computer was not even the highest-scoring album in the issue where they ran that review—that distinction belongs to the Geraldine Fibbers’ Butch. Both albums would eventually lose out on the Album of the Year to Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time.

[note: I would rather listen to Bandwagonesque than Nevermind, but I have never been able to get much of a rise out of listening to Butch.]

What I think Klosterman wants to talk about is what happens to a Teenage Fanclub, or a Geraldine Fibbers (or an Arrested Development) after that moment has passed? Talking to one of the guys from Teenage Fanclub or Cornershop actually would have offered some perspective (or context) for the “doom” he’s predicting for Merrill. Cornershop even placed an album at #258 on Pazz & Jop last year! It would have been a timely contrast, especially since Cornershop are a serious artifact of the 90’s We Forgot that I wrote about the last time I dug into tUnE-yArDs.

But, Klosterman being Klosterman, he was both too lazy to explore that curiosity, AND he so thoroughly beat the article up with his schtick stick that all most readers focused on was “asexual,” “puppeteer,” “I’ve barely listened to w h o k i l l” and “Cop Rock.” And all of those things should be rebutted. He says at the beginning:

The album w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs was just named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll.

I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you can probably skip the rest of the piece.

BUT CHUCK, YOU KNOW NO ONE WILL.

Also, I didn’t have room for this in the rest of this piece, but I 100% agree with Klosterman on one thing: It took me a LOT longer to listen to a critically-acclaimed album called w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs than it would have to listen to a critically-acclaimed album called Whokill by Tune-Yards.