The 11 Minutes of Action in the NFL

February 3, 2026February 5, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

There are 11 minutes of action in the average National Football League (NFL) game, according to a 2010 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stopwatch study conducted by Stuart Silverstein. Silverstein started the stopwatch at the snap of the ball and stopped it at the tackle of the ball carrier. I know what you’re thinking, “11 minutes? C’mon! I know all about the delays inherent in the modern game, but 11 minutes? You’re going to have to back that up.”

I don’t keep a ledger on the complaints I’ve had about delays in the NFL game throughout the course of my life, but my family would probably characterize that number with a sigh or a groan. Even in the most frustrating moments, I never thought about how few moments of action actually occur in an average 3 hour and 12 minute NFL telecast. If you’re approaching this from a static level, based on the number of complaints you’ve listed over the years, you might say, “11 minutes seems about right” in the most cynical tone possible. Now, remove yourself from your “Nothing shocks me” mindset and view this in a more objective frame. If the average NFL game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, and 3 hours and 12 minutes equals 192 minutes, we spend 181 minutes waiting for something to happen in every NFL game we watch. No matter how we spin it, that’s a lot of sitting on furniture, staring at the TV blankly, and waiting for the snap of the ball. The only thing I can come up with is that we spend so much time thinking about what could or should happen that we don’t really notice how long it took to happen, or should I say we do and we don’t.

Those who are not stunned by that 11 minute figure, are likely casual fans who enjoy going to other peoples’ houses for a gathering, the party, or the event status that football games have become in our lives. They’re people who enjoy all of the talking that happens between moments of action more than the game. If we drill down to the nuts and bolts of their fandom, they’d probably admit they like the team, but they don’t like like them. They enjoy watching them win, because it’s always fun to be part of a communal celebration, but they’re not devastated when the team loses. They say things like, “Well, at least it was a good game,” as if this were a television drama that didn’t end well but was nonetheless entertaining. They’re probably the type who leave their friend’s house laughing, they drive home, put the kids to bed, and kiss the wife, and slip into bed without ever thinking about that game again. They have such a healthy relationship between football and life that they can enjoy football game gatherings for what they are, and they spend most of those 181 minutes of inaction chatting it up, eating, drinking, and having a merry, old time. The NFL game is background noise for them, and they check in on the score every once in a while.

“What’s the score?” my dad would ask, stepping into the living room. We’d tell him, and he’d go back to doing whatever he was doing. That used to drive us nuts. He didn’t care about the game, the logistics, the nuances, or any of the smaller moments that defined winning or losing. He just wanted to know the score. As much as he claimed to like football, it was a passing interest to him. As I grew older I realized he was more emblematic of the average, casual NFL fan than I was. I also realized his relationship to football was far more healthy than mine.

Similar to my dad, most average, casual fans don’t understand why any team, college or pro, doesn’t throw a bomb on every play. When Notre Dame had Raghib Ismail “The Rocket,” on their team, my dad didn’t understand why The Irish didn’t just throw the ball to him every time. As myopic as that sounds, it’s a good question that just about every casual fan asks when they see an athlete who appears so superior to the other athletes on the field that it appears that he can do whatever he wants on the field.

Author Chuck Klosterman answers this decades-old question in his book Football, by quoting a track and field coach who, when asked why track and field isn’t more popular in America, said, “Track has a problem. The fastest guy always wins.” After 2007, Usain Bolt won approximately 95% of the individual 100m/200m finals in the Olympics and World Championship races he ran in between 2008 and 2016. There are variables such as reaction time, start technique, lane conditions, etc., that can lead to an upset, but there are no strategies Bolt’s opponents can legally employ to slow him down. There are no counter-veiling forces in track, no defense, so the fastest guy almost always wins.

“I get that they need to keep the defense guessing with the occasional run, but why do they always run right up the middle?” Julie Ann asked Andrew. “That’s where most of the defenders are. Why don’t they run around the side?”

“To further fool the defense,” Andrew, the football enthusiast, explains. “A run up the middle better sets up the play-action fake and pulls the linebackers forward a step or two to open up the middle of the field.”

“So, it’s a wasted play?” she asks. “It’s a play to set up another play? Boring!”

“It’s strategic,” Andrew admits. “If they gain 6-7 yards on that first down run play it opens up a number of possibilities for the next play, but if all a team does is go for the big plays, the defense will adjust, and they’ll execute their plan to stop the big plays. Defenses employ numerous methods to compensate for exceptional athleticism, so an offensive coordinator has to put in some “boring”plays, as you call them, to mess with the defensive coordinator’s mind.”

A run up the middle is widely viewed by casual fans, like Julie Ann, as the little plays of the game, or “The boring part.” Andrew, the enthusiast, knows a little more about the chess match between coordinators, but he’ll likely never be able to explain that intricacies of the game, as he understands them — on a level just a couple notches above rudimentary– to a casual fan like Julie Ann. If Andrew cannot explain the intricacies of football on a conversational level, it might expose the fact that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, or if he can, Julie will likely dismiss his long, intricate explanation with an, “Uh huh, BORING!”

If Julie Ann is a decent example of the average, casual NFL fan, she doesn’t pay attention to an overwhelming amount of the 65-70 plays in the average NFL game. She’ll probably talk through an overwhelming number of those plays. Yet, Julie Ann is a fan, and she does enjoy watching these games, but her attention drifts until the high-leverage plays that add to her team’s Win Probability with crucial, clutch, and dagger-inducing plays. Analysts suggest that there are typically 5-10 game-changing plays per game. Andrew might suggest that is far too high, and that most NFL games are decided, or swung, on 3-4 plays at most. For the sake of consistency, we’ll stick with the analysts findings, and we’ll go with the median and say that there are an average of 7.5 noteworthy “Pay attention” plays per game that are instrumental in wins and losses. If each play last an average of four seconds, then Julie Ann, the casual fan, will want to pay attention to approximately 30 seconds of each 3 hour and 12 minute NFL game, if she wants to sound like an informed fan.

As popular as the NFL is, surveys find that 26% to 46% characterize themselves as casual fans, and NFL enthusiasts, or avid fans, defined through daily engagement of some sort, list at approximately 21% to 36%. If these numbers hold in their workplace, when Julie Ann and Andrew return to work the next day to describe the game for all of their co-workers who missed the game, they’ll probably sound equally informed, even though Julie Ann only paid attention to the most crucial 30 seconds of that game, and Andrew, the avid enthusiast, focused intently on the 11 minutes of action.

“You guys don’t understand the game,” Andrew might say to those who think Julie Ann offered a wrap-up as complete as his, and he might be right, but his audience either won’t notice the difference, or they won’t care. The latter is illustrated by the coverage the average sports’ network, newspaper, internet page, and/or sports radio attributes to that game. There are exceptions, of course, there are always exceptions, but most of their coverage will focus on the 30 most crucial seconds of the game Julie Ann discussed. In my experience 30 seconds might even a bit of an exaggeration, as most post-game television broadcasts limit their highlight packages to about half of those 30 seconds, and fill the rest with graphics and analysis of those 15 seconds. Julie Ann didn’t watch the game as intently as Andrew, and she doesn’t care to know how the “BORING!” plays influence and pave the way for the exciting ones, but she remembers the exciting plays, and she might even watch some of the thousands of hours devoted to those 15 seconds, and she reads expert analysis on the hundreds of articles on the internet, until she sits next Andrew at a family gathering and sounds just as knowledgeable as the more enthusiastic fan who knows how various intangibles can affect an outcome.

Andrew’s love of the NFL game is pure and sincere, so on one level he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, but on another level, we all want some recognition for the accumulated knowledge of anything we’ve acquired. Yet, Andrew will consider it unfair that everyone considers Julie Ann just as knowledgeable football as he is, until he eventually runs into a fanatic who is as enthusiastic about football as he is. This conversation might start great, as we all love meeting someone who can appreciate the game on our level, but that appreciation will eventually go one of three ways. The best possible outcome for the future friendship between Andrew and his fellow fanatic will play out if their girlfriends stop their conversation with a “No football conversations.” At that point, all four will laugh and Andrew and the fanatic will secretly harbor mutual respect for one another, but if they are allowed to explore the topic with one another, it will either turn into a duel of knowledge with no winners, or both will walk away from the conversation characterizing the other as an NFL nerd without recognizing that the other sounds exactly like them to disinterested parties.

Football vs. Baseball

The WSJ did not conduct a similar stopwatch study on basketball and hockey, since it is generally accepted that the games in the National Basketball Association (NBA) have 48 minutes of action in an average 2.5 hour game, and the National Hockey League (NHL) match has 60 minutes of action in an average 2.5 hour game. Save for various breaks, the ball/puck is almost always in motion in those sports, so conducting a stopwatch study would be relatively obvious. The WSJ did conduct a similar study on the average Major League Baseball (MLB) game, however, and they found that the average baseball game has 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action in a game that is now an average of 2 hours and 36 minutes long. Punching these numbers into the system, football has an action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 5.7%, and baseball has an action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 11.5%. So, to those who find baseball games in the MLB boring, they actually have a greater, slightly more than double, action ratio than the NFL. We could debate the definition of action, in qualitative vs. quantitative terms, but the numbers don’t lie.

In the WSJ study of baseball, conducted by David Biderman (on baseball) versus the Stuart Silverstein study (on football), they defined the moments of action in baseball to include pitches, plays, and any ball movement. So, in the battle between America’s Pastime, and America’s favorite sport, baseball proves to be the more active sport.

When we break the 192 minutes of the average game down, the truth starts to reveal itself. The average NFL game consists of approximately 63 minutes of commercial breaks, so when watching the average NFL game, roughly 25-33% of our time is spent in a commercial break, according to multiple studies and analysis conducted by WSJ and FiveThirtyEight reports. NFL teams also have a 40-second play clock after most plays, but a 25-second play clock after administrative stoppages, and most NFL teams, on average, snap the ball at the 20-second point. This is the finding, but when I watch games, it seems to me, most NFL teams snap the ball in the single digits. I know there are moments and strategies that call for a hurry-up offense that moves the average, but I’m still surprised at the 20-second average. This finding suggests the NFL fan spends about half of the in-game moments waiting, in anticipatory glory, for the ball to be snapped. Most teams use at least two time outs per half, and the modern NFL viewer at home must endure countless replays, explanations of penalties, the time necessary for trainers to help the injured leave the field, and various other delays in which referees don’t force a team to use a time out. We break all these delays down, and 11 minutes actually starts to make more sense.

The Third Spinning Wheel

The overarching question is how did a sport that consists of so many breaks, and so few moments of actual action, become the unquestioned, indisputable most popular sport in America? Author Chuck Klosterman offers many interesting theories and conclusions in his latest book, Football, save for one: Anticipation. He touches on the idea of anticipation being a possible element in the game’s popularity, but he doesn’t explore it sufficiently in my opinion.

There’s only one thing we might love more than action, the anticipation of that action. How many times are we up on the edge of our seat waiting for that game-winning play, only to have our team hand the ball off, up the middle, for a three-yard gain? “Boring!” Julie Ann might say, because she was expecting that crucial play to happen there, but we could say it only heightens the suspense and anticipation for her. When this happens, we know the clock is dwindling, and we might say something like, “C’mon! Let’s go!” as the suspense heightens. At this point, few are sitting when the ball carrier flips the ball to the ref, and the team hurries back to the line. In the next play, the quarterback fakes the ball to the running back (play-action), and he delivers the dagger by sending the ball over the middle to the tight-end for a twenty-four-yard touchdown. This is the only place, right here, where Andrew’s knowledge comes into play. He might have sounded like a football nerd when he tried to explain the need to run the ball up the middle earlier, and no one will laud him for correctly predicting this play tomorrow at work, but when those linebackers stepped up to stop what they feared might be another run up the middle, they accidentally opened a hole behind them that the tight-end stepped into to catch the game-winning touchdown, and Andrew, the enthusiast looked like a genius for predicting how their team would win.

We can all break down the action of the NFL to 11 minutes, or 30 seconds of crucial action, but one of the reasons the NFL and college football sit atop TV ratings is that the nature of the game leads to a greater sense of anticipation than any other sport. We could also say that football’s low action-to-total-time ratio of approximately 5.7%, compared to baseball’s ratio of approximately 11.5%, leads to more anticipation and a greater sense of excitement when the payoff finally happens. It’s the NFL’s third spinning wheel.

The psychological power of anticipation has led most casinos to adopt what they call the third spinning wheel. It’s no secret that slot machines are the primary money maker for most casinos, but according to Medium.com, slot machines account for 70% of a casino’s revenue. That seems unreasonably high, but the stats back it up. The question is how did casinos make those machines so incredibly addictive? Those of us who’ve dropped play money into slot machines take notice when the first big money maker stops in the first slot, but when that second money maker seductively slides into the second slot, something happens to us. Everything about slot machines are engineered for dramatic effect. The actual outcome was determined the moment we hit the spin button via a Random Number Generator, and our chance of actually winning was determined by the minimum payout percentages set by various state gaming commissions, or tribal compacts. These compacts and commissions say nothing about how casinos can manipulate emotions however, and casinos take advantage of this by having the first “jackpot!” stop in the first slot almost immediately after we press spin, the second jackpot can take approximately 2-3 seconds, but it’s that third one that is deliberately delayed to induce prolonged anticipation. It can take up to five seconds to stop. What happens to us in those five seconds? How many dreams and aspirations can occur in five seconds?

“I was SO close!” we complain to our friends. “Look at that,” we say, pointing to the two big money makers followed by the taunting cherry in the three hole. We had three-to-five orchestrated seconds of watching that third wheel spin in which we realized that all of our unreasonable dreams could come true. What we don’t know is that those three-to-five seconds are the result of the psychological research casinos commission to maximize our sense of anticipation. They do that with an orchestrated near-miss, or the “I was SO close!” moment that leads to maximum engagement from the customer. We think our machine is ready to pop, and we’re not about to let some other slot player come in and take over, because we’ve paid our dues watching nothing happen for as long as we think it takes for a machine to pay off. Those of us who play slots don’t take into account how much time and money casinos have put into understanding us better. We don’t know that they’ve found how much impact that third-spinning wheel has on us. They’ve determined that if they provide us too many near-misses, they can reduce the impact of the third-spinning wheel (translation: we’ll figure it out). They’ve also found that too few of them often makes our near-misses less effective (translation: we’ll get bored). Their expensive, ever-changing, and ever-adapting research has found that if they give us a third-spinning wheel 30% of the time, that’s the Goldilocks number to manipulate our minds and maximize our engagement. They’ve also found that being “SO close!” to winning is actually more exciting than winning, depending on how much we win of course. It’s all about the power of anticipation.

Unlike slot machines in casinos, the game of football is not coordinated to capitalize on our love of anticipation, but the nature of the game lends itself to maximized anticipatory enjoyment.

As with the other side of the casinos psychological research, basketball and hockey have so much action going on that it can diminish the drama of most plays. There’s so much action going on that when an incredibly exciting play finally happens, we often have to rewind the broadcast to see what just happened, because we accidentally tuned the game out for a while. As Klosterman writes, we love action movies, but some action movies actually have too much action, and we accidentally tune out some of the action scenes that led to the big whopper, final conflict. Klosterman also alludes to the idea that football, and its 11 minutes of action, also incidentally provide talking time between moments of action, which makes it an excellent sport for group settings such as family and friendly get-togethers. On that note, I know baseball provides more moments of action, according to the WSJ study, but I find myself talking to friends so often during baseball games that by the time the action finally takes place, I’m so absorbed in the conversation that I completely lose track of the game. (This might be a problem inherent in the game of baseball for another conversation.)

The NFL will probably never change its formula, because why would they? They’re the king of the hill, top of the heap, and they can charge advertisers pretty much whatever they want. That formula has tested the patience of even the most enthusiastic fan, as most of us hate commercials, the delays now inherent in the review process, and all of the other delays the game now provides, but I found three glorious letters that freed me from my pain, D,V, and R. It’s not foolproof, as some of our friends will text us incidental hints or outright revelations (no matter how often we tell them not to), and we’ll have to be the type who can watch a game knowing it’s already over (some weirdly cannot do this). If we can overcome those low hurdles, we’ll be able to watch most games break-free if we give them a head start of between 50-90 minutes. I usually go high-end, so I don’t have to endure sideline reporters and any banter between the play-by-play broadcaster and the analyst. The DVR also frees me from the time it takes for a referee to review a reviewable play, discuss that review with his fellow referees, and administer the effect of his findings (expedited reviews have cut down on this process, but it’s still not enough for me). Thanks to the VCR, and now the DVR, I haven’t watched an NFL game live (save for those at get-togethers) for decades, because I know those in charge of the most popular game, in the United States anyway, are not going to change, because why would they? I also disagree with Chuck Klosterman’s thesis that the NFL is doomed. Unless something unforeseen happens, I predict its dominance will almost surely continue for generations beyond the point that my generation assumes the temperature, generally between 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit, that maggots anticipate.

Klosterman’s The 90’s: A Book. A Word Salad.

February 17, 2022February 18, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“What’s historically distinctive about the [Generation] X era is the overwhelming equivocation toward its own marginalization,” Chuck Klosterman writes in his book The 90’s: A Book. We understand Klosterman’s point, but we would write it another way. We would write that the art of equivocation may have led to Generation X’s marginalization. As evidence of this, Klosterman then writes, “The things uninformed people said about who Gen Xers supposedly were often felt reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.”

No one in my inner circle said anything bold in the 90’s. There were exceptions of course. We called them the “say anything” crowd, because they’d say anything. The rest of us were either scared, or conditioned, to qualify, equivocate, or obfuscate the meaning of everything we said to try to jam our thoughts into every square hole before us. We edited our thoughts in real time, so that no one could accuse us of generalizing. I talked to other generations, and they didn’t worry about generalizing, stereotyping, or any other accusation our crowd could dream up. They said bold things, and they could back them up, some of the times. Some of their opinions were controversial, and some of them weren’t. Some of their opinions were wrong, and some of them weren’t. They didn’t care. They weren’t afraid to share. They’d say anything. How do they get away with that, we wondered.

Someone accused me of generalizing once, as if it were the ultimate condemnation of my assessment. By that time, we were all sick of the accusation. Being so careful became tedious after a while. I turned to my accuser and said, “I am generalizing, because I find this to be generally true.” She was shocked, presumably because no one ever fought back against her charge. Had she pressed me, I would’ve added, ‘When we generalize, we say things we believe are generally true. If something is true 50.0001% of the time, it is generally true, in general, and that is a generalization.’ “There are no absolutes,” the absolutes crowd say. We might try to argue that line, but the idea they loft is because something is not 100% true 100% of the time, then we should not discuss it until we qualify it to make considerations for the 49.9999% times it might not be true. How does anyone think, talk, or formulate conversation if they’re worried that some statement doesn’t account for the 23.1% of the population to which it doesn’t apply? You don’t. You sit back, in marginalized and intimidated corners to allow the unintimidated to continue unencumbered. The fear of condemnation leads us to say things like, “reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” We enjoyed saying such things initially, as it led to some level of “intellectual status”, but we eventually discovered how discombobulating and tedious it could become.

2) “The most compelling aspect of The Gen X Reader is not what the writers got right or wrong, but the intensity of their search for meaning,” Chuck Klosterman writes of Douglas Rushkoff’s compilation of essays Gen X Reader (an anthology devoted to dissecting Douglas Copeland’s book Generation X).

If all theory is autobiography, and all analysis is self-analysis, Klosterman reveals his raison d’etre in that sentence. If he did this to himself, in a public park, in the state of Alabama, they would probably ring him up on at least a half-dozen misdemeanors.

3) “[The book Gen X Reader is] a fossilized example of how understanding the present cannot be achieved until the present has become the past,” Klosterman further writes.

What?

He writes, “Times, change, because that’s what they do.”

In another space, on another subject, Klosterman asks, “Now … were these assessments accurate?” He answers: (Yes.) (No.) (Sometimes.)”

The first thing that comes to mind when reading these particular lines is, the only person who might be more exhausted in a conversation with Chuck Klosterman, other than the audience to his conversation, is Chuck Klosterman himself. Those unfamiliar with Klosterman’s style might think he is trying to add words to fluff his word count, or they might think he’s trying too hard to be inclusive or sound intelligent. Those of us who read his books, listen to his podcast, and/or watch interviews with him know this is Chuck Klosterman. It’s the way he writes, and it’s the way he talks.

I tried to come up with an assessment of these particular elements of Klosterman’s writing. “Word Salad,” I whispered. What’s a word salad? Wikipedia defines word salad thusly: “A word salad, or schizophasia, is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”, most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder.” This is not Chuck Klosterman in total. He is very intelligent and insightful, but he has moments.

I recommend just about every book he has authored. Klosterman’s writing is not a word salad in this sense, but some of his sentences contain iceberg lettuce. I love iceberg lettuce. I always have. I love it as much as I do Chuck Klosterman’s work. After decades of eating the leaves, I found out that iceberg lettuce has little nutritional value. It provides vitamin A and K, and some fiber, and it has a high-water count, but compared to other lettuce leaves it is very low in nutritional value.

Many Klosterman essays have living lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, and other leaves with nutrients, but he adds black olives. “You can never have too many black olives,” his writing says. Yes, we can. Then he adds far too much cheese, a half-pound of bacon bits, and everyone knows you don’t need that many cucumbers and croutons to make a salad, but Klosterman wants to make sure readers get value for their money.

4) One interesting insight Klosterman writes that aligns with thoughts I’ve explored is: “[Older generations] perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.”

For most of my life I wanted others to consider me weird, strange, or just plain different. Whatever I achieved in this regard, it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted it all. I never realized what an enviable position this was, and I had no idea that it was an offshoot of my dad’s ability (financially and otherwise) that led me to a varying degree of certitude that I belong. My dad grew up in a location just south of the “other side” of the tracks. He grew up, and spent the entirety of his adulthood, trying to fit in. A portion of my desire to engage the minds of the weird, so that I might become one, could have been borne through rebellion to my dad’s obsessive desire to have others consider he and his son’s normal, but I now think he laid a foundation of norms at my feet by raising me in a normal climate that I desperately tried to escape.

5) Klosterman also has a unique gift for making seemingly irrelevant (to me anyway) events in history cultural touchstones that either influenced, changed, or revolutionized the culture. Klosterman writes that Nelson Mandela going from jail to the Nobel Peace Prize and then to the presidency of South Africa as “the most momentous global event of the nineties.” Klosterman lists the cultural influence as initiating the art of the conspiracy theory, as conspiracy theories suggested Mandela died in a prison cell. I don’t know if Klosterman ran around in different circles, or if he is attempting to rewrite his past and assign his thoughts greater significance, but I don’t know anyone, personally, who ever talked about Nelson Mandela in the 90’s.

6) Klosterman is a few years younger than me, and we share some similarities in our background, so when he writes what he considers the cultural touchstones of the last sixty years, I’m intimately familiar with almost everything he discusses save for one: Reality Bites. I was that Blockbuster guy we now see in retrospective videos of a guy who stood in their aisles far, FAR too often, in the 90’s, trying to find something unique and entertaining, but I never selected Reality Bites. To read Klosterman, the idea that someone who paid a ton of attention to the culture, through entertainment venues, the idea that a man my age never saw this movie is his equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. This isn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last he writes of this movie, as he believes it either captured the narrative of the 90’s in America, better than any other movie, or drove it. I wouldn’t know, because I never saw it.

Regardless what I’ve said above, I respect Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I think he’s an excellent writer, and a challenging intellect. When one of his books come out, I’m one of the first in the intangible line to pick it up. If anyone thinks I’m too negative, or cynical, I am. Whenever my friends and I would walk out of a quality movie, we would dissect it, and we were always negative and cynical. We would criticize the acting, the plot, elements of the dialogue, and anything else we could think up. If the movie just sucked, we didn’t waste any more of our lives on it. We just said, “Well, that sucked!” The great ones were the ones we picked apart. Our conversations went something like this: “I hated it when he did that!” “Oh, I know it. What about that time he did this?” “Great movie though.” “Yeah, it was.”

Klosterman’s 90’s: Nevermind the 90’s

February 12, 2022February 17, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

When I first saw Charles John Klosterman had a new book coming out about the The Nineties. I knew he would devote space, for too much space, to Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Klosterman’s essays and books cover a wide array of topics, but his primary focus has always been music. As such, we can call him a music critic without feeling too much guilt about limiting his curriculum vitae (or CV). As a music critic, Klosterman is professionally required to one superlative per every one hundred words. His awareness of this is quota is illustrated by various attempts to qualify his superlatives with qualifiers. The problem with this exercise is that he uses superlatives in conjunction with qualifiers so often that reading a Klosterman book can become a literal exercise in the form of mental jumping jacks.

Some readers might view an Klosterman’s excessive use of superlatives as silly, but others might view the practice as the author making bold statements. If, that is, the author can back them up, and Klosterman does. Most readers, whether they agree or not, also view it as better reading when an author litters his narrative with bold statements. As my 8th grade teacher once told me after failing an opinion piece of mine, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong with conviction.” The problem with superlatives is that most authors feel compelled to address subjective tastes with qualifiers. I write this for those readers who might have a tough time making it through their jumping jacks.

The best way to call Nevermind the greatest album of all time, as Klosterman does, is to say everything but. This literary device allows the author to load their but with supporting evidence to allow the reader to reach their own conclusions. Yet, those of us who read music critics, like Klosterman, on a regular basis, can’t help but think Nevermind is overrated. Most of us think it was a fantastic and transcendent album (I can’t remember meeting anyone, even those in the “sellout” crowd, who told me they thought the album sucked, but I’m they’re out there). Reading music critics, however, Kurt Cobain walked up Mt. Sanai and came down with these thirteen songs.

Klosterman qualifies his superlatives in his first essay on Nevermind, saying, “The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style [heavy metal] of Western culture ends and another begins.” Once he gets that humorous qualifiers out of the way, Klosterman writes that “In the post Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way he did.”

This theory reminded me of a conversation I had with my uncle’s friend on the weekend after John Lennon was killed. I was not yet a teen, and this guy was well into his forties. As such, he had his finger on the pulse of the culture surrounding John Lennon far better than I did. When he said, “The man changed the world,” he said that to defend Lennon against the charge I made that Lennon was nothing more than a rock star. Even at that young age, I knew Lennon was a significant figure in our culture, but I thought the media attention devoted to the man was a bit over the top. “We were all asleep before John Lennon,” he added. “He woke us up.”

“Really?” I asked. “He affected your life that much?” He maintained it did.

I lost a lot of respect for my uncle’s friend when he said that, for even then I had a tough time understanding how a rock singer, or any entertainment figure, could alter an individual’s philosophy to such a degree that it changed how they react with people, and the way they lived their life. As I’ve grown older, I realized some people read too many music critics and watched too many retrospective shows with cultural doyens dropping such bromides. The latter often occurs after the tragic death of a cultural icon, and we all rewrite our past to fit that narrative.

As if to address this issue, Klosterman quotes Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. “I suspect that [Walter Benjamin] would be a little surprised by the extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with the memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories too.”

The media permits us to touch the touching sentiment of the moment, so that we might become part of it. We remember where we were when we first heard the news. “I was eating a chili dog at the Dairy Queen that was just three blocks from my home, when a fella in knit cap told me that John Lennon was shot. I’ll never forget that cap. It was blue with a yellow line on it. He also had a beard similar to the one Lennon wore in his solo years. It was almost eery.”

We repeat the lines media figures and figurines say and write with their king of the mountain characterizations of iconic figures and figurines to impress their peers, because we want to be their audience. We also want to be the writer writing to other writers, and we do so by speaking in superlatives to suggest we understand profound greatness. Common, every day people turn to their friends and say things like, “The voice of a generation, he woke us up, and I think about him every day.” We talk about his music changed our life, and how we’ll never be the same. These are touching sentiments that we might mean in the moment, but they’re enhanced by the media, and ultimately untrue.

I tried to establish a link with an impressive individual I met. The best way to do that, I thought, was to relay whatever information I had about his hometown, Dublin, Ireland. I mentioned that I read most of Ulysses, and I added the joke, “I’ve probably read as much of that book as anyone has.” That joke played on the Larry King quote, “Everyone I know owns Ulysses, but no one I know has finished it.” The impressive individual looked confused, but I didn’t realize how confused he was, until he said:

“Is that a book?”

“Well, yeah,” I said completely thrown off, “by James Joyce?”

“Never heard of him,” he said.

“The author,” I said. He shrugged. “You’ve never heard of James Joyce?! I thought he was the most famous Dubliner this side of Bono. Don’t they have statues built for him in the town square?” Nothing.

This lifelong resident of Dublin had never heard of someone I considered one of his city’s top five most famous residents. After all my reading on Joyce, I considered it impossible that a Dubliner had never heard of him. I considered it the cultural equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. I realized that I fell prey to cultural insiders writing to impress fellow insiders. I love reading Klosterman, but this, too, is his motif.

To Klosterman’s credit, he does qualify his superlatives at the beginning of the essay, writing, “The songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind did not tangibly change the world. There are limits to what art can do, to what a record can do, to what sound can do.”

After submitting that qualifier, he writes, “Nevermind changed everything.” (Perhaps in an intangible way?) He focuses this thesis on advertising, specifically an ad that involved Subaru’s introduction of the Impreza. Klosterman concludes that Subaru’s spokesman in the ad had to “talk about Nirvana without talking about Nirvana,” because “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.” Klosterman basically admits that the pairing would’ve been disastrous if it happened, but he doesn’t explain why. He simply contributes to the narrative Cobain parlayed with the “corporate magazines still suck” T-shirt he wore on a Rolling Stone cover.

I have no doubt that if Subaru approached Cobain, he would’ve laughed it off. Cobain gave us no reason to believe he was into the whole corporate sphere, and for the most part, he never wavered from the punk ethos. (Though he did force his bandmates to sign over most of the writing credits for Nirvana’s music. We should have no problem with that, since by all accounts Cobain wrote the lyrics and most of the music, but that action doesn’t align with the “One for all and all for one” Three Musketeers, punk ethos.)

What if the Subaru proposal hit Cobain’s desk at Nirvana Inc., and Cobain was all about it. “Punk ethos be damned, look what they’re offering to pay me for a couple hours of work.” His business partners would’ve informed him that this move would not only irreparably damage Cobain’s image, but everyone involved and the legacy they were creating. “This will force your fans to defend the Subaru ad for the rest of time,” a member of his management team, probably named Todd, would say, “and I don’t care how much they’re paying you, your bottom line will be affected long-term.”

Klosterman does admit that Nirvana (without singling Cobain out) made “conscious choices in order to become the most popular band in the world,” but Klosterman still feels the need to write “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.”

One particularly obnoxious and useless complaint I have is Klosterman repeating the line, [Kurt Cobain] “didn’t know” about a company putting out a deodorant called Smells Like Teen Spirit. By writing this open-ended line, Chuck Klosterman contributes to a fable on par with “I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down that cherry tree” or every president in the last thirty years telling a reporter, “I haven’t read the report in question.”

Klosterman relays the story of how a girlfriend (Kathleen Hanna) of one of Kurt’s girlfriends wrote, “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on his wall in lipstick. This was her note to Kurt and the girlfriend that informed them she was onto the fact that they were involved romantically. Now, it’s plausible that Kurt thought the lipstick message referred to the general smells of sex, but Kurt was a writer, and her message obviously inspired him. If he was so inspired to write a song about it, wouldn’t he say, “That’s hilarious, but what did you mean by it?” to Kathleen Hanna. If that didn’t happen, wouldn’t his friends ask him what it was about? If he told them what he thought it meant, wouldn’t they correct him, if he thought it was about the smell of sex? “No, what Kathleen Hanna was saying was your girlfriend uses a deodorant with the brand name Smells Like Teen Spirit, and the fact that you smell like that deodorant means she knows you’re having sex with her friend.”

If the origin of the message managed to escape his friends, family, and all of the small venues he played in to test the material out, wouldn’t someone in his band or any of the teams of people involved in the production process of the album inform him of the name of the deodorant before they released it?

Michael Azzarad writes Cobain claimed that he thought Kathleen Hanna’s message was in reference to “the conversation we were having, but … I didn’t know the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.” I’ve never been involved in the process of a song, granular to final press, but I can only guess that in the 90’s, a song passed through hundreds to thousands of ears before final production.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that so many people hit Cobain from so many quarters that he asked for help. I imagine Cobain saying something like. “I love the name of the song so much, and I’ve tried to come up with other titles, but none of them feel as right. How do we escape this unfortunate tie-in that everyone goes on and on about? I can’t play it anywhere without someone telling me about that damned spray.”

To which, a friend or a management type, probably said, “Just feign ignorance.”

“But they’re not going to stop asking about it.”

“They’re not, but when they do, just maintain that you didn’t know. Don’t include a timeframe. Just leave that comment open-ended, because it’s true, you didn’t know for a time. No one is going to ask a “What did he know, and when did he know it?” question about the name of a song. Nobody’s going to care that much.”

Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree, did Led Zeppelin sell their souls to the devil, did Kurt Cobain know about the similarities between the name of his most famous song and a deodorant’s brand name, and did he seek fame and fortune?

On the latter, I suspect that Cobain wanted to make the best album possible, and he allowed some corporate guys to do whatever they had to do to make Nevermind as great as it could possibly be. Some, including Cobain, say that something was lost in the mixing process. So, why did he do it? Why did Cobain succumb to the pressure from label execs and permit Andy Wallace to master it with what some call an “airplay-inviting varnish”? I’ve read that many in his inner circle were against it, and Cobain later regretted it. To understand why he did it, we probably need sort through some deep psychoanalysis of Kurt’s past and present, but that would likely be so far off base that it’s not even worth trying. Some of those who were close to Kurt in the present tense of Nevermind’s pre-production and production, suggest he wanted it more than they will ever tell you. What is it? We don’t know, but I believe Kurt when he said he never wanted to be famous, and I don’t think he ever strove to be rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I have to imagine that he wanted greatness bestowed upon him by his peers first and foremost, rock critics and journalists, and us. I don’t think he necessarily wanted or needed the spoils that come with it however.

All theory and analysis is autobiographical, as I wrote, and most of it is probably wrong, but the one thing we do know is Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana, wrote one hell of an album. Did the iconography of Kurt Cobain lead to rock critics, like Chuck Klosterman, using so many superlatives that Nevermind is now overrated? Perhaps. If Cobain’s worldview didn’t align so well with most of the rock critic world, they might have had a different take on his music. If the timing of the release of Nevermind was different, and it didn’t change the face of music (allegedly, single-handedly), would it have been regarded with such superlatives? Ifs and what if are for children, however, and when we wipe away all of it, and the myths, the narratives, and iconographic worship of Kurt Cobain, we still have to admit he and Nirvana wrote one hell of an album. On that note, Chuck Klosterman wrote one hell of a book, containing essays on Nirvana, 911, and other matters. His book on The Nineties is chock full of deep, entertaining insight into what made that decade what it was, and the reverberations that the decade sent down (or up?) to the modern era.