I’ve been reading—and now listening to—Chuck Klosterman on music and culture for over a decade. He’s a rare specimen: a true hipster precisely because he has no interest in being cool and too much interest in ideas to waste time polishing his image. His new essay collection, Football, keeps that streak alive. I’m consuming it on Audible while trying to erase myself on the Schwinn Airdyne, pedaling hard enough to regret my life choices. Every so often, Klosterman drops a line that forces me to slow the bike, release the upper-body levers, and frantically thumb notes into Google Docs like a deranged monk copying scripture mid-martyrdom.
Today’s line stopped me cold: “Greatness is about the creation of archetypes.” He was talking about the Beatles. Not record sales. Not chart dominance. Greatness, he argued, is the act of filling an archetypal mold so completely that everyone who follows can only approximate it. They may be talented, even brilliant, but they’re echoes, not origins. The mold has already been cast.
That idea made me think of Klosterman as a fourth grader, devastated when the Cowboys lost the 1982 NFC Championship to the 49ers on Joe Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark. I was living in the Bay Area then, and Montana instantly became something more than a quarterback. He wasn’t a flamethrower like Elway or a mythic warhorse like Staubach. He was smaller, calmer, unnervingly steady. He slew the Goliath that had humiliated the Niners for years. Montana wasn’t just great—he was David with a slingshot. That archetype mattered more than his stat line, and for a time it made him the greatest quarterback alive.
I’m not a Beatles devotee, but I understand why people place them on that pedestal. Archetypes don’t require personal devotion; they require recognition. You can see the mold even if you don’t want to live inside it.
Earlier in the book Klosterman expressed his genuine, hard-earned contempt for Creed—contempt earned the old-fashioned way, through actually listening—and my mind wandered to the opposite of greatness: a strange kind of cultural infamy where a band becomes a symbol rather than a sound. That’s when I realized I’d mixed up Creed with Nickelback, which led me down a brief but intense psychological spiral when I couldn’t find the documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback on Netflix. That film makes it painfully clear that Nickelback’s “crime” is not incompetence or fraud. They’re talented, professional, and wildly successful at pleasing their audience. Their real achievement is unwanted: they became the most socially acceptable band to hate.
Nickelback’s loathing isn’t sincere. It’s ritualized. Once social media weaponized contempt for them, sneering became a form of virtue signaling—a low-effort way to broadcast cultural superiority without doing the work of listening. Most of the haters probably couldn’t name three songs. The scorn isn’t about music; it’s about belonging.
Which is why I’d love to talk this through with Klosterman. He’s the right mind for it. Also, he might help me straighten out my chronic band confusion. This isn’t new. When I was five, I used to confuse the Monkees with the Beatles. Apparently, my brain has always had trouble keeping its mop-tops and punchlines in their proper bins.
Cinemorphosis 
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