His methodology is one of torturously stupid analogies propping up a worldview that runs the gamut from socially vampiric to merely narcissistic. To quote General Ze'evi, "He is the Thomas Friedman of pop culture." When he's really throwing down science, when he announces that he's challenging the reader, Klosterman lards meaningless observations about meaningless phenomena with cute paradoxes, trying to rationalize the impossible tension between two strawmen he's invented, before arriving at a conclusion that antagonizes the web-traffic-spiking intelligentsia while validating and comforting the incurious.
His treatment of Billy Joel is a perfect example. In Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he oversees a rhetorical tennis match between the false binary that "Billy Joel Is Terrible" and "Billy Joel Is Secretly Great" by kicking around the man's career and eventually making the same evaluations everyone else already has: Billy Joel is a pretty good piano player who writes pretty good (and some great) pop songs about being in love, and usually once an album has a lyrically superior and commercially unviable song like "Vienna." The important points here are that:
1. That last sentence isn't long enough to count as an article or book chapter, and:
2. Writing that single sentence doesn't take you through the intellectual and emotional gravity well at the center of the universe, Chuck Klosterman.
Simmons goes through this same process with almost everything, sometimes spending a whole column on a strident criticism, then another walking it back too far, then reaching a synthesis as if it occasioned some degree of struggle. It's "Baby's First Hegelian Dialectic," only the logical building blocks are huge and can't really fit in his tiny hands. (Worse, like Klosterman, his analysis of sporting events now largely constitutes analyzing how he might come to analyze the sporting events later, and how he has to think about how he will reevaluate the hypothetical in light of outcomes that haven't even happened.)
