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    I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined)
    I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined)
    I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined)
    Audiobook7 hours

    I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined)

    Written by Chuck Klosterman

    Narrated by Chuck Klosterman

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine).

    Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don’t we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol—Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson’s second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985?

    Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: “By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture—and maybe even American morality.” I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJul 9, 2013
    ISBN9781442362970
    I Wear the Black Hat: Essays on Villains (Real and Imagined)
    Author

    Chuck Klosterman

    Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. 

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    Reviews for I Wear the Black Hat

    3.5/5

    220 ratings17 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I was really excited about this book when I heard about it, and I soon learned that it's best to go in without expectations. The first few essays were very lackluster and hard to follow. Klosterman seemed like he was trying really hard to sound smart, or to make this book seem like there was actually a lot of research done. Later essays made up for it - I was especially a fan of his OJ Simpson analysis - but overall, it wasn't what I expected. It might take a few readings for this one to be enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      If you like Chuck Klosterman’s writing then you’ll like this book but don’t start on this book if this is your first Klosterman exploration.
    • 4/5
      First time reading Chuck Klosterman. Book is unlike any I've read. He tackles an interesting topic with unusual insights and crisp, entertaining yet analytical writing. Klosterman finds a wide array of villains to analyze -- from The Eagles to Joseph Stalin. If I one criticism of the book I suppose sometimes it's a little too erratic with a couple of chapters. I thought they could have stood alone as magazine essays but didn't really hand together with other parts of the book. Nothing that should keep you from reading this one. I strongly recommend.
    • 3/5
      It's not about the kind of villains you're probably thinking of, except for the one token chapter about Hitler, but spends more time on the public figures decried widely in the 1980s and 1990s, a few from this century. Even though I lived through that time, it had the effect on me of thinking "oh yeah, I haven't thought about him in a long time" or misremembering the particulars of what made each particular one so vilified. It isn't so much about the motivations these people had but the reason why the public perception of the villain's worldview makes them so despised, more about mass psychology and less about criminal psychology. The author is also interested in why certain individuals who have performed similar acts as others are not treated as villains in the same way. It isn't really a how-to guide on avoiding being considered a bad person, or even on how to get yourself noticed as a bad person, but more a series of meditations on different aspects of the phenomenon.
    • 4/5
      Chuck Klosterman has pretty much only one overarching idea here: the concept of the villain in any situation as the one who "knows the most and cares the least." It's an intriguing thought, but not one that seems definitive to me at all. And, honestly, I'm not sure Klosterman really thinks it is, either. It seems to just be a notion he likes to keep coming back to.Other than that, this examination of villains and bad guys and who they are and what they mean is very freewheeling. Individual chapters may have a particular focus, but, as a whole, it's not a carefully structured exploration of the idea of villainy that's aimed at coming to any strong conclusions on the subject. It's mostly just Klosterman noodling around with the idea of villains, what they mean to him, what they seem to mean to society at large, and how to wrap his head around it all. He goes a lot of different places with it, thinking about villains in history (including very recent history), in fiction, in sports, in music, and in our culture in general. A lot of it is personal, based in Klosterman's own experiences and attitudes. He spends a good part of one chapter on a list of various bands he used to hate when the was younger, for what now mostly seem like really dumb reasons. He spends another whole chapter comparing Bernard Goetz and Batman. In another, he mostly talks about how hard it is to talk about Hitler. And so on and so forth.And this loose structure, it turns out, works really well. I found it interesting and surprisingly rewarding to just sort of follow Klosterman's mind wherever it happened to go. He has a lot of thought-provoking things to say, and while I don't necessarily agree with him about everything, I think he actually makes some points that are really insightful and important. He's also just really entertaining to read, with a style that I'm finding it difficult to compare to anybody else's.This is the first thing of Klosterman's I've read, which seems like something of an oversight. It's definitely not going to be the last, though. I already have his But What If We're Wrong? on the TBR shelves, and I'm now quite looking forward to it.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful collection of essays about 'villains' and 'villainy'. Chuck Kolsterman is a terrific writer at getting down to the reasons and behaviors of people, to the psyche of why we hate some people and not others, mostly along arbitrary lines. His dissections of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, of the OJ Simpson trial, Machiavelli, Paterno/Sandusky, Muhammed Ali, etc. The essays all work terrifically and are all written so well that you get such a greater understanding of 'wearing the black hat' and why we are all our own villains (and want to be as well). Provides a lot better understanding for things like the Man in Black (WestWorld) and other fictional worlds.
    • 3/5
      Interesting concept. Unfortunately I'm insufficiently familiar with popular culture to understand the MANY sports and pop music examples. If you are more pop culture aware than me (admittedly not a difficult feat) you may get more out of the book.
    • 4/5
      Not Klosterman's strongest collection as a whole, likely due to being written around a singular theme. A few essays are stellar. Many are just okay.
    • 4/5
      I have to say I tried to win this book on good reads the subject matter was thoroughly intriguing. I did not win and the book stuck with me I found a copy at my local Indie bookstore and bought the book. The author has done justice to the topic of what makes a villain and the moral ambiguities of the villain. His essay on Batman, Bernhard Goetz and Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson's character in Death Wish movies) at what point does the victim become the vigilante and then the villain? The essay makes a point that the real life Goetz crossed the line of victim and self defense when he seemed to enjoy the killing. Death Wish was a book before it was a movie, and the book argues against the concept of vigilantism and focus on moral confusion; the movie celebrates the vigilante and makes him a hero. The author touches on hip hop, Penn State, Hitler and then himself.

      This would make a great non-fiction book club pick many great though provoking subjects for discussion.

      I will have to check out Mr Klosterman's other books.
    • 3/5
      Quirky meditations on the nature of villainy/rock and roll authenticity/other stuff. Klosterman’s basic argument, though he doesn’t endorse it all the way, is that the villain is the person in a story who knows the most and cares the least. Moments of interest, but fairly light.
    • 3/5
      Regardless of topic, however cohesive or otherwise, it is the voice of Klosterman that draws readers to his writing. Such characteristics include speculations on post modernity, the championing of culturally derided figures (the Eagles in this instance), and an unusual ability to form unions between seemingly non-sequitur topics. I first discovered Klosterman early in my undergraduate career, and his essays seem to reflect certain conversations I was having with my (perhaps overly pedantic) colleagues about the nature of living in a mediated reality and its consequent social mythologies. But as I age, my tolerance for such meditations on the subject has waned, and this is likely why I enjoyed I Wear the Black Hat less than his previous works.Ostensibly, I Wear the Black Hat is a collection of essays based upon the topic of villainy, exploring the social conditions to produce villainous characters and explaining why those who commit heinous acts often slide into the undisturbed and unexamined recesses of our culture. Beginning with an examination of why Machiavelli remains a unanimously derided cultural figure, Klosterman concludes that the villain is the one "who knows the most, but cares the least." It is through this lens that Klosterman explores the villainization of the once deified Paterno, who possessed both knowledge of Sandusky's crimes and the power to bring forth justice. In my opinion this is one of Klosterman's most cogent essays. Unfortunately, the majority of his work is not even tangentially related to his framing thesis. He seems to overreach and make tenuous connections between vilified individuals, comparing Kareem Abdul Jabar to OJ Simpson ad nauseum.One of his better essays, however, juxtaposes gossip blogger Perez Hilton, piracy champion Kim Dotcom and Wikileaks' Julian Assange. This piece examines the implications of technology on personal privacy, industry, and national security respectively. More importantly however is the implication that access to information shapes the course of the future and therefore these individual megalomaniacs are shaping the course of history as I type this very review.Despite my criticisms, ,I Wear the Black Hat was an enjoyable and light read, best consumed a few essays at a time. For fans of Klosterman, it is certainly worth your time. However, if you are new to the author, I would not start with this work.
    • 1/5
      Wandering and incoherent, and does not get the central issue. More a platform for the author's opinion on music and television than an analysis of the subject matter.
    • 3/5
      I thought this would deal more with fictional villains, so was a little disappointed. Nonetheless, it's an entertaining read that taught more than I thought it would.
    • 3/5
      I Wear the Black Hat is Chuck Klosterman's attempt to explain the moral ambiguity of the term "villain." Villains, nowadays, do not wear the "black hat while twirling the handlebar mustache gleefully waiting for the train to kill whichever damsel-in-distress they've tied to the tracks." Instead, villains live in the gray.

      Their characterizations are murky. They've become multifaceted and nuanced. Klosterman doesn't interpret villains as inherently evil. Villains "are people who know the most but care the least." He points out the most notable exception of this philosophy is Hitler who cared a lot about his various opinions and atrocities but didn't know anything.

      Klosterman points out that society glamourizes villainy as long as the respective person stays out of sight, out of mind. Like in the case of D.B Cooper who hijacked a plane for money, jumped out of said plane, and disappeared. As time passed, Cooper became revered developing a near cult like folk hero status or Bill Clinton. He is possibly a sex crazed adulter but he remains mum about his indiscretions and he is still a favorite especially among women.

      O.J. Simpson always stood in public view after his not guilty verdict in 1994 for the murders of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. It was if his mere public presence and nonchalance added fuel to the fire and has made him one of the most revile criminals supposedly. So much so that Klosterman points out that O.J. might have been railroaded in the armed theft case that has presently landed him in prison.

      I enjoyed I Wear the Black Hat. It was funny and interesting. It was different from Klosterman's other writings because of a sense of detachment. There was little anecdotal experiences that lead into whatever argument he's trying to make.

      Klosterman has always been a polarizing figure to me. Either I like his books (and subsequently him) or I hate his books (and subsequently him). Ironically, he describes cases of this kind of fickle irrational adoration or hatred in this book. I usually can see where he's coming from and why he thinks that or wonder where the heck that came from and he felt the need to express it. The former is true for I Wear the Black Hat.
    • 4/5
      I have a hard time rating books like this.

      Do I think the book to be a profound achievement? No. But it was quite entertaining, it even evoked a number of laughs-out-louds, which is an achievement for any book. Klosterman, as he often does, got me thinking about various topics and people in a way I hadn't before.

      So it's been a mental struggle between 3 stars and 4. Maybe the rating system itself is inherently problematic in that there is no consistency as to what each star means to me let alone what it means to other people. But this is an argument that I am sure has been waged before in other reviews and forums.

      So fuck it, this is a 4 star book of pop-nonfictional popular culture criticism; or some other less dumb arrangement of words that mean what I am really trying to say but can't.
    • 5/5
      It takes more than evil inclinations to become a villain—at least in Klosterman's world."The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least" (18).I Wear the Black Hat is a collection of essays that tests this simple thesis. Over the course of 12 chapters you'll explore the lives of musicians (Don Henley, Taylor Swift, Keith Richards), celebrities (Perez Hilton, Kim Dotcom, Sharon Stone), athletes (O. J. Simpson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), politicians (Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney), and yes, even that paragon of villainy himself, Hitler.Each chapter is full of Klosterman's perspective-shifting analysis and trademark wit. In one of the finest essays in the book, Klosterman compares the life of Batman to the real-life version, Bernhard Goetz, before questioning why we would cheer one and jeer the other. He wraps up the chapter with these comments:"As a framework for living, we have collectively agreed that violently responding to crime makes society worse, ... Street justice is a desirable fantasy, but it must remain a fantasy in order for the desire to exist. In a book or a movie, the vigilante cares about us. In life, he cares more about the squirrels. It's the only way" (75).If you enjoy examining culture in an alternate light, I Wear the Black Hat is an insightful read.
    • 3/5
      This book should really be called This Is Why They Hate You. These words and this thought recur continually throughout. Although it starts out as being about villainy (the Black Hat of the title), it soon shows its true colors – why “we” apparently love to hate celebrities. Before that unfortunate transition, Klosterman posits some interesting paradigms to chew on, such as “People are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.” And “The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.” That’s an intriguing framework I looked forward to exploring. Silly me.Klosterman is skintight in his envelope of American pop culture celebrity, mostly sports. You won’t recognize a lot of the people he considers celebrities worth hating, and in 25 years, your children will find this whole book unreadable. They won’t recognize the names he values, and will have no context to make sense of it. He gives the same celebrity/hate “analysis” to politicians, football players, coaches, basketball players, boxers, rockstars, and writers - all males, by the way. If he doesn’t think they care, they’re villains.He really lost me when he went after Muhammad Ali. Ali was an act with a very short shelf life. To his credit, he understood that well in advance, and plotted a successful strategy. To make it to the top, he had to pull out all the stops; nothing was beneath him psyching out his opponents. He did it and he is lionized for it. But because he racially slandered Joe Frazier, Klosterman casts him as a villain. But lying can be an integral component of a vocation. It’s okay for presidents to lie, but not okay for Ali? Ali verbally pummeled every opponent in sight before they got in the ring with him. He executed brilliantly. Ali was the most entertaining athlete ever, anywhere. Celebrity, not villain. Certainly Lance Armstrong (unmentioned) before Ali. Who hates Muhammad Ali?So while Black Hat began as fascinating, it degenerated into celebrity-bashing. A large percentage of Klosterman’s villains just aren’t. He seems to confuse villainy with character. Howard Cosell? Character. Wilt Chamberlain? Character. Chevy Chase? Character. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Character. You’re allowed to have a less than angelic character without being a villain. I freely admit to not hating 90% of the villains in this book.It swings back to end on two actual villains, the tiresome OJ Simpson, and Adolf Hitler, the only historical (pre Klosterman) figure in the book. Nothing comes of it, except he classifies Hitler beyond villain, because his definition doesn’t fit. Hitler rates evil. No mention of Dick Cheney or Osama Bin Laden, who surely must rank ahead of Howard Cosell on the villain list.Had the title been more accurate, I probably would not have read the book, but many more would. We’d all be better off for it.