There is an enjoyable review of Van Halen’s new album, written by the rock critic Chuck Klosterman, making the appreciative rounds among friends of mine, guys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s under the tutelage of — speaking of rock and theology — “Running with the Devil.” For many of us, Van Halen is like an old friend we are very happy to hear from now and then, because we savor some good memories, although maybe we don’t want them back in our lives on a regular basis.

Van Halen is back with a new album, A Different Kind of Truth, and a new single, “Tattoo.” This is your cue to crank it. (Does David Lee Roth forget the lyrics at 1:20?)

I first encountered Klosterman’s writing in the 1990s when he wrote rococo reviews for Spin magazine, turning rock writing into a David-Foster-Wallace-like smorgasbord of elite intellectual references interleaved with low-culture minutiae, with his own transferences to the music somehow always the half-secret topic at stake. I remember laughing out loud on the Boston subway while reading his first book, Fargo Rock City, and sensing that a new kind of writing, unapologetically fan-centric and insouciant toward genre, was emerging. In Klosterman’s passion for hard rock and metal, I could identify with what I have called (in this R&T post) the conviction that rock’s musical “comfort food” can be a salvation.

As Klosterman’s review of the new VH album circulated among my friends, I thought about how the high and even nerdy degree of rockish literacy he exemplifies in this review, and in all his works, speaks to a new kind of literacy that has emerged in the last few decades, focused on pop culture materials.

Here is one VH song that helped inspire a million little Klostermans:

There is a story line emerging in some influential sociology of religion research today, that has been picked up by many religious institutions, that the post-1960s generations are essentially religiously illiterate. A chief pastoral task, it is argued, lies in cultivating religious literacy among highly secularized youth, young adults, and now

(more…)