But What If We're Wrong? (6 page)

So that's the pyramid.

Now, if the world were logical, certain predictions could be made about what bricks from that pyramid will have the greatest likelihood of remaining intact after centuries of erosion. Devoid of all other information, a betting man would have to select a level-one writer like Roth, just as any betting man would take the Yankees if forced to wager on who will win the World Series one hundred seasons from now. If you don't know what the weather will be like tomorrow, assume it will be pretty much the same as today. But this would require an astonishing cultural stasis. It would not simply mean that the way we presently consume and consider Roth will be the way Roth is consumed and considered forevermore; it would mean that the manner in which we value and assess
all novels
will remain unchanged. It also means Roth must survive his inevitable post-life reevaluation by the first generation of academics who weren't born until he was already gone, a scenario where there will be no room for advancement and plenty of room for diminishing perceptions (no future contrarian can provocatively claim, “Roth is actually better than everyone thought at the time,” because—at the time—everyone accepted that he was viewed as
remarkable). He is the safest bet, but still not a safe bet. Which is why I find myself fixated on the third and sixth tiers of my imaginary triangle: “the unrated.” As specific examples, they all face immeasurable odds. But as a class, they share certain perverse advantages. One is that they are insulated against the shifting perception of commercial success.
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Another is the narrative potential of the unsung, unappreciated hero. But the advantage that matters most is the one that's also most obvious: Unrated books are a neutral charge. The weight of history is not there. They have the ability to embody whatever people want, without the complication of reinvention.

I am, against my better judgment, making a prediction: I am predicting that the future world will be fundamentally unlike our present world. And this prediction can be seen as either risky or safe, depending on how far you extend the timeline. Ask anyone reading
Anna Karenina
in the present day what they think of the story, and they will often mention how surprisingly contemporary it seems. That would suggest the 1877 age of Tolstoy is essentially similar to the age of today, and that the only antiquated details are the details that don't matter. Part of me would like to believe this will always be true. But the part of me who's writing this book is more skeptical. I think the social difference between 2016 and 2155 will be significantly more profound than the social difference between 1877 and 2016, in the same way that the 139-year gap
between the publication of
Anna Karenina
and today is much vaster than the 139-year gap between 1877 and 1738. This acceleration is real, and it will be harder and harder for future generations to relate to “old” books in the way they were originally intended. In as little as fifty years, the language and themes of
The Corrections
will seem as weird and primordial as
Robinson Crusoe
feels to the consumer of today: It will still be readable, but that reading experience won't reflect the human experience it describes (because the experience of being human will be something totally different).

This is where the unrated book holds its contradictory advantage. We know what
The Corrections
is supposed to be about, and the public record of that knowledge will remain as static as the novel's content. Now, could some future person reinterpret and recast its meaning to make it more pliable to her era? Yes. But it would be far more effective—and considerably more inventive—to enact that same process with a text
that has no preexisting meaning
. A book that is “just a book”: the forgotten airport bestseller no one took seriously or the utterly unknown memoir that can be reframed as brilliant and ultra-prescient. Instead of fitting the present (past) into the future, we will jam the present (future) into the present (past).
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And it won't be the first time this has been done.

Am I certain this will happen? I am not certain. I'm the opposite of certain, for motives that are even more convoluted than the
ones I just expressed (more on that later). But this possibility strikes me as plausible, primarily for a reason that must never be ignored: History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

First, there was rock and roll.

Actually, that's not true. First, there was absolutely everything else that ever existed, and
then
there was rock and roll, spawned sometime in the vicinity of 1950. It was named after a 1934 song by a female harmony trio known as the Boswell Sisters, although this might be more of a coincidence than a causal relationship; the term was popularized by the Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed, a man who played black music for white audiences and unwittingly caused the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be built on the shores of Lake Erie, the artistic equivalent of naming North America after the first guy who happened to draw a map of it. “Rock and roll” is a technical term that denotes a specific kind of music—you can (almost) always dance to it, it (quite often) involves a piano, and it has not flourished in any meaningful way for well over fifty years, except as a novelty. This is because “rock and roll” soon morphed into “rock 'n' roll,” a mid-sixties derivative of the same
music now packaged with an ingrained mission statement: Here is art made exclusively for teenagers, self-consciously reflecting what is assumed to be their non-musical mores and values. (This period exists inside a small chronological window, beginning the night the Beatles first performed on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and ending with the December 1967 release of Jimi Hendrix's
Axis: Bold as Love
.) By the dawn of 1968, “rock 'n' roll” had evolved and expanded into “rock,” which is
only
a cultural designation—but a designation encompassing all popular music that has roots in “rock and roll,” including the preexisting artists who invented it.
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Almost anything can be labeled “rock”—Metallica, ABBA, Mannheim Steamroller, a haircut, a muffler. If you're a successful tax attorney who owns a hot tub, clients will refer to you as a “rock star CPA” when describing your business to their less hip neighbors. The metaphysical conception of “rock” cuts such a wide swath that it even includes subgenres that can be applied with equal ubiquity, like
punk
and
metal
and (until the mid-nineties)
hip-hop
. The defining
music of the first half of the twentieth century was jazz; the defining music of the second half of the twentieth century was rock, but with an ideology and saturation far more pervasive. Only television supersedes its influence. And pretty much from the moment it came into being, people who liked “rock” insisted it was dead. The critic Richard Meltzer allegedly claimed that rock was already dead
in 1968
. And he was wrong to the same degree that he was right.

Meltzer's wrongness on this point is obvious and does not require explanation, unless you honestly think
Purple Rain
blows. But his rightness is more complicated: Rock
is
dead, in the sense that its “aliveness” is a subjective assertion based on whatever criteria the listener happens to care about. When someone argued rock was “dead” in 1968 or 1977 or 1994 or 2005, that individual was making an aesthetic argument, grounded in whatever that person assumed to be the compromised motives of the artists of the time (customarily built on the conviction that the current generation of musicians were more careerist in nature, thus detracting from the amount of raw emotion they were allegedly injecting into the music). The popularity of the rock genre is irrelevant to this accusation. People insisted rock was dead in the mid-1980s, the absolute commercial peak for guitar-driven music. Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college. This has almost nothing to do with what's actually happening with the artists who make it. There will always be a handful of musicians making new rock music, just as there will always be a handful of musicians making new mariachi music. The entire debate is
semantic: Something that's only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.

But rock can (and will) recede, almost to the level of nihility. And for the purposes of this book, that's the same as dying.

Now, here is the paradox (and you knew a paradox was coming, because that's how this works): The cultural recession of rock is intertwined with its increased cultural absorption, which seems backward. But this is a product of its design. The symbolic value of rock is conflict-based. It emerged as a by-product of the post–World War II invention of the teenager.
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This was a twenty-five-year period when the gap between generations was utterly real and uncommonly vast. There was virtually no way a man born in 1920 would (or could) share the same musical taste as his son born in 1955, even if they had identical personalities. That inherent dissonance gave rock music a distinctive, non-musical importance for a very long time. But that period is over. Ozzy Osbourne's “Crazy Train” is used in a commercial for a Honda minivan. The Who's “Won't Get Fooled Again” was the opening theme for one of the most popular series in the history of CBS, the network with the oldest average viewership. The music of the Ramones has been converted into lullabies. There are string renditions of Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for lush, sardonic wedding processions. NBC used the Nine Inch Nails track “Something I Can
Never Have” as bumper music for the Wimbledon tennis tournament. “Rock” can now signify anything, so it really signifies nothing; it's more present, but less essential. It's also shackled by its own formal limitations: Most rock songs are made with six strings and electricity, four thicker strings and electricity, and drums. The advent of the digital synthesizer opened the window of possibility in the 1980s, but only marginally. By now, it's almost impossible to create a new rock song that doesn't vaguely resemble an old rock song. So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn't symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and (c) has no specific tie to young people. It has completed its historical trajectory. It will always subsist, but only as itself. And if something is
only
itself, it doesn't particularly matter. Rock will recede out of view, just as all great things eventually do.

“For generations, rock music was always there, and it always felt like it would somehow come back, no matter what the current trend happened to be,” Eddie Van Halen told me in the summer of 2015. “For whatever reason, it doesn't feel like it's coming back this time.”

Mr. Van Halen was sixty when he said this, so some might discount such sentiments as the pessimistic opinion of someone who's given up on new music. His view, however, is shared by rock musicians who were still chewing on pacifiers when Van Halen was already famous. “I've never fully understood the references to me being a good guitarist,” thirty-seven-year-old Muse front man Matt Bellamy told
Classic Rock
magazine that same summer. “I think it's a sign that maybe the guitar hasn't been very common in the last decade . . . We live in a time where intelligent people—or creative, clever people—have actually chosen computers to make
music. Or they've chosen not to even work in music. They've chosen to work in tech. There's an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.” The fantasies of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
are not the fantasies of now: We've run out of teenagers with the desire (and the potential) to become Eddie Van Halen. As far as the mass culture is concerned, that time is over.

But some people will still care.

Some people will
always
care.

Even in three hundred years, some people will remember that rock happened and that rock mattered.

So what, exactly, will they remember?

[
2
]
The concept of
success
is personal and arbitrary, so classifying someone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect more on the source than the subject. So keep that in mind when I make the following statement: John Philip Sousa is the most successful American musician of all time.

Marching music is a maddeningly durable genre, recognizable to pretty much everyone who's lived in the United States for any period of time. It works as a sonic shorthand for any filmmaker hoping to evoke the late nineteenth century and serves as the auditory backdrop for a national holiday, the circus, and major college football. It's not “popular” music, but it's entrenched within the popular experience. It will be no less fashionable in one hundred years than it is today. And this entire musical idiom is defined by one person—John Philip Sousa. Even the most cursory two-sentence description of marching music inevitably cites him by
name. I have no data on this, but I'd confidently assert that if we were to spontaneously ask the entire US population to name every composer of marching music they could think of, over 98 percent of the populace would name either one person (Sousa) or no one at all. There's no separation between the awareness of this person and the awareness of this music, and there is no reason to believe this will ever change.

Now, the reason this happened—or at least the explanation we've decided to accept—is that Sousa was simply the best at this art. He composed 136 marches over a span of five decades and is regularly described as the most famous musician of his era. He also possessed some expressly American traits (he was born in Washington, D.C., and served as a member of the Marine Band) that make him an ideal symbol for such archly patriotic music. The story of his career has been shoehorned into the US education curriculum at a fundamental level (I first learned of Sousa in fourth grade, a year before we memorized the state capitals). And this, it seems, is how mainstream musical memory works. As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any genre fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable. Sometimes this is easy to predict: I have zero doubt that the worldwide memory of Bob Marley will eventually have the same tenacity and familiarity as the worldwide memory of reggae itself.

But envisioning this process with rock is harder.

It's so hard, in fact, that most people I interviewed about this possibility can't comprehend such a reality ever happening. They all seem to think rock will always be defined by a diverse handful of artists—and for the next thirty or forty years, that will be true.
But this is because we're still trapped inside the system. The essential significance of rock remains a plausible thing to debate, as does the relative value of major figures within that system (the Doors, R.E.M., Radiohead). Right now, rock music still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won't seem that way in three hundred years, because nothing in the culture ever does. It will eventually be explained by one artist.

Certainly, there's one response to this hypothetical that feels immediate and sensible: the Beatles. All logic points to their dominance.
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They were the most popular band in the world during the years they were active and they are only slightly less popular now, five decades later. The Beatles defined the conception of what a “rock group” was supposed to be, so all subsequent rock groups are (consciously or unconsciously) modeled upon the template they embodied naturally. Their aforementioned appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
is so regularly cited as the genesis for other bands that the Beatles arguably invented the culture of the 1970s, a decade when they were no longer together. They arguably invented
everything
, including the notion of a band breaking up. The Beatles were the first major band to write their own songs, thus making songwriting a prerequisite for credibility; they also released tracks that unintentionally spawned entire subgenres of
rock, such as heavy metal (“Helter Skelter”), psychedelia (“Tomorrow Never Knows”), and country rock (“I'll Cry Instead”). And though this is obviously subjective, the Beatles wrote the
best
songs (or—at the very least—the greatest number of timeless, familiar singles within the shortest window of time).

“Look, we did a lot of good music,” Paul McCartney said in 2004, the kind of statement that would normally seem arrogant but actually scans as self-deprecation, considering the source and the subject. “You look at
Revolver
or
Rubber Soul
. They are decent efforts by any standards. If they're not good, then has anyone ever been any good?”

There are still things about the Beatles that can't be explained, almost to the point of the supernatural—the way their music resonates with toddlers, for example, or the way it resonated with Charles Manson. It's impossible to imagine another rock group where half its members faced assassination attempts. In any reasonable world, the Beatles are the answer to the question “Who will be the Sousa of rock?”

But our world is not reasonable. And the way this question will be asked tomorrow is (probably) not the same way we'd ask it today.

Do I think the Beatles will be remembered in three hundred years? Yes. I believe the Beatles will be the Sousa of Rock (alongside Michael Jackson, the Sousa of Pop
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). If this were a book of
predictions, that's the prediction I'd make. But this is not a book about being right. This is a book about being wrong, and my faith in wrongness is greater than my faith in the Beatles' unassailability. What I think will happen is probably not what's going to happen. So I will consider what might happen instead.

[
3
]
Part of what makes this problem thorny is the duality of rock: It is somehow both obvious and indistinct. The central tropes of rock—crunching guitars, 4/4 time signatures, soaring vocals, long hair and leather pants, sex and drugs and unspecific rebellion—seem like a musical caricature that's identifiable to the level of interchangeability. From enough distance, the difference between Foghat and Foreigner and Soundgarden is negligible. But conversations inside music culture fixate on those negligible differences: There is still no consensus, for example, on what the first rock and roll song supposedly was (the most popular answer is 1951's “Rocket 88,” but that's nowhere close to definitive). The end result is a broad definition of rock music that everyone roughly agrees upon and a working definition of rock music that is almost entirely individualized.