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Authors: Chuck Klosterman

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[
6
]
“Most commercial music disappears when the generation that made it dies,” Ted Gioia writes me in an e-mail. “When I was a youngster, many adults could have given me a detailed account of the popular music of the 1920s. They could have told me the names of bands and songs, and why they were popular, and where they were performed. Those fans are all dead now, and only a few specialists understand this music—and even the specialists don't grasp it with the immediacy and ‘deep' knowledge our grandparents possessed. After each generation dies, only a few songs and artists enjoy a lingering fame. Louis Armstrong didn't sell as many records as Ben Selvin in the 1920s, but he has retained his fame because he's been championed by critics, historians and later musicians. A few artists succeed on both artistic and commercial rankings (for example, Bing Crosby), but for a reputation to last, the artistry needs to be at the highest rung. Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.”

Gioia is a historian, best known in academic circles for his authoritative books on jazz and the Delta blues. However, his
mainstream profile peaked in 2014, when he published a short essay about the state of music criticism that outraged a sect of perpetually outraged music critics. Gioia's assertion was that twenty-first-century music writing has devolved into a form of lifestyle journalism that willfully ignores the technical details of the music itself. Many critics took this attack personally and accused Gioia of devaluing their vocation.
25
Which is ironic, considering the colossal degree of power Gioia ascribes to record reviewers: He believes specialists are the people who galvanize history. Music critics have almost no impact on what music is popular at any given time, but they're extraordinarily well positioned to dictate what music is reintroduced after its popularity has waned.

“Over time, critics and historians will play a larger role in deciding whose fame endures. Commercial factors will have less impact,” he writes. “I don't see why rock and pop will follow any different trajectory from jazz and blues. For example: In 1956, Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter sold better than almost every rock 'n' roll star not named Elvis Presley, but historians and critics don't care about 1950s bachelor pad music. They've constructed
a historical perspective on the period that emphasizes the rise of rock, and that pushes everything else into the background. In 1957, Tab Hunter's ‘Young Love' sold better than anything by Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis or Fats Domino. Hunter was #1 on the
Billboard
chart for six weeks in a row. But critics and music historians hate sentimental love songs, so these artists and songs struggle to get a place in the history books. Transgressive rockers, in contrast, enjoy lasting fame . . . right now, electronic dance music probably outsells hip-hop. In my opinion, this is identical to the punk-versus-disco trade-off of the 1970s. My prediction: edgy hip-hop music will win the fame game in the long run, while EDM will be seen as another mindless dance craze.”

Gioia is touching on a variety of volatile ideas here, particularly the outsized memory of transgressive art. His example is the adversarial divide between punk and disco: 1977 saw the release of both the disco soundtrack to
Saturday Night Fever
and the Sex Pistols'
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
. The soundtrack to
Saturday Night Fever
has sold over fifteen million copies; it took
Never Mind the Bollocks
fifteen years to go platinum. Yet virtually all pop historiographers elevate the importance of the Sex Pistols above that of the Bee Gees. The same year the Sex Pistols finally sold the one millionth copy of their debut,
SPIN
placed them on a list of the seven greatest bands of all time.
Never Mind the Bollocks
is part of the White House record library, inserted by Amy Carter just before her dad lost to Ronald Reagan. The album's reputation improves by simply existing: In 1985, the British publication
NME
classified it as the thirteenth-greatest album of all time; in 1993,
NME
made a new list and decided it now deserved to be ranked sixth. This has as much to do with its transgressive identity as its
musical integrity. The album is
overtly
transgressive (and therefore memorable), while
Saturday Night Fever
has been framed as a prefab totem of a facile culture (and thus forgettable). For almost forty years, that's been the overwhelming consensus. But I've noticed—just in the last four or five years—that this consensus is shifting. Why? Because the definition of “transgressive” is shifting. It's no longer appropriate to dismiss disco as superficial. More and more, we recognize how disco latently pushed gay, urban culture into white suburbia, which is a more meaningful transgression than going on a British TV talk show and saying “fuck.” So is it
possible
that the punk-disco polarity will eventually flop? Temporarily, yes. It's possible everyone could decide to reverse how we're supposed to remember 1977. But there's still another level here, beyond that hypothetical inversion: the level where
everybody
who was around for punk and disco is dead and buried, and no one is left to contradict how that moment felt. When that happens, the debate over transgressions freezes and all that is left is the music. Which means the Sex Pistols win again (or maybe they lose bigger, depending on the judge).

“There is a pragmatic, justice-driven part of my brain that believes—or needs to believe—that the cream rises to the top, and the best work endures by virtue of its goodness.” These are the words of fair-minded music writer Amanda Petrusich. “That music becomes emblematic—it becomes shorthand—because it's the most effective. ‘Effective,' of course, is a slippery slope when applied to art, and especially to the feelings art incites. It's a theory that presumes all examples of a given genre are accessible and able to be heard in the same way. But yeah: I think the biggest part of this just has to do with goodness. Maybe that sounds naïve.”

Petrusich is the author of three books, most notably
Do Not Sell at Any Price
, a deep dive into the obsessive world of 78 RPM record collectors. The men (and it's pretty much
only
men) Petrusich chronicles are actively constructing the universe of a specific musical realm—they collect the ancient, ultra-rare recordings that were pressed onto defunct ten-inch shellac discs and rotated at the fastest turntable setting. This form of collecting is, in many ways, a technological pursuit. The obscurity of the disc itself is the essential draw. But it is still psychologically grounded in what the collectors consider
musically
essential, and those choices have a completely capricious relationship to whatever was really happening in 1933.

“With a genre like the country-blues, that shit got curated,” Petrusich says. “Specific people made specific choices about what would endure. In this particular case, the people making those choices, the ones picking which records would
literally survive
, were the collectors of 78s. And, if you subscribe to the archetype—which I believe to be mostly true—collectors are outliers who feel marginalized by society, and they were personally drawn to music that reflected those feelings. And now, when people think of the Delta blues, they think of players like Skip James—a guy who made terrifying-sounding records that were not remotely popular or relevant in their time, outside of a few oddball fans and acolytes. But collectors heard them, and they recognized something in that dude's extraordinary anguish. So he became an emblem.”

There is, certainly, something likable about this process: It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most. Within the insular world of pre-Depression 78s, weirdos might be the only ones who
care at all. But it will be a very, very long time before the entire category of “rock” becomes that insular and arcane. There is too much preexisting mediated history to easily upend the status quo. The meaning of rock—at least in a broad sense—has already calcified. “As far as what artists get anointed, I suppose it's just whoever or whatever embodies those [central] attributes in the simplest, most direct way,” Petrusich concludes. “When I think of rock 'n' roll, and who might survive, I immediately think of the Rolling Stones. They're a band that sounds like what we've all decided rock 'n' roll should sound like—loose and wild. Their story reflects that ethos and sound—loose and wild. And also, they are good.”

This is true. The Rolling Stones are good, even when they release records like
Bridges to Babylon
. They've outlived every band who ever competed against them, with career album sales exceeding the present population of Brazil. From a credibility standpoint, the Rolling Stones are beyond reproach, regardless of how they choose to promote themselves: They've performed at the Super Bowl, in a Kellogg's commercial, and on an episode of
Beverly Hills, 90210
. The name of the biggest media property covering rock music was partially inspired by their sheer existence. The group members have faced arrest on multiple continents, headlined the most disastrous concert in California history, and classified themselves (with surprisingly little argument) as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” since 1969. Working from the premise that the collective memory of rock
26
should dovetail with
the artist
who most accurately represents what rock music actually was
, the Rolling Stones are a very, very strong answer.

But not the final answer.

[
7
]
NASA sent the unmanned craft
Voyager
into deep space in 1977. It's still out there, forever fleeing Earth's pull. No man-made object has ever traveled farther; it passed Pluto in 1990 and currently tumbles through the interstellar wasteland. The hope was that this vessel would eventually be discovered by intelligent extraterrestrials, so NASA included a compilation album made of gold, along with a rudimentary sketch of how to play it with a stylus. A team led by Carl Sagan curated the album's contents. The record, if played by the aliens, is supposed to reflect the diversity and brilliance of earthling life. This, obviously, presupposes a lot of insane hopes: that the craft will somehow be found, that the craft will somehow be intact, that the aliens who find it will be vaguely human, that these vaguely human aliens will absorb stimuli both visually and sonically, and that these aliens will not still be listening to eight-tracks. The likelihood that anyone in the universe will play this record is only slightly greater than the likelihood that my dad will play a Kendrick Lamar album, and my dad is dead. But it was a charming idea—very optimistic
and Sagan-like—and it guaranteed that one rock song will exist even if the Earth is spontaneously swallowed by the sun: “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. The song was selected by Timothy Ferris, a science writer and friend of Sagan's who'd contributed to
Rolling Stone
magazine. Ferris is considered the album's de facto producer. Supposedly, folklorist Alan Lomax was against the selection of Berry and argued that rock music was too childish to represent the highest achievements of the planet (I'm assuming Lomax wasn't too heavily engaged with the debate over the Sex Pistols and
Saturday Night Fever
).

“Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock song on the
Voyager
disc, although a few other tunes were considered. “Here Comes the Sun” was a candidate, and all four Beatles wanted it to be included—but none of them owned the song's copyright, so it was killed for legal reasons.
27
The fact that this happened in 1977 was also relevant: “Johnny B. Goode” was nineteen years old in '77, which seemed almost prehistoric at the time; if such a project was pursued in 2016, the idea of picking a nineteen-year-old song would be unthinkable (unless you find me an astrophysicist who lost her virginity to “MMMBop”). I suspect the main reason “Johnny B. Goode” was chosen is that it seemed like a levelheaded track to select. But it was more than merely reasonable. It was—either consciously or accidentally—the best possible artist for NASA to select. This is because Chuck Berry may very well become the artist
society
selects, when (and if) rock music is retroactively reconsidered by the grandchildren of your grandchildren. We might
be wrong about the Beatles and the Stones; that music might matter only to people who remember it for real.

Two thousand words ago, I speculated on the divergent ways rock would be remembered if Elvis or Dylan became the sole totem for what it was. And that will be true, assuming the idea of celebrity culture dominates history in the same way it dominates modernity. If we pick the person first, that person's function becomes the genre's form. But what if it works the other way? What if all the individual components of rock shatter and dissolve, leaving behind a hazy gestalten residue that categorizes rock 'n' roll as a collection of memorable tropes? If this transpires, historians will reconstitute the genre like a puzzle. They will look at those tropes as a suit and try to decide who fits that suit best. And that theoretical suit was tailored for Chuck Berry's body.

Rock music is simple, direct, rhythm-based music. Chuck Berry made simple, direct, rhythm-based music. Rock music is black music mainstreamed by white musicians, particularly white musicians from England. Chuck Berry is a black man who directly influenced Keith Richards and Jimmy Page.
28
Rock music is grounded in the American South.
29
Chuck Berry is from St. Louis, which certainly feels like the South for most of the year. Rock
music is preoccupied with sex. Chuck Berry was a sex addict whose only American number-one single was about playing with his penis. Rock music is lawless. Chuck Berry went to prison twice before he turned forty. Rock music is tied to myth and legend (so much so that the decline of rock's prominence coincides with the rise of the Internet and the destruction of anecdotal storytelling). Chuck Berry is the subject of multiple urban legends, several of which might actually be true (and which often seem to involve cheapness, violence, and sexual defecation). “If you tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon famously said, “you might call it
Chuck Berry
.” That quote is as close as we come to a full-on Sousa scenario, where the person and the thing are ideologically interchangeable. Chuck Berry's persona is the purest distillation of what we understand rock music to be. The songs he made are essential, but secondary to who he was and why he made them. He is the idea itself.

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