But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

  Adams is asserting that the things people like about rock are less predictable than the things people like about classical music, and that this divergence increases the possibility that rock will matter for non-musical reasons. What people appreciate about rock and pop is less cerebral—the subjective notion of cool is the most critical aesthetic factor, and any emotional exchange can trump everything else. This, curiously, is a big part of what makes rock music compelling: There’s no consistent criterion for what is (or isn’t) good. Sometimes virtuosity is essential; sometimes it’s actually viewed as a detriment. This is almost never the case with classical music, where non-negotiable genius is the omnipresent goal. But given enough time, both genres will fold into the same historical space. They will both be represented in totality by an exceedingly small sample of artists.

  “When you look at the classical-music repertory, you can’t really complain that a bunch of mediocrities have crowded out the composers of real talent,” says Alex Ross, the author of The Rest Is Noise, a 720-page exploration of modern classical music. As a younger man, Ross was also a top-shelf rock writer (his 2001 article on Radiohead remains the best thing ever written about the group). “If you have Monteverdi representing the late Renaissance and early Baroque, or Haydn and Mozart representing the Classical era, or Beethoven, Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, and Brahms standing in for the nineteenth century, you get to feast on a tremendous body of work. Posterity has been more or less right in its judgments. The problem, though, is that Mozart becomes a brand to sell tickets, and there’s an assumption that any work of Mozart is worth scrutiny. In fact, he wrote a fair amount of music that doesn’t radiate genius in every bar. Meanwhile, there are composers of his era—Luigi Boccherini, for example—who produced many fascinating and beautiful pieces, even if you can’t quite claim that they rise to Mozart’s level. Ultimately, the repertory operates on a celebrity logic. These happen to be celebrities of thundering genius, but we’re still giving in to a winner-takes-all mentality. There’s a basic human reason for this simplification: It’s difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters, and we settle on a few famous names.”

  Yes.

  [5]Ryan Adams referenced the idea of “the hero’s journey,” a contention similar to what you’d hear from mythologist Joseph Campbell: the notion that all stories are essentially the same story. It’s a narrative template Campbell called “the monomyth.”24 In Western culture, pretty much everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person—the “journey” of one particular “hero”—as a prism for understanding everything else. In rock, there are two obvious candidates for this purpose: Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. The Beatles are the most famous musical collective, but Elvis and Dylan are the towering individuals—so eminent that I don’t need to use Elvis’s last name or Dylan’s first.

  Now, neither is an ideal manifestation of rock as a sonic concept. It’s been said that Presley invented rock and roll, but he actually staged a form of seminal “pre-rock” that barely resembles the post–Rubber Soul universe that became the prevailing characterization of what this music is. He also exited rock culture relatively early—he was pretty much out of the game by 1973. Conversely, Dylan’s career spans the entirety of rock. Yet he never made an album that “rocked” in any conventional way (the live album Hard Rain probably comes closest, or maybe the song “Hurricane”).

  Still, these people are Rock People. Both are baked into the core of the enterprise and influenced everything we understand about the form (including the Beatles themselves, a group who would not have existed without Elvis and would not have pursued introspection without Dylan). In one hundred or two hundred or five hundred years, the idea of “rock music” being represented by a two-pronged combination of Elvis and Dylan would be equitable and oddly accurate. But the passage of time makes this progressively difficult. It’s simply easier for a culture to retain one story instead of two, and the stories of Presley and Dylan barely intersect (they supposedly met only once, in a Las Vegas hotel room). As I write this sentence, the social stature of Elvis and Dylan feels similar—perhaps even identical. But it’s entirely possible that one of these people will get dropped as time plods forward. And if that happens, the consequence will be huge. If we concede that the “hero’s journey” is the de facto story through which we understand history, the differences between these two heroes would profoundly alter the description of what rock music supposedly was.

  If Elvis (minus Dylan) is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz. Like Frank Sinatra, Elvis did not write songs; he interpreted songs that were written by other people (and like Sinatra, he did this brilliantly). But removing the essentialism of songwriting from the rock equation radically alters the context of its social value. It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music, and the dominant qualities of Presley’s persona—his sexuality, his masculinity, his larger-than-life charisma—become the dominant signifiers of what rock was. His physical decline and reclusive death become an allegory for the entire culture. The reminiscence of the rock genre adopts a tragic hue, punctuated by gluttony, drugs, and the conscious theft of black culture by white opportunists. But if Dylan (minus Elvis) becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition. It would be remembered as far more political than it actually was, and significantly more political than Dylan himself. The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally “good” singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style, and the portrait of his seven-decade voyage would align with the most romantic version of how an eclectic collection of fifty autonomous states eventually became a place called “America.”

  These are the two best versions of this potential process. And both are flawed.

  There is, of course, another way to consider how these things might unspool, and it might be closer to the way histories are actually built. I’m creating a binary reality where Elvis and Dylan start the race to posterity as equals, only to have one runner fall and disappear. The one who remains “wins” by default (and maybe that happens). But it might work in reverse. A slightly more plausible scenario is that future people will haphazardly decide how they want to remember rock, and whatever they decide will dictate who is declared as its architect. If the constructed memory is a caricature of big-hair arena rock, the answer is probably Elvis; if it’s a buoyant, unrealistic apparition of punk hagiography, the answer is probably Dylan. But both conclusions direct us back to the same recalcitrant question: What makes us remember the things we remember?

  [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 rock26 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).