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

  “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.

  [8]Not everyone agrees with this, or with me. “I don’t think purest distillation is how giant fields get replaced by one single figure,” novelist Jonathan Lethem contends. “I think the one single figure isn’t the inventor or the purest distillation, but the most embracing and mercurial, and often incredibly prolific.” Ryan Adams disputes Berry on similar grounds: “If you’re looking for a cultural highlight that will still be talked about later, it would be a symptom of the thing that was set in motion—not the inventor itself. We talk about Twitter all the time, but rarely about the person who designed it.” Interestingly (or maybe unavoidably), Lethem and Adams both think the better answer is Bob Dylan. But something tells me that their dual conclusion is too rooted in the world we still inhabit. It seems self-evident only because Dylan still feels culturally present.

  I keep imagining a college classroom in five hundred years, where a hipster instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with the same level of fluency as the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style of music they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, and its origins, and the way it served as cultural currency, and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He attempts to personify the concept of rock through the life of a rock person. He shows the class a photo—or maybe a hologram—of this chosen individual. This is the guy. This is the image of what rock was, and what rock is.

  Will that image be a Jewish intellectual from Minnesota who never rocked?

  I don’t think so. And if it is, I don’t know if that means things went wrong or right. Both, probably.

  “Merit”

  Right about now, were I reading this book (as opposed to writing it), I’d probably be asking myself the following reasonable questions: “But what about the merit of these things? Shouldn’t we emphasize that? Isn’t merit the most reliable criteria for longevity?” Were I the type of person predisposed toward disagreeing with whatever I was reading, I might suspect the author viewed the actual quality of these various artifacts as tangential to their ultimate value, and that all the author’s suppositions inevitably suggest that what things actually are matters less than random social conditions and capricious assessments from people who don’t necessarily know what they’re talking about.

  If that is what you assume, here is my response: You’re right. Not totally, but mostly.

  [This is not what people want to hear.]

  I realize my partial dismissal of “merit” as a vital element of the historical record is problematic (even to me). Part of this problem is philosophical—it’s depressing to think quality doesn’t necessarily matter. Another part is practical—whenever we consider any specific example, it does seem like merit matters, in a way that feels too deep-seated to ignore. William Shakespeare is the most famous playwright who’s ever lived, and his plays (or at least the themes and the language of those plays) still seem better than those of his peers. Citizen Kane is a clichéd response within any debate about the greatest film of all time, but it’s also a legitimate response—it’s a groundbreaking movie that can be rewatched and reevaluated dozens of times, somehow improving with every fresh viewing. It doesn’t seem arbitrary that we all know who Vincent van Gogh is, or Pablo Picasso, or Andy Warhol. In the broadest possible sense, merit does play a key role: The work has to be good enough to enter the critical conversation, whatever that conversation happens to be. But once something is safely inside the walls of that discussion, the relative merits of its content matters much less. The final analysis is mostly just a process of reverse engineering.

  Take architecture: Here we have a creative process of immense functional consequence. It’s the backbone of the urban world we inhabit, and it’s an art form most people vaguely understand—an architect is a person who designs a structure on paper, and that design emerges as the structure itself. Architects fuse aesthetics with physics and sociology. And there is a deep consensus over who did this best, at least among non-architects: If we walked down the street of any American city and asked people to name the greatest architect of the twentieth century, most would say Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, if someone provided a different answer, we’d have to assume we’ve stumbled across an actual working architect, an architectural historian, or a personal friend of Frank Gehry. Of course, most individuals in those subsets would cite Wright, too. But in order for someone to argue in favor of any architect except Wright (or even to be in a position to name three other plausible candidates), that person would almost need to be an expert in architecture. Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities. And what emerges from that social condition is an insane kind of logic: Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twe
ntieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question.

  History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

  As a brick-and-mortar visionary, Wright was dazzling. He was also prolific, which matters almost as much. He championed the idea of “organic architecture,” which—to someone who doesn’t know anything about architecture, such as myself—seems like the condition all architecture should aspire to. But I know these imperative perspectives have no origin in my own brain. The first time I ever heard Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, I was being told he was brilliant, which means the first time I looked at a building he designed, I thought either, “That is what brilliance looks like,” or “This is what everyone else recognizes as brilliance.” I knew he was considered “prolific” long before I ever wondered how many buildings an architect needed to design in order to be considered average, much less productive. I believe all architecture should aspire to be in harmony with its habitat, because (a) it seems like a good line of reasoning, and (b) that was Wright’s line of reasoning. Yet I am certain—certain—that if I had learned that Wright had instead pioneered the concept of “inorganic architecture,” based on a premise that architecture should be an attempt to separate the rational world of man from the uncivilized creep of nature . . . not only would I agree with those thoughts, but I would actively see that philosophy, fully alive within his work (even if the buildings he designed were exactly the same as they are now).

  I don’t believe all art is the same. I wouldn’t be a critic if I did. Subjective distinctions can be made, and those distinctions are worth quibbling about. The juice of life is derived from arguments that don’t seem obvious. But I don’t believe subjective distinctions about quality transcend to anything close to objective truth—and every time somebody tries to prove otherwise, the results are inevitably galvanized by whatever it is they get wrong.30

  In 1936, a quarterly magazine called The Colophon polled its subscribers (of whom there were roughly two thousand, although who knows how many actually voted) about what contemporary writers they believed would be viewed as canonical at the turn of the twenty-first century. The winner was Sinclair Lewis, who had won the Nobel Prize for literature just five years earlier. Others on the list include Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, George Santayana, and Robert Frost. It’s a decent overview of the period. Of course, what’s more fascinating is who was left off: James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (although the editors of The Colophon did include Hemingway on their own curated list). Now, the predictive time frame we’re dealing with—sixty-four years—is not that extreme. It’s possible that someone who voted in this poll was still alive when the century turned. I also suspect several of the 1936 writers who still seem like valid picks today will be barely recognizable in another sixty-four years and totally lost in 640. That’s just how history works. But the meaningful detail to glean from such a list is the probable motives used by the voters, since that’s how we dissect their reasonable mistakes. For example: Edna St. Vincent Millay is fourth on the Colophon list, and Stephen Vincent Benét is ninth. Both were known primarily as poets—Millay won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and Benét in ’29. Benét was something of a Rock Star Poet (at least at the time of the poll) and is retroactively described by the Poetry Foundation as “more widely read than Robert Frost.” Yet of the three poets on this list, only Frost remains familiar. Now, the fact that Colophon voters went only one-for-three in their poet prognostication is not what matters here; what matters is that they voted for three poets. If such a poll were taken today, it’s hard to imagine how far down the list one would have to scan before finding the name of even one. A present-day Colophon would need to create a separate category exclusively for poetry, lest it not be recognized at all. So what we see with this 1936 list is people selecting artists under the assumption that 1936 is the end of time, and that the temporary tastes and obsessions of 1936 would remain historically universal. The poll operates from the perspective that poetry is roughly half as important as prose, which is how the literary world thought in 1936. These voters were okay at gauging the relative timelessness of the various literary works, but they were terrible at projecting what the literary world would be like in the year 2000 (when the planet’s best-selling, highest-profile book of poetry was A Night Without Armor, written by Alaskan pop star Jewel). The forces shaping collective memory are so complicated and inconsistent that any belief system dogmatically married to the concept of “merit” ends up being a logical contention that misses the point entirely. It’s like arguing that the long-term success of any chain restaurant is a valid reflection of how delicious the food is.

  Do you unconsciously believe that Shakespeare was an objectively better playwright than his two main rivals, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson? If so, have no fear—as far as the world is concerned, he was. If you want to prove that he was, all you need to do is go through the texts of their respective plays and find the passages that validate the opinion most of the world already accepts. It will not be difficult, and it will feel like the differences you locate are a manifestation of merit. But you will actually be enforcing a tautology: Shakespeare is better than Marlowe and Jonson because Shakespeare is more like Shakespeare, which is how we delineate greatness within playwriting. All three men were talented. All three had enough merit to become the historical equivalent of Shakespearean, had history unspooled differently. But it didn’t. It unspooled the way we understand it, and Shakespeare had almost nothing do with that. He is remembered in a way that Marlowe and Jonson are not, particularly by those who haven’t really thought about any of these guys, ever.

  To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

  Burn Thy Witches

  I’ve written about pop music for over twenty years, productively enough to deliver musicology lectures at universities I could’ve never attended. I’ve been identified as an expert in rock documentaries broadcast in countries where I do not speak the language. I’ve made a lot of money in a profession where many talented peers earn the adult equivalent of birdseed. I’ve had multiple conversations about the literal meaning of the Big Star single “September Gurls,” chiefly focused on who the September girls were, what they allegedly did, and why the word “girls” needed to be misspelled. I own a DVD about the prehistory of Quiet Riot and I’ve watched it twice. Yet any time I write about popular music—and even if the sentiment I articulate is something as banal and innocuous as “The Beach Boys were pretty great”—many, many people will tell me I don’t know anything about music, including a few people I classify as friends. Even though every concrete signifier suggests my understanding of rock music is airtight and stable, I live my life with an omnipresent sensation of low-level anxiety about all the things I don’t know about music. This is a reflection of how the world works and how my brain works.

  So now I’m going to write about fucking physics.

  And here are my qualifications for doing so: I took physics as a senior in high school and did not fail.

  That’s it. That’s as far as it goes. I know how a fulcrum works and I know how to make the cue ball roll backward when I shoot pool. I know that “quantum mechanics” means “extremely small mechanics.” I understand the concepts of lift and drag just enough to be continually amazed every time an airplane doesn’t crash during takeoff. But that’s the extent of my expertise. I don’t own a microscope or a Bunsen burner. So when I write about science, I’m not really writing about “science.” I’m not pretending to refute anything we currently believe about the natural world, particularly since my natural inclination is to reflexively accept all of it. I am, however, willing to reconsider the idea of science, and the way scientific ideas evolve. Which—in many contradictory ways—is at the center of every question this book contains.

  There is, certainl
y, an unbreachable chasm between the subjective and objective world. A reasonable person expects subjective facts to be overturned, because subjective facts are not facts; they’re just well-considered opinions, held by multiple people at the same time. Whenever the fragility of those beliefs is applied to a specific example, people bristle—if someone says, “It’s possible that Abraham Lincoln won’t always be considered a great president,” every presidential scholar scoffs. But if you remove the specificity and ask, “Is it possible that someone currently viewed as a historically great president will have that view reversed by future generations?” any smart person will agree that such a scenario is not only plausible but inevitable. In other words, everyone concedes we have the potential to be subjectively wrong about anything, as long as we don’t explicitly name whatever that something is. Our sense of subjective reality is simultaneously based on an acceptance of abstract fallibility (“Who is to say what constitutes good art?”) and a casual certitude that we’re right about exclusive assertions that feel like facts (“The Wire represents the apex of television”).