But What If We're Wrong? Read online

  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.20 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 imm
ediate and sensible: the Beatles. All logic points to their dominance.21 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 Pop22). 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.

  “I think of rock and roll as something fairly specific,” says David Byrne, a gangly bicycle enthusiast best known for fronting the band Talking Heads. “Chuck Berry, early Beatles, the Stones, and a bunch of others. By the late sixties, I think other than a few diehards—many of them very good—it was over. The music was now a glorious, self-aware, arty hybrid mess.”

  Beyond his work with Talking Heads, Byrne is also the author of an astute book titled How Music Works, which is the main reason I wanted to ask him what rock music might live beyond the rock era. I suppose I literally wanted to know “how music works” over the expanse of time. What was surprising was the degree to which he denied himself this authority. As is so often the case with popular music, he ceded his own views to that of a younger person—in this case, his daughter (born in 1989).

  “I would not be surprised if my daughter and some of her pals have heard of the Velvet Underground, but not many of the other acts who were having hits back in the late sixties. The Association? The Monkees? ELO? I bet she’s never heard of them. Suspect she’s heard of the Eagles but maybe only knows ‘Hotel California’ from the radio. Suspect she’s heard of the Grateful Dead but has probably never heard a song.”

  What Byrne is unconsciously reacting to, I suspect, is an aspect of pop appreciation that latently informs everything else about it: the tyranny of the new. Since rock, pop, and rap are so closely tied to youth culture, there’s an undying belief that young people are the only ones who can really know what’s good. It’s the only major art form where the opinion of a random fourteen-year-old is considered more relevant than the analysis of a sixty-four-year-old scholar. (This is why it’s so common to see aging music writers championing new acts that will later seem comically overrated—once they hit a certain age, pop critics feel an obligation to question their own taste.) Even someone with Byrne’s pedigree feels like he must defer to all those born after him; he graciously expresses confusion over an idiom he understands completely. Which doesn’t remotely bother him, considering the role confusion plays in all of this.

  “I remember reading in John Carey’s book23 that Shakespeare and Rembrandt both went through periods of being considered not important,” Byrne concludes. “Carey’s point was that there is no such thing as absolute, timeless, eternal artistic values that will inevitably rise and endure. It just doesn’t happen. No matter how timeless and classic I think Hank Williams is, in one hundred years, some obscure recordings by some minister in Lake Charles might come out of nowhere and snatch the crown. It happens all the time. Or it might be that some cranked-out commercial crap gets a cultural reappreciation. We’ve seen that happen too. For all we know, the classic Greek plays were daytime dramas to the locals. I can see it now—in one hundred years, university students will be analyzing the details of every Three’s Company episode!”

  [4]What Byrne suggests is applicable to almost every topic mentioned in this book. Yet it feels particularly likely with rock music, a haphazard pursuit that’s inherently irrational. There is no way to anticipate or understand how Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View sold sixteen million copies while the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street was certified platinum only once. It’s hard to explain how Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was unable to climb higher than number six on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, despite being viewed (almost from its media inception) as the defining song of its era. The prospect of rock’s entire history being perversely formalized through a random, middling song is extraordinarily high.

  That prospect is magnified by rock’s role as an ancillary vehicle. Quite often, rock music is used in conjunction with something else that’s better suited to stand the test of time, inadvertently elevating a song that would have been otherwise lost. Here’s an easy example: television. Three or four generations from now, the present-day entertainment medium most likely to be “studied” by cultural historians will be television, based on the belief that TV finally became a serious, meaningful art form around the turn of the twenty-first century. The first TV show imbued with this new seriousness was The Sopranos, so future scholars interested in the evolution of television will always recognize and reexamine that specific series. The most interpretative moment in the history of The Sopranos is the last scene of the final episode, set in a diner. It’s a long scene with little dialogue, scored by the track “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey. Whether or not this choice was motivated by irony is beside the point, as is the critical (traditionally negative) or popular (traditionally positive) assessment of this song: “Don’t Stop Believin’” will exist as long as The Sopranos is considered significant. And let’s suppose that future scholarship around The Sopranos is tenacious and comprehensive; let’s suppose The Sopra
nos gets lumped in with the Godfather films and Goodfellas and The Departed as a means for understanding the social depiction of white organized crime, an essential cog in the history of twentieth-century America. If that happens, every directorial detail will become worth considering. Suddenly, people who don’t care about the history of music will have to care about Journey. Their inclusion in this episode of television will need to be explained. And since Journey is so emblematic of the clichés of classic rock, they will become a shorthand model for what rock supposedly was.

  “When you’re talking about individual artists from any period of time, all those various people exist within a washing machine of chaos,” argues musician Ryan Adams, phoning from the backseat of a car while touring through Denmark. Adams is a maniacally prolific songwriter who makes music in multiple genres (he’s recorded fifteen albums and eight EPs in a span of fifteen years, along with hundreds of other songs that have never been officially released). He’s also a published poet, a dater of celebrities, an oft-stoned goofball, and a legitimately unorthodox thinker. “Someone like Mozart or Bach remains relevant because they either contradict or embody the idea of the hero’s journey. Their life—or their death—aligns with whatever it is we value about that music. Maybe the way they live or die draws attention to the work. Or with someone like Beethoven, you’re talking about a musician who was deaf. But it’s a more complex question with how this would apply to rock ’n’ roll. Classical music, which is an extraordinarily sophisticated thing to compose, requires a listener with a lot of attention to detail and a willingness to really think about what they’re experiencing. That’s culturally different from something like the Sex Pistols, where you’re looking at music that stimulates us because it shocks people or awakens people or scares people or electrifies people in a much more immediate way. But that’s also the way all culture has progressed. It seems like people have just become more bored with being human.”