But What If We're Wrong? (7 page)

“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 book
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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 Sopranos
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.”

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.”
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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?