Free But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

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.
    â€œFor 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 makemusic. 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 byname. 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