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

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 immediate 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 ofrock, 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).
    â€œLook, 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