not reasonable. And the way this question will be asked tomorrow is (probably) not the same way weâd 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 Pop 22 ). If this were a book ofpredictions, thatâs the prediction Iâd 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 Beatlesâ unassailability. What I think will happen is probably not whatâs 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 rockâcrunching guitars, 4/4 time signatures, soaring vocals, long hair and leather pants, sex and drugs and unspecific rebellionâseem like a musical caricature thatâs 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 1951âs âRocket 88,â but thatâs 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.
âI think of rock and roll as something fairly specific,â says David Byrne, a gangly bicycle enthusiast best known for fronting the band Talking Heads. âChuck Berry, early Beatles, the Stones, and a bunch of others. By the late sixties, I think other than a few diehardsâmany of them very goodâit was over. The music was now a glorious, self-aware, arty hybrid mess.â
Beyond his work with Talking Heads, Byrne is also the authorof 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 âhow music worksâ 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 personâin this case, his daughter (born in 1989).
âI 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 sheâs never heard of them. Suspect sheâs heard of the Eagles but maybe only knows âHotel Californiaâ from the radio. Suspect sheâs heard of the Grateful Dead but has probably never heard a song.â
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, thereâs an undying belief that young people are the only ones who can
really
know whatâs good. Itâs 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 itâs so common to see aging music writers championing new acts that will later seem comically overratedâonce they hit a certain age, pop critics feel an obligation to question their own taste.) Even someone with Byrneâs pedigree feels like he must defer to all those born after him; he graciously expresses confusion over an idiom he understands completely. Which doesnât remotely bother him, considering the role confusion plays in all of this.
âI remember reading in John Careyâs book 23 that Shakespeare and Rembrandt both went through periods of