But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Whenever people tell me I’m wrong about something, I might disagree with them in conversation, but—in my mind—I assume their accusation is justified, even when I’m relatively certain they’re wrong, too.

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

‘Literary posterity may often surprise us in its selections, but it almost exclusively selects7 from among those known in their day, not the unknown.’

Philip K. Dick (a sci-fi writer who embodies the possibility of seeming more consequential in retrospect than he did as an active artist).

The most canonical figure in literary history who was essentially a self-published kook would arguably be William Blake.”

And this, of course, is where naïve realism punches me in the throat. There’s simply no way around the limited ceiling of my own mind.

skoliosexual

Things that seem obvious now—the conscious racism of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the role the CIA played in the destabilization of Iran, how payola controlled what was on FM radio, the explanation behind America’s reliance on privately owned cars instead of public transportation, et al.—were all discussed while they were happening . . . but only on the marginalized periphery.

Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist. And the same thing is happening in the arts.

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is literally about media alienation, so it can’t really be about media alienation.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “a set of lies agreed upon”). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

This is because “rock and roll” soon morphed into “rock ’n’ roll,” a mid-sixties derivative of the same music now packaged with an ingrained mission statement: Here is art made exclusively for teenagers, self-consciously reflecting what is assumed to be their non-musical mores and values.

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.

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.

It’s a narrative template Campbell called “the monomyth.”

What makes us remember the things we remember?

Louis Armstrong didn’t sell as many records as Ben Selvin in the 1920s,

In 1956, Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter sold better than almost every rock ’n’ roll star not named Elvis Presley, but historians and critics don’t care about 1950s bachelor pad music.

Skip James—a guy who made terrifying-sounding records that were not remotely popular or relevant in their time, outside of a few oddball fans and acolytes.

Rock music is black music mainstreamed by white musicians, particularly white musicians from England.