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

by Chuck Klosterman

Interestingly (or maybe unavoidably), Lethem and Adams both think the better answer is Bob Dylan. But something tells me that their dual conclusion is too rooted in the world we still inhabit. It seems self-evident only because Dylan still feels culturally present. I keep imagining a college classroom in five hundred years, where a hipster instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with the same level of fluency as the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style of music they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, and its origins, and the way it served as cultural currency, and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He attempts to personify the concept of rock through the life of a rock person. He shows the class a photo—or maybe a hologram—of this chosen individual. This is the guy. This is the image of what rock was, and what rock is. Will that image be a Jewish intellectual from Minnesota who never rocked? I don’t think so. And if it is, I don’t know if that means things went wrong or right. Both, probably.