Interesting article, and raises a lot of pertinent questions. I disagree with some of his claims about rock having run its course and being a dead end. It originated as the music of youth, yes, built around simple three-chord blues progressions. But musical genres evolve, both stylistically and in their social setting. Modern jazz is a very different beast in form and audience from what was being played in New Orleans in the 1920s.
The problem I have with the author's vote for Chuck Berry as the face of rock 300 years from now is that Berry wasn't prolific enough. For 99% of people he's only known for the one song. I think that what happens with the passage of time is a telescoping effect, where a great body of work gets whittled down and whittled down in the public awareness until any given artist is only really known for just one or two pieces that "stand in" for the whole repertoire, which only specialists really explore. College teachers only have twenty minutes out of one class session in the survey course to talk about that genre so they pick the one or two iconic works to exemplify the rest.
This is not just music; how many Leonardo da Vinci paintings can the average person on the street name? Mona Lisa and... maybe the Last Supper... what else? People KNOW there's a lot more, and the fact that a lot more exists allows scholars to build their careers on studying the artist and writing dissertations about them, but most people don't know WHAT exactly the "lot more" actually consists of.
Given that telescoping effect, an artist that only has one major work to start with very quickly gets sandwiched in with a batch of other artists in the same boat, and then they become a nameless and generic batch of forgotten individuals. Chuck Berry is too easy to lump in with Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly as "fifties rock and rollers" to become the textbook example of what late-20th century popular music was all about. Also, he lacks longevity (even though he kept playing for a long time). Fifties rock went moribund fast and can easily be fitted into the bigger narrative as the gateway to the explosion of 60s, 70s, 80s rock. Guys like Chuck Berry then become mere forerunners to the "real" story.
So I would argue that, 300 years from now, the "face of rock" people learn about will be someone who was prolific in their output and who had longevity in their career so that they can be used to exemplify as much of the history of the genre as possible in a 20-minute segment of a class. That would put the Beatles back in the running; they didn't have such great longevity as a group, but were certainly prolific, and just about everything in rock that happened after can be traced back to something they did. You also have built-in human interest in things like the dispute over Yoko's role and the later murder of Lennon. That kind of thing is teaching gold.
But I think the Stones would probably be the ones to really emerge as the long-term icons of rock. The article makes the argument pretty strongly, and then dismisses it rather weakly to try to argue for Chuck Berry. They have the prolific output of the Beatles, but also the longevity the Beatles didn't have, and they better exemplify the transgressive quality of early rock than the Beatles do.
Great post. Totally agree.
It probably would have served the author well to consider this from the academic standpoint of how subjects are taught as you have. The idea that all of rock and roll will be boiled down to one icon actually doesn't sit well with me, nor do I think it will happen due to human nature. We humans are detail freaks, especially in academia. Rock and roll is too complex and culturally important to distill into one face. I think as the era is studied by historians, it would be as any subject is studied, ranging from gen ed survey to dissertation. My guess is that historians will break rock and roll into much finer bits than they are even now, genres, eras, regions, etc, as opposed to trying to limit the entire subject to a single figure. One single representative for an entire subject is totally counter to the way historians earn their bread and butter, wouldn't you say?
As to popularity during the era dictating the place the figure holds in the historical canon, I can see certain unexpected personalities rising to the top. After all, there are 300 years of history yet to be written before our fictitious professor chooses her examples for class. In that intervening time, there will undoubtedly be a renaissance or two where rock and roll is rediscovered and changed to either fit the current culture, or as a result of technology. I think that whomever is rediscovered to inform those reinterpretations, will hold a strong place in the future version of history. Mozart, for instance, not exactly popular at the time of his existence, Van Gogh, another. Due to the passage of time and discovery, both are now top of the list when the subjects of classical music or painting are discussed. Who knows, in 300 years, Richard Hell may be seen as the progenitor genius that he is.
If I were a history prof 300 years from now, I would make my first presentation selections based on how my class might react to it. I would want their attention. I would want to find a sound and visual that would shock and amaze them instantly. Sitting here, I can not think of a better example than Little Richard. The first sounds my class would hear would be "A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!". Combined with the amazing visual of Little Richard on the "holodeck" doing what only he could do so well, I have no doubt the class would be left slack jawed.
I would then run some Sex Pistols footage, before back tracking to the Beatles to talk about the idea of "the band" and the shift from dance music to songwriting as an art form.
So, the scary thing about all this is television. Not the band, Television, but the object, television, which was the main source of promulgation and infection of this rock and roll virus. Every story about how rock and roll went from underground to mainstream begins with "Ed Sullivan..." The author of the essay mentions rock and roll being influential on culture but not as influential as TV. This being the case, future historians may conflate the two and may come to believe that rock and roll transmitted through the medium of broadcast was the most important rock and roll to the culture. Given this, the band or musician with the most air time would be the most important. Here's the scary part, that band would be The Monkees. A close second, The Partridge Family. Yikes!
.....(Except, of course, country)....
