Excellent think piece by Chuck Klosterman in the NYT. Fairly lengthy, but a very entertaining read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html?_r=0

SPOILER/TEASER:
Not The Beatles
Not The Stones
Not Elvis
Not Dylan

...that everyone forgot except for China. :(

.

This guy's perception is just so warped and biased to his experience.

He epitomizes rockism. Almost every other paragraph contains an assumption that is questionable. For someone who's seemingly going for that 'finger on the pulse' cultural critic....his worldview is so small and rigid. And white (there, I said it). It's ironic...cause he spouts a few kinda cliche statements that attempt to be racially aware...but you can see that there's undertow of a deeper bias that he's NOT aware of. Sort of like a woke person having a dream about being woke.

He sucks and the biggest reason is his self-conscious *anti-rockism* which runs through everything he writes including this text (unlike you, I don't think the assumptions he make is based on rockism but more his perception of OTHER rock-critics and their biases, it's finger pointing); in the context of today and 2016, we need MORE prominent rockist-biased critics, not less; rockism in music-writing has not been an issue/problem since the 90's. Klosterman is part of the problem and dudes like him and others still act as if they have discovered something new by challenging rockist-norms that haven't existed in contemporary criticism since at least the pitchfork era and "everyone" embracing everything from Daft Punk to Kanye to Beyonce to Timberlake to...

But the first one is the contention that Bob Marley perfectly encapsulates all things that are reggae whereas 'rock' is much too nuanced and multi-layered to be represented by just one person. The only reason he THINKS that reggae can be thoroughly represented by Bob Marley is because he doesn't know alot about reggae music.

That's just the first one though....there's alot more.

Bob Marley is *the* token reggae-guy and has been for decades; look in an average record-collection and the only reggae record will be Marley's "Legend"-comp. I don't know any other genre known in the west that has it as bad as reggae in that regard. That reggae *music* can't be properly encapsulated by Marley alone is besides the point; that is not what this article/text/whatever was about but rather which representative of the rock genre that will be remembered and why.

And I see no reason to make it race-related; a black-as opposed to white-*american* perspective on reggae wouldn't be too different simply because reggae didn't cross over like that in USA regardless of the race of the listeners; had it been a british perspective, there's a chance that race becomes an issue though for a variety of reasons...

Either way, using Bob Marley as the sole token symbol/face of reggae in the future is hardly a controversial standpoint because it's already like that, has been for decades and I doubt it will change...

>the contention that Bob Marley perfectly
>encapsulates all things that are reggae whereas 'rock' is much
>too nuanced and multi-layered to be represented by just one
>person.

you're completely misrepresenting his stance here.

what he said is that the way collective mainstream memory works w/r/t musical culture is that the fringes are forgotten, one individual eventually emerges as emblematic of an entire genre, and their accomplishments accordingly become exaggerated over time. see bob marley in reggae or kurt cobain in grunge.

he's contending that the difference with "rock" (as with jazz before it) is that as an ideology it's transcended its musical-genre origins to become definitive and pervasive of society as a whole in so many non-musical ways. hence the fact that we use words like "jazzy" and "rock-star" as adjectives to describe things that literally have nothing to do with music, in a way that we don't use the word "reggae".

>This guy's perception is just so warped and biased to his
>experience.



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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

I think the question itself is interesting even if the article itself was a bit lackluster. It was at its best in discussing, in more general terms, the curious relationship between history and memory in relation to music. (I'm a history PhD candidate writing my diss now, and part of my project deals with history and memory in perceptions of the 1960s, but I have never thought a great deal about the problem in relation to music or cultural canon formation.) The point that what was once deemed transgressive and revolutionary can change or even flip entirely, conveyed via the punk and disco conflict, is a good one, I think, even if it's something we already know unconsciously. Putting the shifting sands of memory in the context of larger issues of representation and canonization is a complicated endeavor and a worthwhile one.

But Klosterman (who I don't have strong feelings for or against, as others do, although I don't find his writing especially interesting) kind of misses his own best point here. On the one hand, he tacitly acknowledges that the boundaries of "rock" have effectively blurred with pop, were blurred from its beginnings, and that determining where rock ends and something like disco begins is at least somewhat futile. He further recognizes that "rock" has as much to do with performance and character and story as with the music itself, again putting itself firmly within the parameters of pop music. But then relies on a handful of early rock folks as his possible candidates, without ever entertaining the fact that the shifting sands of memory may very well reorganize 20th c. musical categories beyond recognition. I was disappointed, in that respect, that he actually put up a name --- to me, the piece points mostly to the futility of prediction in this regard, even if it's fun to think about. (And is also a great stepping stone to really rethinking standard categories and genre divisions... how *will* 20th c. music be interpreted 200 yrs from now?)

One other point: I'm not sure how much the "big name" representatives in music actually have to do with genre. I am thinking, for instance, of the standard western classical quintet of Bach/Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven/Brahms. On the one hand, each represents a period of musical transition and development. But from another perspective, many of those changes are rather slight (especially from Haydn through Beethoven), revolutionary in their context but only definitive of a "genre" if one really gets into the music. And they were never alone, and we know that: each of these names is more like a centerpoint around which many other important names float, names that are also recognizable even to the uninitiated. So part of me was disappointed that he stuck so closely to the idea of a single representative, when I'm not sure that's an accurate version of how art history generally operates...

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

I didn't have as big a problem with this piece as a lot of people in here, but can imagine that it might read different in the context of the book (which is all about history and the idea of "getting it wrong").

I'm also a big Klosterman fan.

I need to dig it up and refresh, but he was recently on Open Mike Eagle's Secret Skin podcast and actually addressed the fact that he tends to stay in the rock music lane in his writing and specifically avoids hip hop. I don't want to totally misquote or misinterpret but I remember him acknowledging that it was slippery ground for a white guy to pick apart that music and that he essentially wanted no part in that.

That makes a lot more sense. Authors don't always have a lot of control over excerpts when they appear, either --- so stuff could be edited, removed, etc. As part of a larger project, could be more interesting and nuanced....


-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~

And I say arbitrary because his rationale for Chuck Berry could be used to justify a slew of other musicians.




**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"