Read Online But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman - Free Book Online Page A

the part of me who’s writing this book is more skeptical. I think the social difference between 2016 and 2155 will be significantly more profound than the social difference between 1877 and 2016, in the same way that the 139-year gapbetween the publication of
Anna Karenina
and today is much vaster than the 139-year gap between 1877 and 1738. This acceleration is real, and it will be harder and harder for future generations to relate to “old” books in the way they were originally intended. In as little as fifty years, the language and themes of
The Corrections
will seem as weird and primordial as
Robinson Crusoe
feels to the consumer of today: It will still be readable, but that reading experience won’t reflect the human experience it describes (because the experience of being human will be something totally different).
    This is where the unrated book holds its contradictory advantage. We know what
The Corrections
is supposed to be about, and the public record of that knowledge will remain as static as the novel’s content. Now, could some future person reinterpret and recast its meaning to make it more pliable to her era? Yes. But it would be far more effective—and considerably more inventive—to enact that same process with a text
that has no preexisting meaning
. A book that is “just a book”: the forgotten airport bestseller no one took seriously or the utterly unknown memoir that can be reframed as brilliant and ultra-prescient. Instead of fitting the present (past) into the future, we will jam the present (future) into the present (past). 18 And it won’t be the first time this has been done.
    Am I certain this will happen? I am not certain. I’m the opposite of certain, for motives that are even more convoluted than theones I just expressed (more on that later). But this possibility strikes me as plausible, primarily for a reason that must never be ignored: 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.

But That’s the Way I Like It, Baby. I Don’t Want to Live Forever.
    First, there was rock and roll.
    Actually, that’s not true. First, there was absolutely everything else that ever existed, and
then
there was rock and roll, spawned sometime in the vicinity of 1950. It was named after a 1934 song by a female harmony trio known as the Boswell Sisters, although this might be more of a coincidence than a causal relationship; the term was popularized by the Cleveland radio DJ Alan Freed, a man who played black music for white audiences and unwittingly caused the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be built on the shores of Lake Erie, the artistic equivalent of naming North America after the first guy who happened to draw a map of it. “Rock and roll” is a technical term that denotes a specific kind of music—you can (almost) always dance to it, it (quite often) involves a piano, and it has not flourished in any meaningful way for well over fifty years, except as a novelty. This is because “rock and roll” soon morphed into “rock ’n’ roll,” a mid-sixties derivative of the samemusic 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. (This period exists inside a small chronological window, beginning the night the Beatles first performed on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and ending with the December 1967 release of Jimi Hendrix’s
Axis: Bold as Love
.) By the dawn of 1968, “rock ’n’ roll” had evolved and expanded into “rock,” which is
only
a cultural designation—but a designation encompassing all popular music that has roots in “rock and roll,” including the preexisting