Rock*

Kaleidoscopic culture critic Chuck Klosterman rewrites the history of reality, built off a question that has never been asked or (in all likelihood) even considered: What if Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle was actually about rock music? The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in the spring of 1967. For decades, the cliche has been that it initially only sold 10,000 copies, though everyone who bought it supposedly started a band. It is the definition of a record whose influence outstrips its mass popularity. But what if the opposite had transpired? What if instead of selling 10,000 copies, it had sold…10 million copies? What if it had sold 100 million copies? What would have happened if the Velvet Underground had inexplicably become the biggest group in the history of popular music, and everything about the rest of the 20th century was merely a footnote to that phenomenon? Whatever answer you imagine is an infinitesimal splinter, at least when compared to Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music. In what’s guaranteed to be the most polarizing work of his already polarizing career, Chuck Klosterman has generated a fictitious universe where almost everything is different, except for the songs. The songs remain the same—the difference is how they are heard and what they now mean. Lou Reed is a messiah, reversing the monoculture and dictating the outcome of presidential elections. The Beatles disappear, though they never break up. The Rolling Stones collapse while Led Zeppelin goes bankrupt. Punk rock fills stadiums, undermined only by insouciant radicals like Boston and Van Halen. Disco is destroyed. Hip-hop becomes country. The 1980s are defined by disposable pop icons (like G.G. Allin) and Christian revivalists (like Madonna). Lenny Kravitz lets love rule, Oasis collides with a wonderwall, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are somehow blamed on the Strokes. “I have always felt,” Greil Marcus once remarked, “that when criticism really hits its stride, when it’s at its highest pitch, it’s fiction.” Marcus wasn’t talking about Rock* when he said that, but he accidentally describes it perfectly. Presented like The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll if written by Jorge Luis Borges and Patrick Bateman, it intermixes satiric contrarianism and Spinal Tap-ish absurdity with darker theories about what makes art popular, how success delineates perception, and the inescapable consensus of subjective history. It is not, nor does it claim to be, the greatest book ever written about rock and roll. But it’s probably the last one that ever needs to be written.