Chuck Klosterman: Will Butthole Surfers Outlast The Beatles?
The subtitle of Chuck Klosterman's new book But What If We're Wrong? is "Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past." It's an examination of why we, as a culture, remember what we do, and speculates about the traces of us that will survive into the deep future to send signals about who we were. So Klosterman not only treats Elvis and Bob Dylan in the long-past tense, but so too the whole of TV, physical books, and...well, physics. Given Klosterman's outsize love of pop music, he joins Soundcheck host John Schaefer to talk about what happens when Elvis becomes the unelected representative of sixty years of rock culture to our great-great-great descendants, and explains how it's conceivable that tomorrow never knows -- or cares about -- The Beatles.
