It's an interesting piece, from 2016, but it doesn't seem dated. Perhaps inadvertently, he reinforced his case by mentioning:
Hard to argue with that.
I think the template that he's set forth has a great deal of validity, but it's the person (Chuck Berry) who he's plugged into that template that I find hard to agree with. The template itself isn't absolute, either; for example, I think most people know of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as classical composers. Though they do belong to different periods of time, they've been aggregated into a general "classical" category. It doesn't take much to add others: Vivaldi, for example. While classical music was an elite pursuit in its time, a time when most people were just trying to survive, it still has a breadth that most other genres haven't had. Even though rock music is far more mass-appeal, I think it has a similar breadth, if not more so. It will not reduce to a fleetingly representational subset easily.
Klosterman also makes a great point when he writes (this is in the section where he decides that Elvis Presley isn't the chosen one; I agree, for different reasons):
I think we've seen that already with rock artists crossing over to do standards; and MOR artists crossing over to sing rock hits. In the latter case, the results can be cringeworthy, and these two sentences explain that kind of reaction. It hasn't seemed to work that way in the other direction, though; possibly, that's viewed as a way of honoring the artists who once were popular but who've given way to a new generation.
One quibble: I think he should have written, "Rock becomes a purely performative art form", because rock has been about performance as well as expression all along. That's increasingly the case, particularly given that the forms of music consumption have changed in a way that drives artists to focus on performing to a greater degree.
But let's say Klosterman is right that there will be a singular figure to represent the rock era. Klosterman seems a bit obsessed with the concept of transgression, both in song and in deed. That might have fit the times 50-70 years ago; it may not now. But hold that thought. I want to get to the case that I think he's inadvertently made, using his preferred yardstick of transgressiveness:
Not to mention the likelihood that Keith Richards will still be alive 300 years from now.
It's hard to match the Stones' record of transgression. Klosterman tries with Chuck Berry but, I think, stretches the point too far. Yes, there are urban legends about him. I've heard some of them. In high school, the word on the street in O'Fallon, Missouri was that your female colleagues could go to parties at his farm in nearby Wentzville only at their own peril. In other words, the message was, folks, stay away. Maybe this is why I have some distaste for him, despite his accomplishments. Hearing "My Ding-a-Ling" doesn't help. Leaving my personal reactions aside, I have to say that Led Zeppelin could fit the bill for transgressive behavior, too.
I agree with Klosterman that "Rock music is black music mainstreamed by white musicians, particularly white musicians from England. Berry is a black man who directly influenced Keith Richards and Jimmy Page." But rock is full of cultural appropriation, especially of black culture, and Berry by definition can't appropriate something he's already a part of.
One more problem I have with Klosterman's approach: he's assuming that past behavior will carry forward into the future. True, history has tended to be reductive. But, up until recently, you could argue that the reductiveness came about because knowledge required physical access that could often be difficult, with the exchange of ideas being limited and often confined to academic venues. That's changed. We all carry around little computers now that are networked. We can find things out very quickly, even the most obscure things. Sometimes, the sources for those search results aren't entirely reliable - hello, Wikipedia - and lack editing and vetting. There is more of a burden on us to evaluate the validity of assertions presented to us. (This could have been predicted by the well-known trade-off in searching between precision and recall, but I want to stay focused here.) The benefit though, is that we can get to information far more easily than ever before, assuming that copyright, political, and other nontechnical constraints don't wall off information. I think this can't help but affect how history is viewed and taught. John Phillip Souza as a representative of 19th-century march music may well be an artifact of pre-Internet limitations. Future generations will interact with history differently than we or our ancestors did, I believe. Klosterman's template makes sense if you carry past conceptualizations of history into the future, but I'm not sure that will actually happen.
So, ultimately, I think the question he asks is interesting and, ultimately, may not matter very much.
