There is no logical reason for Chuck Klosterman to have written Rock* – A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music. That is one reason I’m glad he did. Klosterman says as much himself. He describes the book as something he was compelled to write because it was fun, partly because he misses the days when writing about rock music could also be funny. That context helps for a book with an inherently ridiculous premise: “What if the Velvet Underground, rather than the Beatles, became the defining commercial force in rock music?”
The premise sounds like a joke. In fact, it is a joke, but Klosterman is sufficiently interested in the consequences of that joke to write an entire book on it. The Velvet Underground & Nico famously sold very few copies when it was released in 1967. The old cliché was that everyone who bought it went on to form a band. Klosterman reverses the cliché. What if everyone bought it? What if the Velvet Underground became the biggest band in rock history?
This isn’t simply a story about the Velvet Underground selling more records. Chuck Klosterman keeps the music intact and changes the world around it. The songs remain the same. Their cultural meanings do not. This is where the joke becomes surprisingly serious.
The Beatles still have their familiar early success, but their increasingly elaborate late-1960s music now looks less like an expansion of rock’s possibilities and more like an attempt to catch up with a revolution that had already happened. Jimi Hendrix is still a remarkable guitarist. He just no longer sounds like the future. His innovations are still impressive, but they have lost the sense of danger and possibility that made them revolutionary.
Black Sabbath can still sound dark, but darkness is no longer especially transgressive. Pink Floyd’s psychological anguish is less shocking when Lou Reed has already made alienation part of mainstream pop. David Bowie and Queen have another problem: their theatricality, sexual ambiguity and flamboyance are difficult to use as cultural weapons when the biggest band in the world has already made such things ordinary. The success of the Velvet Underground shifts pop’s centre of gravity Stateside, and the band’s theatricality is instead channeled into Kiss and Funkadelic.
The further the book proceeds into alternative rock history, the more entertaining these inversions become. Led Zeppelin still sound like Led Zeppelin, but their grandeur and machismo now represent the opposite of the dominant aesthetic. They become cult favourites rather than mass-market gods. Punk arrives only to discover that its revolution has already happened. If the Velvet Underground have made nihilism, amateurism, and alienation commercially respectable, what exactly is punk supposed to overthrow?
The answer, amusingly, is guitar virtuosity. Boston and Van Halen become guardians of the critical flame, their technical brilliance representing an alternative to the mainstream rather than its embodiment. The values that once belonged to progressive or commercially dominant rock have been reassigned. The cultural furniture is the same; somebody has simply moved it into different rooms.
This is the great pleasure of Rock*. Klosterman isn’t asking whether a song is inherently rebellious or conservative. He’s asking what makes it rebellious or conservative in the first place. Nothing is rebellious in isolation. Something is rebellious because of what it is rebelling against. Once the outsider becomes the mainstream, someone else has to become the outsider. That sounds like a serious thesis. He just happens to arrive at it by imagining Jimi Hendrix becoming boring.
Chuck Klosterman’s treatment of punk is especially revealing. Punk’s mythology has always depended on the idea of a Year Zero: the young rejecting the bloated conventions of the previous generation and starting again. Yet punk was never quite as disconnected from the past as its mythology suggested. It borrowed from garage rock, R&B, reggae, glam and, crucially, the Velvet Underground. In Klosterman’s alternate history, that contradiction becomes impossible to miss. If the Velvet Underground have already won, punk can’t be a revolution against the Velvet Underground. The revolution has to find somewhere else to go.
This is also where Klosterman’s stated desire to make rock criticism funny becomes important. Rock*‘s straight-faced absurdity is not incidental to its argument. It is the argument’s delivery system. The joke works because the historical judgments are written as though they are perfectly ordinary. Hendrix really is reduced to the status of a technically proficient blues guitarist. The Beatles really are the conservative old guard. Boston really does become the dangerous alternative.
Klosterman doesn’t need to tell us that this is funny. The deadpan treatment lets the historical inversion make the joke itself. There is, however, one point at which I stopped laughing and started asking whether I believed him. I don’t really believe that the Velvet Underground could have become the Beatles, of course. The problem isn’t that they were too strange. Popular culture has repeatedly demonstrated that strange things can become popular. The problem is that the Velvet Underground were barely embedded in the popular culture of their own time.
The Beatles had a route into mass culture. They were deeply connected to American rock and R&B, the British beat scene, emerging postwar youth culture, and the increasingly powerful machinery of television and popular entertainment. Bob Dylan had a route too, emerging from the folk revival and the political and literary culture surrounding it. Even the Kinks, despite resisting many 1960s fashions, were unmistakably a product of the decade they resisted.
The Velvet Underground are harder to place. Their world was Andy Warhol’s Factory, downtown New York, avant-garde art, underground cinema, sexual experimentation, heroin, and urban alienation. All of those things existed in 1960s America, but they weren’t the cultural vocabulary most record buyers used to understand their own lives. The Velvet Underground could plausibly have become more influential. They could have sold considerably more records. With enough changes in circumstance, they could even have become commercially successful.
Rock*’s alternative world for the Beatles? That requires a much larger miracle. It requires us to imagine not merely that The Velvet Underground & Nico sold ten million copies, but that ten million people somehow came to want what it represented. This is the one place where Klosterman’s counterfactual feels less convincing than his consequences.
The distinction matters because commercial success isn’t simply a matter of producing an extraordinary record and locating enough people willing to buy it. Artists become culturally central because their work connects with the culture around them. The Beatles, Dylan and even the Kinks were deeply entangled with the worlds that produced their audiences. The Velvet Underground often seemed to stand outside that world and look in.
The reviewer’s objection, then, is not that Klosterman has chosen an impossible band. It is that he hasn’t quite shown us the cultural bridge between the Factory and the mass audience. Perhaps that isn’t fatal. Klosterman’s interest is less in constructing a historically watertight alternative 1960s than in seeing how much history can be made to wobble if you move one piece. Once the Velvet Underground somehow occupy the centre, his experiment becomes remarkably persuasive.
Indeed, the further he gets from 1967, the less I care about whether 1967 could have happened. The consequences make sense. If Lou Reed has already made darkness mainstream, Sabbath’s darkness means something different. If sexual ambiguity has already been normalised, Bowie loses some of his historical function. If the avant-garde has already become commercially respectable, punk loses its claim to rupture. If rebellion has become ordinary, ordinary things can become rebellious.
The further Rock* travels from its first impossible assumption, the more plausible its cultural logic becomes. This leads to an even more interesting problem for the Velvet Underground themselves. Their actual historical importance may depend upon their failure. The old story—that hardly anyone bought their first album, but the people who did went on to form bands—became part of their mythology. Their marginality made them fascinating. Their commercial failure helped establish their position as the band who arrived before the culture was ready for them.
In Chuck Klosterman’s world, they arrive on time. Perhaps too precisely on time. If the Velvet Underground are already the biggest band in the world, they can’t perform the same cultural function. They can’t be the secret passed from one generation of musicians to another. They can’t represent the possibility that something artistically important might exist outside the mainstream, because they are the mainstream.
This may be Rock*‘s most revealing paradox: making the Velvet Underground successful potentially destroys the very conditions that made them historically important. That brings us back to Klosterman’s original question. He says that he began thinking about why some things succeed, and others fail, and whether artistic validity comes from the product itself or from the world around it. Rock* doesn’t provide a neat answer. Instead, it makes the question ridiculous enough that we can see it clearly.
The songs haven’t changed. The Velvet Underground are still the Velvet Underground. The Beatles are still the Beatles. Jimi Hendrix is still Jimi Hendrix. What changes is the cultural arrangement in which we hear their music. That is why I don’t think Rock*‘s greatest achievement is persuading us that the Velvet Underground could have been the Beatles. It doesn’t quite do that. Its achievement is making the Beatles look slightly less inevitable.
We know the Beatles were central because they were central. We know Hendrix was revolutionary because he was revolutionary. We know punk was rebellious because punk was rebellious, but Rock* makes us imagine, for a few hundred pages, a world in which those statements aren’t true. Once you’ve imagined that world, the real history begins to look less like destiny and more like an extraordinarily complicated series of accidents.
That’s a serious idea, but Rock* is better for refusing to deliver it solemnly. The best thing about Rock* is that its seriousness never quite overwhelms Chuck Klosterman’s humor. It is an elaborate joke about the history of music that gradually becomes a joke about our confidence in history itself.
I still don’t believe the Velvet Underground could have become the Beatles, but after reading Rock*, I am less certain that the Beatles had to become the Beatles, and that is a considerably more interesting thing to have accomplished.