IMHO the author misrepresents how 'history' 'remembers' people/things. "Remembering the past" has always been a complex, contested, ongoing, and nuanced process full of fantasies, forgetting, and agendas, all of which make it far harder to predict than simply pointing to a few previous examples might make it seem. The Souza example he leads with is not illustrative of much at all, considering the many contrary examples (we don't remember 'classical' or 'jazz' music as being embodied by one person), mitigating factors (differences in technology, media, etc.), and just plain differences involved (Really? Marches were/are basically the same cultural thing as rock???). He does try to reckon with the problems of anticipating cultural memory in his the disco/punk example, but misses there too because he muddles 'history' with 'living memory,' proposing that the views of those who lived through 1977 will die with them. History, the subject, and cultural memory, the phenomena, don't work that way.

The whole point of history as a discipline is to rediscover and then present the voices of those who were there and what they thought was important, in the context of causal relationships, contingent events, etc., not to offer rock critic-like opinions about whether [disco, punk, metal, etc] was the single important cultural touchstone in the history of rock that year. If historians in 300 years try to distill "rock" down to one person or band, they'll be doing history wrong, by present-day standards anyway. One person/place/thing/event that embodies -- as in, makes the essence of something complex clear to outsiders and insiders alike -- an historical period or narrative is vanishingly rare in written history. Ex: Just as the written history of the American Civil War isn't understood as being embodied by the Three-Fifths Compromise, rock's written history likely cannot be embodied by a single influential early figure like Chuck Berry. History will remember far more than one rock musician or band.

The whole point of cultural memory is making sense of the past -- as we understand it through our given set of present-day cultural, social, political, geographic and educational filters -- in terms that help us make sense of our cultural present. So if future cultural memory does reduce rock to one person or group, it'll be because the history of the musical form itself, with all its nuances, changes over time and cultural/social impacts, are not needed to understand the same kinds of things about their present day - something we cannot predict. But if that's the case and they only need one person or group to represent all of rock history, I guarantee that it will not be whomever we want or hope it'll be today. It'll be whomever they need it to be, based on how they view the 20th and 21st centuries within their cultural histories. Personally I hope it's the Beatles, if rock turns out to be that inconsequential in 300 years. But who knows? It could be your least favorite musician. The best we can do is make our case to our kids.

Elvis Presley, of course.

Also, your link was broken when it truncated the last "l". This is the correct link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/wh...r-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html

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Bob Dylan!