Future historians, rock & roll, narratives

The record that just might go gold galactically

The New York Times magazine recently published a fun article about which iconic rock artists might still be remembered 300 years hence, but also about how it's not facts but narratives that shape history. Here's an excerpt for flavor:

I have no data on this, but I would assert that if we were to ask the entire population of the United States to name every composer of marching music they could think of, 98 percent of the populace would name either one person ([John Philip] Sousa) or no one at all. There’s just no separation between the awareness of this person and the awareness of this music, and it’s hard to believe that will ever change.

Now, the reason this happened — or at least the explanation we’ve decided to accept — is that Sousa was simply the best at this art. He composed 136 marches over a span of six decades and is regularly described as the most famous musician of his era. The story of his life and career has been shoehorned into the U.S. education curriculum at a fundamental level. (I first learned of Sousa in fourth grade, a year before we memorized the state capitals.) And this, it seems, is how mainstream musical memory works. As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any field fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable.

I'd say it doesn't stop with musical memory, though: this is how almost all memory works.

This might be my favorite sentence from the entire article:

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality.

The popular conception of memory is that it provides an enduring record of fact, but the human brain is not a video recorder. From optical illusions to eyewitness misidentification to selective attention tasks, there's ample evidence that we are highly biased observers. Context, emotions, fleeting physical sensations, that day's lunch, and so on color not just how we remember events, but what we remember in the first place.

It goes even further, though: because we have the capacity to learn, we continue revising memories long after they're laid down, using the present to give the past greater meaning, often without realizing what we're doing. Depending on the circumstances and memories involved, the process can lead to growth, misery, or neither.

Here's the question: when is Fact, capital F, preferable, and when is it desirable to spin narratives propelling us toward a hopeful future?

Okay, now that this month's existential question has been asked, let's talk about my other favorite bit from the article:

NASA sent the unmanned craft Voyager I into deep space in 1977. It's still out there, forever fleeing Earth's pull. No man-made object has ever traveled farther; it crossed the orbit of Pluto in 1989 and currently tumbles through the interstellar wasteland. The hope was that this vessel would eventually be discovered by intelligent extraterrestrials, so NASA included a compilation album made of gold, along with a rudimentary sketch of how to play it with a stylus. A team led by Carl Sagan curated the album's contents. The record, if played by the aliens, is supposed to reflect the diversity and brilliance of earthling life. This, obviously, presupposes a lot of insane hopes: that the craft will somehow be found, that the craft will somehow be intact, that the aliens who find it will be vaguely human, that these vaguely human aliens will absorb stimuli both visually and sonically and that these aliens will not still be listening to eight-tracks.

What a great story – NASA scientists dreamed alien intelligence might find the capsule, and put together a set of gold phonograph records (example pictured) with sounds of waves, birdsong, greetings in dozens of languages, ethnic music, and yes, a single rock & roll song. This is all described in "Murmurs of Earth" (now on my reading list). Echoes of Earth soaring through the cosmos – just imagine!

It's what we're best at, after all.