Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music

Kaleidoscopic culture critic Chuck Klosterman rewrites the history of reality, built off a question that has never been asked or (in all likelihood) even considered: What if Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle was actually about rock music? The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in the spring of 1967. For decades, the cliche has been that it initially only sold 10,000 copies, though everyone who bought it supposedly started a band. It is the definition of a record whose influence outstrips its mass popularity. But what if the opposite had transpired? What if instead of selling 10,000 copies, it had sold…10 million copies? What if it had sold 100 million copies? What would have happened if the Velvet Underground had inexplicably become the biggest group in the history of popular music, and everything about the rest of the 20th century was merely a footnote to that phenomenon? Whatever answer you imagine is an infinitesimal splinter, at least when compared to Rock: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music.