As a writer who has spent much of his life covering rock music, Chuck Klosterman has a vested interest in how the genre will be remembered, if at all, centuries from now. In a provocative think piece for The New York Times, Klosterman imagines how rock music would be discussed and debated in a college classroom 300 years in the future, when rock is but a distant memory and has no direct connection to the lives of the students. History, Klosterman suggests, tends to boil down to the stories of just a few dynamic individuals, and there’s no reason to believe rock will be any different in that respect. The Beatles, due to their long-lasting popularity, would seem to be the logical standard-bearers for rock in the centuries to come, except for the fact that there are four of them. Students of the future may only be able to commit one name to memory when forming a paradigm for rock. So whose name will that be? Klosterman spends much of his essay debating the pros and cons of two likely candidates: Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.