Bedrock of Pop Culture

In 1977, the year Elvis died, music scholar Reebee Garofolo published an elaborate hand-drawn map of rock ‘n’ roll history. It appeared on the jacket cover of the seminal book Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry. In 2003, California artist Dave Muller picked up Garofolo’s map, which outlines rock musicians who topped the charts between 1957 and 1975, and added a bit of distortion. He appropriated Garofalo’s meandering grid, subverting the very notion of a linear history by flipping the original drawing and placing the reverse image between the years 1988 and 2006. In Garofalo’s map, the vertical rise is based on record-sales percentages. Muller uses the mirror to show rock’s share of the market dwindling back to zero. “It’s like retro music,” he says. “At a certain point you’re going to run out of things to bring back. The lag time between retro and the source material seems to be getting shorter and shorter.”