If the legend of the great Memphis rock and roll quartet Big Star teaches us anything, it is that the cultural past is never as fully settled and sorted as we like to think. It remains open for business. Our storytelling impulse trains us to regard the winners (and losers) of history as inevitable and fated. But, on the ground, where this collaborative cultural process plays out, the past is continually changing and under negotiation: new evaluations and devaluations; the rising and falling stock of influence; the decentering of one demographic and the centering of others; old artifacts gaining new resonance under changing cultural conditions; and, where music is concerned, the maddening, ever-shifting, contrarian politics of cool.

As the current generation grapples more intimately than a

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