In a music sense, what music is going to survive and be held in high reverence in the future?

Well, the truth is I have no idea. Recently the Get Back documentary came out giving us an incredibly in-depth look at The Beatles making their Let It Be record and attempting to put together some sort of live or TV show at the same time. The part of this that goes to your question is that while listening to people talk about and review this film I heard people commenting that a lot of younger people have either no idea who The Beatles are, don't care, don't find them interesting, or don't see what the big deal with them is/was. 

I mean, I can't fathom that really because The Beatles are some of the founders of the entire pop rock world. However, I recall Michael Stipe saying way back when that The Monkees were far more important to him than The Beatles. At that time he seemed more a major exception than the rule. As pop culture stuff ages though I don't think people love the things that people loved decades before. Stuff fades away. 

I can only try to look at examples. At one point one of my wife's colleagues approached me at a party knowing I was a big movie guy and he asked me if I would help him create a film elective class about Alfred Hitchcock. I asked him why and what the goal of the class would be and he said to let these kids know who Hitchcock was. I was a bit surprised because I thought everybody knows who Hitchcock is...just like everybody knows who The Beatles are. The truth is everybody over a certain age knows who these people are...not everybody.

I do think our generation, baby boomers, and maybe Gen X as well, were a bit unique in that I think we became familiar with many decades of pop culture. Music, movies, TV...we kind of consumed it all. I mean I knew pictures going all the way back to the 1920s. I knew W.C. Fields, Fatty Arbuckle, Rudolph Valentino. I knew the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges. I knew Charlie Chaplin, Ma and Pa Kettle. I knew Mae West and Buster Keaton. All well before my time having been born in 1967. I knew who they were though and had seen their work on TV and seen them referenced in other pop culture stuff. 

I was at a party a few summers ago with a bunch of 30 somethings and I said something about Burt Reynolds...nobody knew who he was. I said "Smokey and the Bandit?" and they had no clue. 

When Kim Carnes sang that song Bette Davis Eyes we knew who she was singing about. We knew what Bette Davis looked like. 

I do think with younger generations they really don't go very far back when it comes to entertainment. They see these older movies or stars and think they look weird. The movies are strange and boring and the music sounds odd to them. People talk about how younger generations have shorter attention spans but I think they probably also interpret time differently than we did. A few months ago is a long time in the past to them. I feel like we thought in terms of decades and they think more in terms of months. 

I find it strange when a much younger person calls a movie that came out three years ago a really old film. Or a song from last year an old tune. I just think the way their brains work, partially because of how technology works, they discard and move on to the next thing much, much faster than we ever did.

Part of this is probably due to the speed at which everything comes at them now. We sat down and listened to entire albums. This is no longer something young people do. They blast through some videos or a few different songs on youtube or tik tok and quickly move on to the next thing. 

A song seems popular with them for a few weeks at most and in that time they are already moving on to the next song. I mean good god, we played the same records for years. We are still playing them. That's "boring" to them.

If you are asking what will be popular in 100 years...I don't know. By that time anybody that experienced the birth of rock 'n' roll will be long dead. Neil Young's catalog of songs might be just collecting dust and if someone stumbles upon hearing one, they might wonder why the fuck the guy did not use auto tune. 

There will be nobody alive that will have seen a Rolling Stones show nor have a clue who Ringo was. They probably will wonder how anybody could stand all that screaming Robert Plant was doing if they even know who he is.

Bob Dylan will be some weird sounding guy that if they happen to hear him they probably will think "No way anybody liked listening to this guy's nasal yowling!"

Pop culture does fade but what seems difficult for me to absorb is I feel like I can see our pop culture fading right in front of us. Jack Nicholson made his last couple appearances in films in 2010. In our current pop culture universe that may as well have been 1000 years ago. A good sized percentage of people in the United States have no idea who he is anymore. If you tried a little experiment and walked around showing people his picture on the street, I bet more than half would not be able to tell you who he is.

So, maybe it's better to burn out than to fade away.