Like Ronald Reagan, rock is dead. Even more like Ronald Reagan, it's been dead for a long time now. This indisputable fact (I'd say rock officially keeled over after the late-'70s' punk movement petered out in the early '80s) undermines the trite argument that there's something inherently wrong with a "rock museum." According to your cringing boyfriend, museums are for Greek sculptures, Renaissance paintings, dead baseball players, and dead presidents. They're the antithesis of rock.

Your boyfriend is wrong. Rock is dead. It belongs with the dead presidents. It belongs in a museum. It's dead. Pick your moment: the fitful death throes in '73, vaunted '77, or Spinal Tap in '82, and that's being generous.

Don't get me wrong. I dig rock. For about 30 years between the early 1950s and late 1970s, rock music was the language of a bona fide cultural revolution. It was the muddled yet beautiful sexed-up lefty/anarchist political language of some general Rebel Without a Cause opposition. In short, rock music was relevant during the mid-to-late 20th century, when the world basically went from black-and-white to color, short hair to long hair, and when a tense generation gap reflected a series of social splits that charged rock's initial underpinnings: civil rights vs. segregation, antiwar vs. cold war, McGovern vs. Nixon. But now that the demographics of an anti-Bush vote aren't tied to the loaded generation gap (your parents are just as likely to listen to rock and vote for Dennis Kucinich as your Capitol Hill neighbor), rock has been reduced to a nod and wink: Parents pretend to dislike it, but really, couldn't care less, knowing that they listened to something that sounded pretty similar.

The real question then is this: Is EMP a good museum? I've been there a couple of times, and it seems okay. I liked the album-cover exhibit EMP did a while ago. But let's face it: I can go to a CD shop anytime I want and gaze at album covers. Which is kind of the whole point. Record stores themselves are museums, so why do we need EMP? josh feit

josh@thestranger.com