His influence through the meme is of a different kind: he is part of the shared internet cultural vocabulary of a generation that grew up online in the late 2000s. This is a form of cultural presence that has no exact precedent, because the meme as a cultural form has no exact precedent. He exists in the memory of that generation as a specific face and a specific sound attached to a specific experience — the experience of being surprised, of clicking a link and finding something unexpected — and that memory is durable and widely distributed in a way that the memory of most pop acts from 1987 is not.
The legacy that he seems to be building in the years since *50* is one that is more rooted in the present than in any of the preceding chapters. The album’s success, the Foo Fighters collaboration, the hearing loss advocacy, the ongoing touring activity — these represent a career that is active and present-tense rather than nostalgia-dependent. He is not performing 1987 for audiences who want to be transported back to it; he is making and performing music in 2016 and beyond, and finding audiences who want that.
## The M4 and the Life Not Abandoned
The M4 motorway between London and Heathrow Airport is one of the most traveled roads in Britain — a utilitarian stretch of tarmac that connects the capital to its primary international airport, used by millions of people per year for travel that is primarily purposeful rather than scenic. It is not a road that appears in poetry or song, not a landscape that prompts reflection. It is functional infrastructure.