13 August

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the equivalence he was drawing was that from the 1960s onwards, music took on a political role that he thought was like eating the scraps from your master's table. At the same time as society was dismantling the institutions that protected the weak and vulnerable, peoples' political and social interests shifted to their favourite artists. Protest music, the idea that singing about something is a substitute for doing politics. Even further, to this day vast numbers of people know nothing about the way their own society operates, but could tell you every obsessive detail of their favourite acts. It was a massive diversion of attention away from the grown-up concerns of adult society. Perpetual adolescence.