3 January

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions. The Russians and the Chinese had at least one each. But we did too, we just don’t recognise it. Or we do, but then we strangely think it was just some nice new songs. The 1960s is widely described as a ‘counter-cultural revolution’. The root of that revolution was ‘anti-establishment’ worldviews, driven very heavily by the musical culture of that time. Music was the cultural launch pad for the young of that time, their way to forge a new adult world. Beatlemania was the dominant expression of this shift, why I use The Beatles so often as an example. The Beatles were brilliant songwriters. But their songs are nowhere near sufficient to explain Beatlemania. ‘Mania’, it’s in the name. They rode the wave of a massive cultural and social shift in society. A revolution. My writing on this time is very much influenced by Edmund Burke, who wrote I think the definitive book on all revolutions. He saw revolutions as a disaster for societies. I think he’s right. That includes our Beatle-led revolution. That’s just the context of my views. I’ll expand more on them in future, but the discussions get bogged down right now in the quality of the music, which to me is irrelevant. Music as a vehicle of cultural and social change is what interests me. Revolutions also interested George Orwell, which is why he wrote Animal Farm, to warn about the same things.