Someone told me about Straight Edge music recently - those post-punks with Xs drawn or tattooed on their hands to denote no booze, no meat, no drugs, no casual sex. Interesting I thought. Until I heard the music. Thrash and Shouting at 115 dB, apparently coming out of a spinal tap that was either full on or off.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I think the politics left music as the naivety fell away. Once people believed all you needed was a slogan, just as corporates still believe all they need is a name and a logo. But gradually there was a realisation that popularity didn't equal power. Woodstock didn't stop the Vietnam war, Geldof didn't do more than scratch the problem of ethiopia, punk did not defeat the government, God save the queen didn't destroy the monarchy. Impotence bred apathy.

Music is totally corporate now. The licencing laws mean you can barely play music in a pub now, the legit venues are closing, the points of entry are being closed off. As some journo wrote recently, "I watched a video of the nice from the 60s and watching proto-prog rocker Keith emerson stabbing his hammond with a knife was just as preposterous as it sounds. But somehow it was  still a whole lot more like rock and roll than the Arctic Monkeys are ever going to dream of."

keep to the Fen Causeway

You could make the case that the first part of music's "revolutionary" effect on society began with the filtering of black music into straight amurkan culture, beginning the march to free sexuality.  I would cite Duke Ellington as beginning the process, though he of course was building on others who never achieved his reach.

Producers of the era of the fifties were looking for a white artist who could take the sexy soul of Little Willie John and a horde of other black performers and cross it over.  Elvis did the trick.

In less than a decade, black music was all over the radio, the main delivery system at that time.  Some of it migrated to Europe, where it came back exploded as the British Invasion.  With Elvis in the army in Germany, and the Beatles in Hamburg, it exploded there as well.

However much he wishes to deny it, Bob Dylan added a level of social consciousness or conscience that had never hit the mainstream before.  He wasn't the first, building on Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger amongst a host, but his explosion was a shot heard round the world.  When he went electric, it presaged the main event.

By the time psychedelia hit the world, the cycle was complete.  The joining of the drug and political cultures affected every art form, from the San Francisco Sound to French cinema.  Sexual barriers had fallen for good, accompanied by overt idealistic politics.

You could also argue that it wasn't long before the industry regained its footing, using glam and the heavier rock sounds to take the revolution back to ego-driven marketing concepts.

But it all really goes back to the melting pot that amurka was, and the influence of the former slaves' music was the primary driver.

The history of New Orleans music is the best example, mixing black-Afro and Carib sounds with the displaced French Acadians, with whorehouses providing the caldrons where the music was mixed.  Even 3rd generation white Texas fiddlers like Bob Wills went there to sop up the mix with their bread, taking Duke Ellington horn charts back to play on three-part (or more) electric strings.

When Peggy Lee turned Little Willy John's "Fever" into required cocktail party music throughout suburbia, the damage was already done.

Then the insane born agains brought abstinence back into the equation, completely forgetting the very sexy "Midnite Rambles" that were the most popular part of every religious tent show.  

Now it's the bedroom produced music of modern technology which will provide the next musical break.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin