Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Well, the old ones were flogging butter and car insurance last time I looked.

I don't think you'd realistically get a new 'punk' or any similar such sense of revolution in popular music any more, certainly not with such a distinctive impact. I guess acid-house and the subsequent take-off of dance culture and its various sub=genres was the last time such a thing happened in the UK, being a confluence of the music, an aesthetic, a community and so on. And, of course, the accompanying drugs!

This is not to say that revolutionary stuff doesn't happen but that it happens in a more subtle, diffuse form reflecting the changes in how music is consumed and created. Things are probably spread too thin for any one such thing to have a massive cultural impact these days. I mean, the latest thing to cause 'outrage' in some quarters is stuff like Miley's wobbling arse and the perceived outrage has little to do with the music itself and more the presentation of it which, in a way, has been going on since Elvis wiggled his hips on telly. In fact, you could say that if any 'revolution' has occured it IS in the way things are consumed and created rather than a particular music itself. The fact that many on this forum make and release a wide range of music themselves is probably testimony to a revolution of sorts except there is no conscious unity of a revolutionary 'sense' - it's a subtle, outward rippling effect of available and evolving technologies and again, modes of consumption. Plus, I also think that even if something DID come along and cause a bit of a stir, so to speak, any potential cultural impact would, in all likelihood. be somewhat diluted because of the tendency of our modern, accelerated culture to co-opt and homogenise things with alarming rapidity. Movements reduced to blips!