Everything’s rock and roll these days. The mainstream of society has adopted a kind of belligerent pose as if each person is in a state of individualistic rebellion against the supposedly rotten, hostile forces of the system. There’s something entirely false about it.

Usually such types are just as conformist as in previous generations. There is nothing rock and roll about them. They may use hip and pseudo-radical language and know what music to like but all the while their pensions are fully paid-up and insurance policies safely locked away in the drawer. Their subversion and rebellious take is only another myth for them to live by, something to stave off the plight of their existentialist trauma.

My mythology has it that it was different in the 60s and 70s. At least then if you subscribed to pop culture it stood you apart from the mainstream. There was something genuinely alternative about it. Now pop culture is the mainstream. Its sulky and recalcitrant demeanour comes over as only pretentious.

Maybe there’s a serious point here. Society probably suffers at the hands of the pretenders. Their contribution to the world is mean-spirited and grudging like that of a deviant teenager. Their relationship to it tends to be one of utility, measured in terms of what they can get from it, seldom what they might put back. This is not a good model for development.

And why am I so bothered about it? Perhaps I needed the old conservative society to stay as it was as something I could rail against. The mainstream has stolen my pose and in its typically postmodern way uses it without sincerity or commitment. It enjoys the full benefits of conformity without the risk of a truly radical stand. Someone like me is left with nowhere to go.