Jonah, I take your point. When rap afficionados say, ah, well, in their day people disapproved of Elvis hip-swiveling and Bing buh-buh-buh-boo-ing and the Viennese waltz, that’s either rubbish or, alternatively, terrifying: if the argument is that a decade or two hence the three gangsta rappers who’ve avoided being shot long enough to celebrate 50 years in showbusiness will sound as unobjectionable as “The Blue Danube”, then what’ll be on the cutting edge by then doesn’t bear thinking about.

But two responses: First, boomer rock bores are least well-positioned to object to that line because their music sold itself as explicitly socially disruptive in a way that big bands and crooners and ragtimers did not. So I always enjoy hearing cranky boomers bemoaning the way the kids don’t know what good music is anymore.

And, second, I happen to think that one of the most effective resistances to the social pathologies of stuff like gangsta rap is the fragmentation of pop culture that Brooks bemoans. In the Sixties and Seventies, the monolithic hegemony of boomer rock meant that anyone who objected to it was perforce Mister Squaresville. Today you can object to Kanye West and 90% of the country won’t care, because they’ve either never heard a thing he’s done or they have and they don’t like it because they prefer some other kind of niche music. I’m struck, with today’s middle- and high-schoolers, at how pop music plays a much less dominant role in their lives than it did in mine at that age.

Incidentally, one of my favorite remarks on rock came from the late Jule Styne, composer of (just to be seasonal) “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!” I was a young lad and Jule was in his eighties and trying to show he was still au courant. “I love rock’n’roll,” he said to me, “because of its excitement, its freshness, its energy. It reminds me of when the Charleston came in.”

There’s a guy with a sense of proportion.