There’s a famous Pre-Raphaelite painting — and a rather ghastly one, if you ask me — called “The Awakening Conscience.” A young woman is sitting on the lap of her dissolute swain, who’s leaning back with a liquored grin. They’re both at the piano, which is what people did for music before Spotify. She is rising up, hands clenched, face transfixed. We realize that she has come to see how her immoral life is wrong, and she has been transformed.

I thought of this when reading a New York Times opinion piece that asked whether it was time to cancel classic rock artists and songs because — well, you know. Oh, the emotions that fill your soul when you find something that was just sitting there, in plain sight, and you realize you could taint it for good! I can be the awakened conscience for everyone! You wonder if these people meet at a convention somewhere.

“This is Jessica, who exposed the colonialist history of the spice rack, which centered whiteness by exoticizing other cultures’ cooking. Jessica, we’d like you to meet Katherine, who led the effort to replace Planters’ Mr. Peanut with George Washington Carver.”

The first example of problematic songs: Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which the Times author loved. The composer was accused of spousal abuse. Is it okay to listen to the song now?

“Of course, there is no easy answer here,” says the author. “Even Ms. McLean doesn’t think ‘American Pie’ should be banned from playlists.” So that settles it, right? Ha! Absolute moral authority revoked for inconvenient wrongthink.

Granted, if I never heard “American Pie” again, that would be fine. The song lasts 16 hours and 47 minutes, and that’s the AM-radio cut. The album version actually pauses in the middle to play “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” twice and is the only LP issued in the ’70s that takes an entire diurnal cycle to play. But I wouldn’t ban it.

It’s not just “American Pie,” of course. “Can I still love [his] music if I’m appalled by . . . Eric Clapton’s racist rants and antivaccination activism?” the author asks, and links to offensive remarks Clapton made 45 years ago, while drunk. “For a lot of baby boomers, it’s painful to realize that some of the songs first lodged in our memories in adolescence really need a second look.”

Oh, indeed. Consider “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am,” by Herman’s Hermits. The singer has just entered into a marriage with the widow next door, who’s been married seven times to men named “Henry.” (Or “’Enery,” as the singer pronounces it.) What happened to his predecessors? It is unlikely the marriages had a legal conclusion, since divorce laws were not liberalized in England until 1969. It is entirely possible the widow poisoned them all and buried them in the basement because she could find no legal means to end abusive marriages. But we ignored the harsh social truths of the song, the way the lyricist underscored the perpetual entrapment and cycle of violence women experienced: Second verse, same as the first.

Is that what she means? Yes and no. It depends! Use the handy, rigorously precise ideas of social justice. It’s not a yardstick, but rather a tape measure, something that can produce any length you need until the thing you are measuring is deemed to be warped. Measure the song and the artist and see if there’s something that doesn’t align precisely with the mores of the moment, or was waved away in the past. Then frown a lot when the song is referenced or played without trigger warnings. If Casey Kasem were alive he could read the musical versions of stolen-land acknowledgments.

“Coming in at No. 2 this week, it’s Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome,’ a song that does not address the environmental impact of film production, including the introduction of methylene chloride, acetone, and methanol into groundwater supplies, often affecting disadvantaged communities.”

Making the future safe is one thing; we must also interrogate the past.

“It’s hard to explain,” the author writes, “why younger versions of ourselves ever thought” these songs “were OK in the first place.”

Because you were young, perhaps? When you’re eleven and yelling subliterate strings of phonemes into a hairbrush, pretending to be a rock star, you’re not doing a contextual analysis that reveals the colonialist mindset of a British singer who has culturally appropriated Black music.

“I want to live in a world where I can be moved by art and music and literature without having to come up with elaborate apologies for that work or for its creators. But does such a world exist?”

Let us introduce her to the world in which everyone who subscribes to this magazine lives: a place where your favorite musicians probably hate you because of your position on marginal tax rates.

“Maybe reconsidering those songs, and their artists, can inspire us to think about the future and how to bring about a world that is more inclusive and more just.”

Inclusion through exclusion: I think Orwell had that engraved over a room in the Ministry of Truth.

In the end, it shouldn’t matter. The songs will pass from the culture on their own as the Boomers dwindle. A handful of songs will survive, but the rock catalogue will take its place alongside the collected works of Mitch Miller — relics of other times, other tastes. The youth of today might end up like the rest of us: hearing their adolescent favorites piped in over the grocery-store loudspeakers.

If the music of today hasn’t been canceled by then. Perhaps the only safe sound is white noise. But you can see the problem with that, of course.