I also would hate to live in a world without music in it - which is why I lament the popularity of hip-hop. When did wiki-wiki noises, sampling and crappy poetry become a replacement for real music?

That said, hip-hop is probably the closest modern equivalent of the broadside ballad - and I wouldn't be surprised if most young people got their awareness of current events more from hip-hop lyrics than from any other source. The bad news (there's more?) is that the self-aggrandizing tripe spewed forth by most hip-hop artists panders to people's basest, most dysfunctional instincts. Wonder why people these days are so rude and callous? Check out what they're listening to. This is not the Age of Aquarius, it's the age of "I'm a playah, get outta my face." I believe music is still making a huge impact, it's just a negative one.

We also live in an era when everything we take in - ads, movies, news stories, political speeches, corporate announcements - is steeped in calculated artifice. We have come to expect hypocrisy and emotional manipulation from every source: nothing strikes us as genuine, from the heart; we learn to be jaded from the crib. This is particularly true of modern music; it reeks of insincerity. Sadly, if musicians returned to making unaffected, honest, direct, sincere music, it wouldn't get sold nowadays, so no one would hear their message. It's the world we're choosing for ourselves.