There was a time when our celebrities didn’t feel like they had to join the madding crowds and rush to topple the latest offender of today’s delicately framed sense of self. Once upon a time artists painted and sang about what they saw, not what they wanted to see. But that was before the culture wars.

In 1969, The Band recorded their classic hit, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and it is impossible to imagine a modern rock group having the courage to write anything even vaguely as challenging today.