  urlLink The Observer | Comment | Year the music died : "Some brands never die; but the people who buy them always change.
On the first floor of the Oxford Street branch of Virgin Megastore, you can buy a black- and-white postcard of Martin Luther King Jr from a display he shares with Jimmy Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Bart Simpson dolls. Walk 10 yards, as I did on Friday, and you may hear his voice intoning 'I have a dream' mixed into a track and played by a shop selling jeans... ..."The rulers of the country were tolerating the napalming of civilians in Vietnam ('Hey! Hey!
LBJ! How many kids have you killed today? '), just as they refused to take action over apartheid South Africa, just as they tried, culturally, to hold the nation in the grip of old and bad ideas. We believed in love, peace and storming the barricades, but not necessarily in that order. When you are the most junior possible extra in an epic involving millions, you can't be expected to understand the whole thing. This week, reading Mark Kurlansky's new book 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, I got a sense of how it had all fitted together, of how the events of that extraordinary year, the year I turned 14, helped make us what we are. And how we have misread it ever since..." 
