DJ Taylor: It's only Mick and Keef but we like them

Twenty-five years ago this summer, a time when the scent of iconoclasm drifted on the Jubilee air, I used to enjoy listening to a record called "1977" by the Clash. A no-holds-barred, three-chord assault on the sacred cows of the Seventies music business, it contained the deathless line: "No more Elvis, Beatles or Stones in 1977". I remembered this brash little exercise in statue-toppling only the other day when reading the newspaper accounts of the latest Rolling Stones world tour, a lavish geriatric progress which will drag its cast (collective age 280-plus) around the planet for the next six months. Further research revealed that Elvis Presley has just scored a posthumous hit single. The Beatles, of course, are everywhere: in Sir Paul's newly-married face beaming from the tabloids; in nearly every chord progression that the Gallagher brothers ever wrote. Pronounced dead a quarter of a century ago, Mick, Keef, Presley and the Fab Four – even where deceased – are, on the contrary, very much alive.

There is more to this phenomenon than odd bits of iconography. The Beatles and the Stones are still flourishing, but so, mysteriously, are the Who (John Entwistle's death notwithstanding), David Bowie and, judging from this year's Jubilee extravaganza, most of Black Sabbath. Top of the Pops, on which they all first pranced into view so many years ago, is about to celebrate its 2,000th airing, and the interest, as you might imagine, is focused on past glories rather than the contemporary drivel squeaked out by boy bands and tough low-life ensembles with names like the Hip-Hop Rapping Krew. If pop music exerts any communal pull these days, it is entirely retrospective. A concert by the Bootleg Beatles (tribute bands are another manifestation of the trend) is an extraordinary knees-up, half-way between an old-style variety hall and a VE Night street party, in which the age range swings between four and 80 and everyone knows the words.

Part of this is simply a reflection of what George Melly, several decades ago, called "the revolt into style", the route – habitually mocked by purists – whereby savage irruptions of the cultural spirit are gradually extinguished, emasculated and otherwise made safe by the restraining hand of commerce. Even my father, who once maintained that the Beatles were responsible for the decline of Western civilisation and that pop stopped where Elvis's hips began, now affects to like "Penny Lane". But we are also witnessing a validation of a once-derided but increasingly attractive view of how the cultural process works.

Just as there is a Whig – that is, progressive – view of history, which holds that human affairs will always move gently forward to some (presumably unattainable) pinnace of perfection, so there is a Whig view of culture. One of its most notable exponents, at any rate in the particular field of literature, was the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury. Bradbury's take on the English novel, for example, went something like this. There were we novelists, on our creative building site, the great foundation stones (Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot) at our feet, more recent materials (Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka) piled up around us. We needed only to apply our own precious contemporary mortar to send fiction lofting another few storeys into the sky.

But there is another view of culture: the Tory view. This holds that, dear me no, rather than using the achievements of our forefathers as a base from which to progress we are merely skulking around in their collective shadow, that Thackeray, say, is a better writer than Salman Rushdie, just as Corot is a better artist than Picasso, and that's that. Art, according to this analysis, doesn't invariably get better; it can often get worse. Naturally the Tory view of art is complicated by the range of social and historical factors that provide its backdrop. Thackeray and Corot's task, it can be argued, was made easier because they lived in a different world, one more confident about its ability to represent itself accurately on canvas or in print.

And yet most art forms, if examined in any depth, reveal a centralising pattern, in which the form, having spent a certain amount of time developing its techniques, reaches an efflorescent popular high point, after which, if only to avoid stagnation, it has to change. Invariably the change involves fragmentation and, in the end, the loss of accessibility. This is more or less what has happened to the English novel and English poetry since a Victorian heyday rapidly trailed by Modernism and Bloomsbury. It is certainly what happened to painting in the later 19th century and to jazz in the mid-20th. More to the point, it was inevitable. To look at the ultra-realistic skin tones of the pre-Raphaelites is to realise that representational painting had reached a point of precision, or mimicry, beyond which it could go no further. Thereafter the road lay downward to surrealism and abstract expressionism – tedious obfuscations, from one side of the critical easel, praiseworthy experiments from the other.

All of which brings us back to the spectacle of old rubber lips lining up for another serial work-out among the stadiums of North America and beyond. One doesn't have to like or even be interested in the Rolling Stones to recognise the extent of their appeal. Not only did they establish the basis of their art form, they are still here, 40 years later, to show their imitators how the trick is turned. Which would you prefer to read – the new Martin Amis, or a previously unknown Dickens manuscript found in a forgotten cellar at Gad's Hill?

Another quintessential pop artefact from the mid-1970s was a novel by the old International Times journalist turned New Musical Express scribe Mick Farren called The Texts of the Festival – a kind of futurist hippy fantasy in which the sacred texts are the lyrics to classic Sixties pop songs. A quarter of a century on, the modern cultural carnival has its own set of defining moments, most of them coming from a very early stage in the respective art forms' development. To put it another way, the Stones will always pull in more punters than, say, the latest lo-fi sensation from Albuquerque who won't get past their third album, and Handel always raise bigger audiences than Schoenberg, not because the mass audience is necessarily timorous but because some elemental cultural laws are silently working to corral it. All the same, watching Sir Mick gamely limbering up for perhaps his 5,000th public rendition of "Jumping Jack Flash", one could wish that Malcolm Bradbury had been right.