The famous backlash against Bob Dylan’s switch to playing electric music in the mid-1960s is often misunderstood. It was not an objection based on musical aesthetics. Folk purists, such as the audience at Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the man who shouted ‘Judas!’ at a Manchester show in 1966, were not enraged by the simple fact of the volume, rhythms, and brashness of rock and roll. Dylan’s adoption of what many saw as a popular fad was more a social question of the artist-audience relationship. By abandoning the acoustic folk paradigm in favour of rock, he was supposedly rejecting the communal, interactive aspect of performance (the singalong, the political unity through song) in favour of positioning himself as separate or aloof from his audience. As the critic Ian MacDonald put it, ‘this big sound ended the traditional relationship between artist and audience: listeners became implicitly demoted to passive spectators … Dylan had done a Napoleon: declared himself electric emperor.’