Community music is situated as a form of social and political activism which traces genealogical connections to the politicised community arts movement (de Banffy-Hall, 2019; Higgins, 2012, 2024) and as a concept through which we might critique and identify oppressive logics in other music-making practices. This paper builds upon Deleuzo-Guattarian and Derridean theorisations of music education (Gould, 2009) and community music (Higgins, 2006, 2024), aligning these perspectives with social innovation theory (Pue et al., 2015) to conceptualise the activist dimensions of community music. Thus, community music is understood as an arena of social innovation in a way that simultaneously affirms and responds to critiques of the activist positioning of community music. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, the activism of community music might be conceptualised as war machine-like (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), creative lines of flight that smoothen space and opens pathways for creative participation. Through social innovation theory, the trajectory of the war machine is emergence through the agentic engines of facilitation and creative participation. The war machine of community music activism remains at risk of capture and (re)striation of its smoothened space through its interactions with State-like structures. As the activist impetus of community music comes into contact with institutional structures this impetus becomes increasingly stabilised and standardised. Through this adoption stage of social innovation the war machine dynamic of community music bends towards institutional aims and (re)striation. This dynamic provides insight into the critiques of a depoliticisation of the field and adoption of neoliberal self-descriptions as a consequence of institutional capture (Kertz-Welzel, 2016; Krönig, 2019; Rimmer et al., 2014). Yet, the emphasis of Pue et al. (2015) on the processual nature of social innovation, not necessarily requiring the yielding of specific benefits, urges an understanding of a non-teleological emphasis of change. The war machine of community music activism is in continuous flux between an impetus for smoothening and passage through structures of striation, oscillating between lights of flight and lines of death: between activism and institutionalisation. In Derridian terms, the emancipatory desire that frames community music activism is then avenir, perpetually deferred, renegotiated and always incomplete (Derrida, 1994). Through proposing additional vocabulary to understand this under theorised aspect of community music, new perspectives and avenues for future research are shown. In particular, practical implications for how the academy might consider and negotiate the transformations that occur to participatory and activist practices when incorporated into curricula and research agendas are explored.