There's an alternative history of the last 60 years that doesn't just regard popular music as a process of non-stop ever-increasing liberation and "empowerment". Obviously it isn't. In fact many people have written many such alternative histories, some of them very good, nearly all of them very contentious and combative. There has always been a lot of musical dross around, some it very ugly dross, and there are many good reasons to think that what's known as "rock* music" has long since become a deeply reactionary force.
For good, solid (i.e., commercial) reasons, Classic Rack gets played non-stop worldwide, including and especially on stations owned by, say, Rupert Murdoch. The motive is greed and the profits are huge, but the means are aesthetic and the effects are ethical and political. They're instructing you
how to be, mainly because they make money off how you are. And they have a vested interest in you staying the way you are, i.e., exactly the same way you were when you were 13, namely befuddled and fearful and disorientated and excitable, and with barely a clue about anything. Then they sell this back to you as "rebellion" and "non-conformity" and "being yourself".
Not only are the Murdochs of this world no longer threatened by rack music, they adore it, like the golden calf it has turned out to be. No wonder, when it never stops shitting out golden eggs. It's a fucking racket in more ways than one, not least when it's most boringly and sanctimoniously and "upliftingly" tuneful. See Madonna and Gaga, as prime contemporary examples.
*
Pronounced "rack", and not for no reason. Listening to most of this stuff is torture unless you've become inured to it or addicted to it, or simply can't escape it. (I pity people who have to spend eight-hour days working in it.)
On Edit: There are a few RI threads that touch on these topics, e.g.:
60's Counterculture: Through a Bong, Darkly
