![]() Listeners are demanding more from their music than rock is willing to provide. Kids aren’t starting garage bands the way they used to for the simple reason that there’s nothing vibrant to tap into. Electric guitar sales are down 30 percent over the past decade. As rock’s promethean figures inch closer to their 80s and veteran musician-activists such asU2’s Bono continue to lose traction with anyone under 40, rock seems unmoored from its commitment to social engagement, especially among the young it’s ceded its role as a channel through which listeners work things out with themselves and the world around them. Hip-hop has also become the musical soundtrack of millennials’ lives. To take the measure of forward thinking in popular music, you have to pay attention to every culvert and tributary of hip-hop. But superstars such as Lamar don’t really drive hip-hop culture anyway, not when obscure and iconic artists are posting mind-blowing tracks online at a rate that makes rock seem sclerotic by comparison. No present-day rock musician can compete with Lamar’s astonishing verbal dexterity or his ability to articulate the inchoate rage of his listeners in tracks that take in the full sweep of vernacular music. Hip-hop has cornered the market on innovation. ![]() For them, the Internet isn’t a distribution system, or worse, an evil force siphoning money from musicians it’s their primary medium for artistic expression. There’s a practical reason for this: While other musicians were whining about their paltry Spotify royalty checks and trying to monetize their fading careers, hip-hop artists gamed the Web in the 2010s and made it their bullhorn and promotional tool. A genre aggressively committed to singles, as opposed to the creaky album-and-tour model that rock stubbornly insists upon even at the indie level, hip-hop provides a running commentary on the culture as it happens - a musical newsfeed in real time. Mercifully, rock has been displaced by hip-hop, with its daring formal innovations, its blistering polemics and its vital role as a sounding board for powerful social movements. Didn’t millions of us, after all, live out our arena-rock fantasies with the Guitar Hero video game just a few years ago? The Pulitzer for Lamar might confuse or anger those reared on the great canon of rock, but perhaps we will no longer have to endure the cloudy reveries of middle-aged men bemoaning the fact that fewer people seem to appreciate the brilliance of a 20-minute Clapton or Hendrix solo anymore. More than that, it is further proof - if any is still needed - that American culture has at last fully moved beyond the hegemony of rock ’n’ roll and the electric guitar-driven sound that dominated 60 years of popular music. No one who has heard Kendrick Lamar’s stunning album Damn could be at all surprised that it is the first nonclassical or -jazz recording to win a Pulitzer Prize.
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