"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."

"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. 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. 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."

From "Sorry, rock fans. Hip-hop is the only genre that matters right now." by Marc Weingarten (WaPo)(on the occasion of a Pulitzer Prize for Kendrick Lamar’s “Damn”). Weingarten makes a number of arguments, but the #1 thing I'm seeing here is that what matters is social media, not music, and rap is social media.