Is Popular Music Changing the System?

I often listen to current popular music and think, there's nothing really new here. It sounds like this could have been done 20 or 30 years ago. I wonder if this is just attitude of someone who's aged out of the demographic for popular music. How much of that is there? And what about the role of culture in his analysis of politics? Is that just one way of approaching it, or is culture actually a way of thinking about transforming the system?