The Most Important Cultural Movement?

SOMEBODY, and I wish I'd taken note, 'cause I can neither remember nor Google who it was now, recently said on TV that Hip Hop is the most important cultural event of the 20th century. This struck me at the time, since I had written—in the liner notes to a compilation of classic 1950s R&R I was putting together—the exact same sentiment, except it was about rock & roll. Russian Revolution? OK... World War II? Yeah... Nuclear weapons? Sure, but what has really made a difference to global culture, worldwid, to individual men and women? It's rock&roll, no doubt. Think about it. Think about how much scope there is in half-a-century of rock, in all the permutations that have been dreamt up, invented, and reinvented, in that time.

Now, there's a lot about Hip Hop that I like, so I don't mean this post to be a competition between these two claims; in fact, I kinda think the Hip Hop comment was in a similar spirit, and of course that has the whole racial relations aspect going on. I'm going to disqualify myself from commenting on Hip Hop because, much as I like parts of it, I just don't I think get it the same way. I grew up in Whiteboy, Canada, and so I grew up with rock music, and so there's the cultural bed I slept in.

I found this article online, called "Popular music and processes of social transformation," by a Peter Wicke (1996), which is part of a book-length study:

In September 1996 the European Music Office published its report on "Music in Europe". The second part of this study was titled "Music, Culture and Society in Europe" and edited by Paul Rutten. It contains six critical essays and five case studies on the cultural value of music in the European Union. This critical contribution on rock music in the former East Germany was written for the occasion by Peter Wicke.

The article discusses the fall of the Berlin Wall and related ideological tensions in Germany since the 1960s. Pretty interesting, but still pretty dry stuff. It hits the right points, though:

...events in the GDR demonstrate in a manner not profiled nearly so graphically and explicitly in the West the fundamental importance of cultural processes meaningfully related to the everyday lives of people to the survival of a society's political and economic fabric. This importance demonstrates additionally the impossibility of dealing with the question of culture's relatedness to processes of social production and reproduction in a purely abstract and theoretical manner.

Uh, yeah! Which represents to me not so much the right kind of talking about music as an admonition that unless we start talking about music in some kind of meaningful way, we're bound to miss the real things.