I completely agree with this, we’ve made everything disposable and thus removed intrinsic meaning in favour of space for projection, to make everything as lowest common denominator as possible.

Watched a poignant discussion between Anthony Fantano and F.D Signifier recently (link here for those interested) where they focused on the Right’s media illiteracy (their co-opting of RAtM to fuel reactionary and regressive movements is an example which they dissected) and they hit upon an aspect which I found very relevant to this subject, namely that music had an almost completely different dynamic “back then.”

What they point out is that, with the absence of Social Media and the internet still relatively in its infancy, music used to be more of an event and a social marker than it is now. Songs used to be packed with more and more specific meaning considering they had a much harder time at delivering the ideological payload to the masses, people used to form communities around the bands’ messages, and through said communities the message was made entirely unambiguous - nobody in the 90s would have mistaken RAtM’s almost Anarchic messaging for Right Wing chest pumping, for instance, as their message was solidified in culture by the very communities which formed around them.