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this is all very simplistic thinking.
Big Black sounded nothing like VU and used a synthetic drummer way before other "rock" bands did it.
Sonic Youth did so much innovation on guitar that it now seems old hat, but they surpassed VU's sound many times over.
"rock n roll" has been around now for 60+ years.
Hip Hop music has been around for almost 40 years.
Both genres have been recycling themselves for decades now.
Bands/groups in either genre who seek to expand the musical vocabulary of these genres are always ridiculed at first by the purists , then their innovations end up seeming boring and trite once everyone catches up. It is what it is.
at it's core, rock n roll is riffs, a backbeat, and songs about primal things.
at it's core, hip hop is a looped beat, and an MC talking to their people in rhyme.
Both of these allow for an infinite variety of sound.
What I used to love about Hip Hop was how it was structured so differently from traditional song forms. That shit went out the window in the late 80's, early 90's when record labels and rappers realized mad money could be made by essentially making pop songs with rapped verses, and sing along Rhythm and bullshit choruses. After that (and after the labels sucked the creativity out of sampling) most mainstream Hip Hop was just the same old tired formula. verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus chorus.....
innovation in music happens because people get tired of the same old shit, but it can only go so far.
The history of Jazz shows this, having reached a maximum level of innovation that took shit to such far out edges that everyone lost the thread of true jazz improvisation. Fusion sounded like drug addled funk. Free Jazz became cacophony for it's own sake. Smooth Jazz became adult contempo background music.
The same is happening as we speak to rock n roll. rock music did so much with a riff, beat and a song that there is not much else left to do with that framework that has not been done.
In ten or twenty years the same thing will happen with Hip Hop.
I have been predicting the next big wave of young people's music to piss off parents will be Tejano/ranchera inspired accordion music, good for drinking and for dancing, and it will usher in a new wave of polyphonic multi-instrumental music that is as far removed from rock as hip hop was back in the day.
rambling.....
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