Move over Kanye West, Taylor Swift and the Millennial generation are taking over music

The Academy Award for best song from a movie has already moved toward this Millennial sensibility. The 2005 winner was the rap song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from the movie “Hustle and Flow.” But last year’s Oscar winner, “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire,” combined Indian rhythms with upbeat exhortations celebrating victory throughout the world. Instead of bemoaning the fact that they “done seen people killed, done seen people deal, done seen people live in poverty with no meals,” as the group Three 6 Mafia did in that 2005 song, the Bollywood movie looked at very similar conditions and made a hit out of a tune (originally sung in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and even Spanish) whose English translation focused on a love affair that promised to make everything better.

The end of an musical era is near when its proponents pronounce its eternal life the loudest. In their 1970s reprise of a 1950s Danny and the Juniors classic, Sha Na Na told “all of you hippies out there in the audience,” that “Rock n’ roll is here to stay. It will never die.” In 1979, Neil Young said the same thing – just about the time that rap emerged to take rock ’n’ roll’s place on Top 40 radio play charts.

When Kanye West jumped on stage to protest Swift’s victory over Beyoncé for Best Female Video at the MTV Video Music Awards last September, he was foreshadowing just how shocked Gen-Xers will be when their signature genre, rap, drops from the top of the charts as fast as you can say “Napster.”

According to the Record Industry Association of America’s official tally of music sales by genre, rap’s popularity peaked in 2002, just as the first Millennials entered adulthood, and has now fallen to third place behind country and rock in America’s musical purchases.

Most members of Mr. West’s generation, now in their 30s and 40s, will not react kindly to the mantle of youth being placed on the Millennial Generation, whose optimism and group-oriented behavior represents a sharp break from the alienated cynicism and individual entrepreneurship of Gen-X. They may even manage to deny Swift her crown in this year’s Recording Academy voting for Grammy Awards in a last gesture of generational hostility.

But having already been named the new queen of pop by millions of fans on social networks throughout the world, it’s only a matter of time before Swift and her generation make over America’s music as triumphantly as they did its politics with the election of President Obama.

When that moment occurs, it will be the latest and perhaps most definitive sign that the Millennial Era has arrived.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and coauthors of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics.”

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