Interesting take on “the decay of American culture”, using music as the marker:
Eventually you run out of chairs for chords, variations on the order you play them, and their complexity. You reach the point that Kroeber described: “With pattern potentialities exhausted, there could be only diminished or devitalized repletion… so more and more sluggish mechanical repetition within the realized but fully exhausted patterns became the universal vogue.”
Which is to say, much of the music of today.
Over the top maybe but: food for thought.