This is quite true and also a fascinating insight, given that it ehoes something Nietzsche said in his very-often-wrongly-cited “God is dead” passage. That passage, from a mini-story called “Der tolle Mensch,” (The Madman) comes from the perspective of a crazy man who preciently warns the populace (i.e. “philosophers”) that in their constant search to concretize, define, and otherwise know God (who is by nature unknowable), to make the transcendent immanent as it were, they have “killed” him (that is, replaced religion with aesthetics and reason, God with beauty and logic, the sublime with the much more palatable beautiful or explicable), i.e. removed all the mystery. Despite Nietzsche being grade-a crazy, it is a beautifully crafted passage and it is quite fitting in a discussion of increasingly vapid popular music, where, as you explained, the palatable, easy-to-understand shallowness of appealing to base instints (whether they be insipid relationship ideals or sexual cheapening of ever younger people) has ever so more completely replaced the unique expression of yearning, misery or joy you find in Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Nina Simone and others (who, yes, sometimes sang about sex and drugs and violence but in a much more provocative and less prurient way).

(Here is a link to the full text of “Der tolle Mensch” in both German and English:
German: http://www.textlog.de/21289.html
English: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/nietzsche-madman.html)