Necessary Foreplay in Music

The discussion in class on Monday in which a classmate mentioned a band that she knows, I believe there name is something about Breakfast in Kentucky (I apologize for not remembering the actual band name) and their particular style of music. She had mentioned that the band tends to play more classical pieces like Beethoven and such but they play it at an impossibly fast speed and they play it very clean. This made me think about what qualities that I like in musical composition and whether or not this would fit my own personal criteria. I would like to take this moment to clarify that I am in no way trying to say that this music is deficient or inferior to all people but am merely comparing it to what qualities that I rank music by.
One issued that I have is that I feel it is not enough to merely play the correct notes and to see at how fast tempo one can do them at, I feel that the amount of effort put into playing a piece should also be put into composing the piece as well. Furthermore I do not think that finding the right combination of notes that sound good together is all that goes into composing a piece. There is something that must be said for the flow, for lack of a better word, of the piece in question. A song that is merely thrown at you with no variation, no deviation from the rest of the song seems kind of bland to me. You need the buildup, the anticipation if you will in order to truly appreciate a solo for example. I liken my idea to the cliché of too much of a good thing. When piece is a collecting of notes being played at an alarming rate, it might be technically impressive on the musician’s part but I feel that actual skill is only part of what is needed.
For example when one writes a short story while they are in elementary school they are taught about building up the anticipation in order to make the climax, well more climatic, then the ending wraps everything together. I feel that a song or musical piece should be the same. Many of the songs that I find most intriguing have this same structure built into it. I would not like Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb as much as I do today if they did not have the buildup and then David Gilmore’s Guitar solo.

Question: What elements are occurring in society, in your opinion, that makes it able for what is deemed popular music to shift drastically? For example when the Beatles came to America, and when Nirvana brought grunge to mainstream society?