You're reading way too much into that comment about rock and roll. The timeline isn't even right for it to be a serious model. But pop music is the cultural successor to orchestral music in this way: The energy and money that used to go into orchestral music, string quartets, piano recitals, etc., now go into pop music. It's seized that share of the public's attention.
I thought the connections would be obvious. I don't like Berg's music, at all, and I blame him and people who promoted the 2nd Viennese School for the death of great music. But it is not a list of things I don't like.
I say fiction is masochistic because we like to read about characters whom we like and identify with suffering. If a book's hero doesn't suffer, we don't like it. There's a larger story there, that usually has to do with overcoming obstacles. But then, maybe that's a part of the masochism story as well.
There's a larger topic there-- fiction composed entirely of events which are pleasant for the characters simply doesn't work for human beings, even though logically, such fiction should be possible.
I've asked around, and while there's a wide range of experimental fiction, no one seems to do the experiment of writing a "story" which consists entirely of friends getting together for a good meal and pleasant conversation, with nothing at all going wrong and not the faintest threat on even the most remote horizon. No tension, no nasty gossip, no disc...
Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?