Pop culture has stopped making sense. It has begun to mirror the world of business, wherein the mantra today is “The old model no longer applies.” There was a time when a cursory understanding of sociology provided one with plenty of ammunition in the battle to decode the progress of pop culture.

Today, one might more wisely turn to laws of thermodynamics for clues. There, theories of entropy shine a certain amount of light, delineating as they do between the concepts of “useful,” creative energy and “useless,” destructive energy.

WHAT: University at Buffalo Spring Fest 2009 featuring Rise Against, Brand New, Framing Hanley and Cartel

WHEN: 6 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Alumni Arena, North Campus, Amherst

TICKETS: $35 for the general public (Tickets.com)

“Entropy increases as matter and energy in the universe degrade to an ultimate state of inert uniformity,” insists the Princeton.edu definition.

Which, in layman’s English, suggests that the more interchangeable things become, the more likely they are to fall into a pattern of generating “useless” energy, and thereby, burning out.

Popular music has been following this paradigm from the beginning, but the current glut of all-but- interchangeable pop exercises taking place in every idiom—teen pop, punk, metal, rock, rap, R&B —seems to have accelerated the rate of decay. The result is that, lately, there has been an awful lot of heat generated, but very little light shed. On the fan’s side of the fence, it has become increasingly difficult to care too much about what we hear. On the musician’s side, it has become ever more challenging to court the muse, to make music that “matters.” We’re stuck in the “useless energy” phase.

When Chicago punk outfit Rise Against began making headlines in the early part of the decade, the “r” word began to be tossed around quite liberally. Not as in “redundant,” but as in “revolutionary.”

Not since Rage Against the Machine had fused hard-left politics to its groove-centric rap-metal, in the process helping to launch the Che Guevara T-shirt industry, had heavy music been hailed as something that mattered with such consistency. If Rise Against (which headlines the University at Buffalo Spring Fest on Saturday and is headed back to the area for a July 30 show at the Hamburg Fairgrounds) wasn’t going to change the world, it was certainly supposed to change punk rock back into a form of protest music.

Talk about gilding the lily.

For anyone who had grown up familiar with political punks Bad Religion—a crowd well past age 30—Rise Against wasn’t really doing anything new. For the generation the band had squarely in its sights—punk-pop fans in their 20s and late teens—the politics expressed by singer Tim McIlrath most likely took a back seat to the relentless propulsion and emofriendly attack of the guitars.

Even by the time the band released its finest album, “Appeal to Reason,” in 2008, the revolution so many critics saw coming was, alas, nowhere in sight.

Who could fault McIlrath and Co. for going for it, though? If “Appeal to Reason” was a response to the oppressive vacuousness of the Bush years—which it was clearly intended to be—well, at least the band was trying. Still, it seemed that Rise Against had arrived at the party well past last call. No one was really paying too much attention. They just wanted to hear some good, loud tunes while they finished kicking the keg.

Considering all of this, it is admirable that Rise Against has so stubbornly forced its way into a lineage of punk rock music where the message and the medium were equally important strands of the musical DNA. It’s fitting, too, that this weekend the band will be performing songs with titles like “Collapse (Post Amerika),” “State of the Union,” “Hero of War” and “Re-Education (Through Labor)” at an institution not unfamiliar with hosting social and political protest of one sort or another.

You want a revolution? Here are some of Rise Against's 'protest punk' predecessors:

MC5: The Detroit group that served as the musical arm of the White Panther Party wrote the book on protest punk.

Sex Pistols: This band barely got going before it collapsed into a burning heap. (Entropy in action.) Happily, it made the disgusted and disgusting "Never Mind the Bollocks" just in the nick of time.

Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Not necessarily political, this short-lived band sounded at once angst-ridden and intelligent. Proving, in the process, that the two needn't be mutually exclusive.

Dead Kennedys: Releasing an album called "Bedtime for Democracy" right smack in the middle of the Reagan era shows a certain amount of ... um, "fortitude" will have to suffice.

The Clash: Some (yours truly included) believe that this was as musical and smart and politically astute as punk ever got, and probably, ever will get. I'm just sayin'.

Bad Religion: Can a person who has been to graduate school still play in a punk rock band? Brett Gurewitz and Co. answered this question, while simultaneously posing a few other riddles for the likes of Rise Against to unravel, or die trying.