Merzbow gets booked for popular-music festivals regularly, and plenty of other artists have credited him. The Japanese noise scene even inspired a Detroit noise scene through the 1990s and early millennium.

I don't care for the genre myself, but having been to events and seen pleasurable crowd reactions and met people who traveled some distance for it, I can't deny it has at least some real following. Who cares if it isn't discussed as the future of music? There are punk, metal, and hardcore subgenres that draw the same narrow audiences and don't aim to shake the world, but claiming that disqualifies them as part of the popular-music world would be silly.