When a dominant culture adopts a minority's music, it tends to keep the rhythm and sensuality while stripping out the social conflict the music carried. The music becomes exotic and erotic for outsiders, and its political meaning disappears in the adaptation.
People outside a community often enjoy its music as a pleasing sound or as an expression of the community's culture, without grasping what it says about their social situation. The same song can be pure entertainment to one listener and a statement about race, class and power to another.
For people living as a minority far from home, shared popular music becomes a way to reaffirm who they are. Listening and dancing together keeps a cultural identity alive that the surrounding society might otherwise wear away.