Regular readers of this site -- both of them -- will know that I'm no admirer of the popular beat combos of today. I don't, to my knowledge, like a single song written after 1986, and even before then the only pop and rock I can stand is either a) obvious throwaway camp or b) the product of soulless industrial hacks, who at least imbue what they do with a certain amount of slickness. Otherwise, I can't abide pop, and I especially can't abide pop when it aims to be art.
I've tried to isolate a single reason for this, and here is my tentative result: it's the lyrics. I find pop lyrics at best painfully hokey, and at worst indistinguishable from bad adolescent poetry -- indeed, they often are bad adolescent poetry. The verses of Coldplay, Belle and Sebastian, Morrissey and the like could well have been lifted from poetry.com, or someone's livejournal. Artistically, they belong with the buckets of versified zit-squeeze secreted nightly by sensitive teens across the globe. I'd run a mile from any of this stuff written down, and none of it becomes more bearable when set to sixteen bars of drum and bass. Quite the opposite, in fact. And thanks to an entertainment industry which keeps pop stars, like pet dogs, trapped in a permanent state of adolescence, bad adolescent poetry is all most of them ever produce.
I've repeatedly tried to get into pop and rock, but hokey lyrics have always defeated me. My last such attempt was two years ago, when daily car trips with a Scandinavian coworker made me appreciate at least the theoretical appeal of 70s metal, and even made me curious enough to check it out personally. A friend of a friend, whose musical taste I respect transitively, once claimed that all rock since 1975 was basically just footnotes to Led Zeppelin; so I went and bought Led Zeppelin's classic 1971 album IV, aka "the one with Stairway to Heaven". I went home, pressed play, and prepared to rock! But after a few minutes of listening to a bunch of grown men singing "yeah! yeah! rock'n'roll!" or some such, I began to feel a bit silly. It sounded just like Spinal Tap, only without the irony. I barely made it through the self-serious bombast of Stairway to Heaven (which was doing nothing for me) before I became overcome with embarrassment and had to turn off the CD. I can't say the lyrics were intrinsically sillier than "Hoyotoho-ho" or "Walla-lalla-la", but I guess the riffs weren't grabbing me like those leitmotifs did. I remain content to respect Led Zeppelin from a distance, preferably outside audible range.
When it comes to silly lyrics, it occurs to me that most of the music I like has the benefit of being purely instrumental. Of the vocal music I like, I either don't understand a word of it (as in Vivaldi motets) or find the lyrics actually quite well-written (as in Handel's Messiah, even if they place style over content). The exception is the music of Purcell, who could take dreadful hackwork like Nahum Tate's Birthday Ode for Queen Mary and turn it into something miraculous and joyous and transcendent. But I've yet to find a Purcell of the pop world.