Pop is short for popular. That itself explains a lot why people don't like it.
First of all, what does that imply? Talking very generally, it means that it appeals to a lot of people and you can make money of it. Many tend to think of a lot of pop music as corrupted by the powers of capitalism. It's mass-produced and designed so that people will spend money on it. What does that imply? It means there's less honesty. Producers can take someone with a good voice, give them a boob job, hire the best pop-music writers to write something that might stick in the minds of the masses and then sell that along with some kind of image, like schoolgirl or angsty emo-teen. The artist becomes an instrument that plays other people's songs and wear other people's image in order to suck money out of your wallet.
I mean, not always, but sometimes. Take t.a.t.u for example, two voices sold off as schoolgirl lesbians. Their first album in english was called "200 km/h in the Wrong Lane". They became icons for a generation of frustrated homosexual teenagers who were naive enough to think they were the real deal. Of course, they were not. They were singing songs written by someone else, pretending to be characters invented by someone else and even pretended to be lesbians when in fact they were not.
Artists like these gives the word "pop" an immediate, negative association for many of us. It's like someone saying "vaginal secrete". You don't have to ponder the word, the emotional response comes as you hear it.
Secondly, music is for many people very important. It's so important that we use it to define who we are. If you wanna come across as an intellectual connoisseur of music, you're not gonna admit to sitting at home listening to Britney Spears. Maybe you'd listen to Emerson, Lake & Palmer instead. If you see yourself as a free individual, you don't want to define yourself by what everyone else is listening to. Although you like U2, you'll probably pick something else when someone asks what your favourite band is.
If you give me a minute to reflect, I don't think pop is **** at all. I love a lot of what I consider great pop music, but I will admit that I do tend to demonize pop music in general. I tend to write off a lot of music as mass-produced junk produced by people who's only after the content off my wallet and I don't think listening to pop music adds inches to my E-peen.
However, I try to be aware of this weakness and not to bash people because of what they like. Positive reinforcement is better. Also, I try to define myself by what I like - not by what I dislike. Some people prefer to do the latter.
