My issue is not so much with any given genre but with the entire situation surrounding 'popular music', which is basically music that serves only to (a.) induce purely escapist entertainment and (b.) cause people to spend money, be it on the band, the cross-marketed clothes, or the tour sponsers. I grew up as a rock musician and still play in a couple of prog-rock/avant-esque groups and the outer rock scene I deal with on a tangential basis, as a whole, is rotten to the core. The music is buried under Everest-sized heaps of b.s. related to publicity, magazines, club promoters, and a million other grubbing little hands that have never touched an instrument. Bands end up spending almost all of their time touring in direct competition with countless other acts and the artistry gets pushed way back on the shelf.
A fundamental requirement of music should be some level of disconnection with the social anxiety and economic tooling that corrupts the worst kind of musics - American Idol tat, gangster rap about using triple-beam scales and driving around in Hummers with Tec-9s, pithy country-pop songs, and genre-tailored rock songs with lots of long hair, eyeliner, and no melody whatsoever.
I've always maintained that auditing this and that part of classical music is almost missing the point. The other genres are responsible for dumping the most garbage in people's ears. Even if somebody's listening to bad classical music, it's still a miraculous leap beyond the tastes of the average 14-40 American dumbshit who's buying Avril Lavigne, Green Day and 3 Doors Down records at Target and Best Buy.
Topic: Pieces that shouldn't have been composed?