There's only a few situations in which I hear top 40 pop these days - like if I go into a deli that has the radio on - but what always strikes me immediately is how so many of these tracks are, for want of a better phrase, melodically pointless. You can tell they've just reached for a really obvious chord progression and churned out the most obvious melody that comes to mind. Along with the boilerplate teenybopper lyrics they honestly remind me of nursery rhymes. I listen to them and truly wonder at the effort which goes into recording and releasing such superfluous pieces of bubble gum crap.
And then I get to wondering how it is that so many people's musical tastes don't seem to develop past age 10. It's funny how it's socially acceptable to neglect your intellectual appreciation of music. We're told that music is an entirely subjective thing and that who are you to claim that Miles Davis was more talented than Justin Bieber? Yet if you were 30 years of age and your reading material was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and other large print picture books like it, people would worry about the state of your intellect. With literature, we're expected to move on from childhood and appreciate higher forms. With music, nobody cares if you're still listening to nursery rhymes in your 40's.