Lots of random thoughts on this subject.
I don't listen to much mainstream pop stuff and I own precisely 1 non-Beastie Boys rap/hip hop/whatever album: Ice Cube's Predator. I can't read music but have taught myself piano, bass, and guitar just by playing along with songs I like. I compose my own stuff but need to record my experiments since I can't write it down.
Anyway, I appreciate the mathematical aspect of music - the juxtaposition of instruments, melodies, rhythm, syncopation - moreso than lyrics. I like jazz, R&B, soul, ska, and some rock and pop stuff. I can appreciate bands like Phish or Keller Williams or MMW from a technical perspective - they're all virtuosos - but some of their stuff is too nerdy even for me. It's like "wow, I can play this ridiculously hard riff so look at me!"
This will seem elitist but that's not how I intend it. There are high forms of music and low forms. Likewise, high music can be sublime or it can suck. Low music can be good, groovy, fun or it too can suck. High music is intellectually challenging - think of Brubeck's syncopation or Davis's uncomfortable silences, Beethoven's jousting melodies or Mozart's flurries of notes - while low music is simpler, accessible, real.
My aesthetic sense owes much to
Gadamer's notion of play. The aesthetic experience involves the work and its perceiver extending to each other. The work has an implicit set of rules that the perceiver accepts. The perceiver suspends aspects of reality to engage the work. Like playing a game, the game and its players are bound by this relationship. Music has to be experienced. That experience can and does occur on many levels.
So I understand that when I listen to Beethoven's 6th that there are many levels on which I can approach it. I may concentrate on woodwinds or try to isolate the bassoons, or I may focus on the mimetic aspects of melody, or I can try to take in contrasts, etc. And when I listen to Suicidal Tendencies I'm focusing on Mike's funny lyrics or the guitar riff or something.
If high music is fine art, I equate low music with cartoons. Each is enjoyable, but high music can be appreciated in itself whereas low music conveys a message that transcends the form. The Requiem is beautiful musically in the purest sense. One doesn't need to understand Mozart's lyrics to appreciate it. I don't think we can say the same about, say, a Dylan tune. The music serves the message in the latter.
TLDR
Probably not making much sense. Basically, I think there's music and then there's popular music. Both have merit, but for different reasons.
Examples of "high music" from popular artists:
Miles Davis's Kind of Blue album
Molly Hatchet's Dreams I'll Never See
Simon and Garfunkle's I am a Rock
Charles Mingus's Haitian Fight Song