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Your argument, as I understand it, basically comes down like this:
Pop music is stupid and simple because
1) classical music is so much more complicated, and pop music is full with uninteresting, simple features.
2) it is used a lot as background music.
some arguments against these:
1) different kinds of music focus on different aspects of things you can do with sound. Gregorian chant ONLY focusses on one beautiful flowing line that has as less elements of repeat as possible, and little bit on the text it is based on. Even rithem and the highest point in the melody are almost always linked. Yet we call this classical music.
Modern pop music, I believe is mostly homophonic, this means that counterpoint does not play a role. It is not a good idea to even look for counterpoint within pop music, it does not exist. Also, pop music is a vocal genre which produces mosly short songs. The focus here is on 1: repeating harmonic patterns (which are based on classical cadences but ignore most of the rules) with a repeating rithmic pattern repeating each bar.
The rithmic patterns is, nowadays, usually where the complexity is (this is exactly why rap exists at all!), try to listen to some modern pop music to analyse what happens rithmically within one bar. Complex syncopation often plays also a big role. This is why this kind of music is also danced to.
The focus however to me seems to be even more on text and melody. In pop music that is never meant to dance to this plays the biggest role. Even still good melodies in pop music also use heavy sycopation.
Another example I want to give is Indian classical music. It uses no harmony at all. It is however very complex in all the different scales (classical music from baroque to classical, which is very popular uses only 2(!) different scales, even pop music uses more (pentatonic blues scale, jazz scales, church modes etc.).
My argument against 2) is that the concert hall didn't exist at all untill the Romantic period. In the time of Mozart is was normal that people talked during performances, only in the Romantic period it became customary to be silent during performances. So many of the classical music played today was performed as background music, this does not mean that people didn't listen to it or enjoyed it.
Thanks for reading my post,
Niku
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