Yeah...guilty as charged.
I have little to no patience for people who loudly proclaim "oh, I don't watch
television—I read
literature." As though
The Wire or
Deadwood or
Breaking Bad isn't every bit the artistic achievement of, say,
Tales of the South Pacific or
Early Autumn or
A Visit from the Goon Squad (beep beep).
I don't listen to Taylor Swift for enjoyment, but I do try to keep up with pop culture, and she's put out some very good to excellent pop over the years, and her latest album was an interesting experiment and musically wonderful (if not as large a step forward lyrically).
What's more, I realized long ago that any big popster for whom you might have disdain—Justin Bieber, say, or Hilary Duff or Elton John or Barry Manilow or whomever—pretty much without exception has an absolutely killer band made up of monster players: like or hate their music, they hire outstanding musicians. So to diss someone who's almost certainly a fantastic player because you're too cool for their boss? To write off Thomas Lang, say, drummer for the Spice Girls and Kelly Clarkson—among many others—seems remarkably closed-minded and foolish to me. I may not want to listen to their music either, but yeah, you're right, I don't have a lot of respect for that attitude.