Are there competent musicologists that actually defend popular music? Most of them like Adorno just sound like insufferable assholes that brag about classical and nothing else. Is "popular" music really that bad?
Musicology isn't just about judging quality of music, it's about a lot of other things too such as historicity and social function. I guarantee you that people that dedicate time studying the history and sociology of popular music actually like popular music.
No, popular music is just modern folk music: constantly changing, always shallow, never remembered. Nobody in 2100 will know what NMH, or Pere Ubu, or Talking Heads or Danny Brown are, but they'll know Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc.