"modern pop music is bad" is such an odd argument to me. we currently live in a time where you can find pop music of any kind at the click of a button. you are no longer constrained to just what labels want you to hear on the radio.
"it's all meaningless" is just an odd argument too, one of the biggest pop albums of the year - brat by charli xcx - has pretty raw and vulnerable lyrics, so does the new billie eilish record, there are other artists like twenty one pilots who have wrote songs about heavy subjects and has their biggest hit be about it sucks to be an adult.
also, why can't we just also have fun pop songs that aren't deep? the weeknd isn't gonna win awards for deepest lyrics anytime soon but he has made some of the most infectious pop songs of the 2010s and 2020s. i don't go to dua lipa to learn the meaning of life, i go to her music to dance and have fun.
“it all sounds the same” is also weird, do you think that hozier and sabrina carpenter sound that alike? they both had big hits this year. pop music isn't one thing, it can be rock, electronic, metal (see linkin park and poppy), hip hop (see gnx by kendrick lamar), and so many more things. there's also more experimental kinds of pop music like hyperpop or psychedelic pop. if you want boundary pushing stuff from the pop world i’d recommend imaginal disk by magdalena bay or desire, i want to turn into you by caroline polachek. there's also tame impala.
pop music isn't bad, lighten up a little and have some fun.
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ok fair argument, but saying “pop is bad” isn’t odd, it’s just opinion and preference.
also less relevant but your claim that “pop can be rock, metal, and electronic” is wrong on a few counts. Rock, metal, and electronic on their own are completely seperate genres with different characteristics. They can be fused with pop, however they aren’t, on their own, pop. Especially not metal or electronic.
Linkin Park, in this case, is nu metal (which is a niche enough genre).
Also, in the rock realm, there’s prog rock, psychedelic rock, “college” rock, and so on, none of which share characteristics with modern pop
Electronic is a blanket term that has over 100 subgenres that follow their own rules. Many of them are completely different from modern pop (like dubstep, future bass, trance, drum & bass)
most radio pop on the other hand is pretty noticeably homogenized and adheres to a very generic sound that all sounds the same and is completely devoid of new ideas. it’s a different problem from pop music as a whole but tbh i think that’s what a lot of people mean when they say all pop sounds the same. pop music as an umbrella term is lit, but if i have to listen to magic 106.7 for another afternoon while making salad at work i swear to god i’m gonna throw somebody through some drywall
yeah that’s why i wanted to point out i’m aware that music on radio sucks at the start, but i do see people just extending that thinking to all modern pop music regardless. plus also gave me an excuse to shoutout albums and artists i like lmfao
another thing I wanted to point out is that you could make many of these arguments for most eras of music. take the 80s, it's synonymous with gated drums and liberal use of synths, so all 80s pop music sounds the same.
now of course that's silly to say, the 80s pop scene had more to it than just gated drums and synths. it was just one of the zeitgeists of the time. just like how now you have things like hyperpop being a zeitgeist of our time.