Tangential to my real point, but generally something doesn't need to be like nails-on-chalkboard to sound "bad". Sometimes, things are offensively bland (in my opinion, like the general pop aesthetic, and also football!), as in so boring and repeated so often that it's painfully uninteresting to be subjected to.
As for how a whole genre can be dismissed as sounding "bad": pop music generally adheres to tried and tested formulas, both structurally AND in terms of the raw sounds you can hear that make up the aesthetic of the music. Over the decades, pop music has been streamlined more and more, becoming a lot more formulaic and less adventurous. So if you don't like any of the relatively small palette of sounds and ideas that are presented to you in pop music, you're doomed to dislike most of it. To reiterate my original point, I think that limiting our choices of (easily accessible) music is one method of encouraging ignorance in the population and discouraging people to challenge the status quo (because that would be a threat to the influence of those few folk who own the industry, who do interestingly but not surprisingly happen to be friends of the more right-wing Governments - like how Gary Barlow is a Tory. But I digress...)
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A man walks into a zoo. There's nothing there but one dog. It was a shih-tzu.
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