...and I'm not gonna get into the argument about whether it is "music" or not...

But I will point out that once we make music academic, innovation in that music dies...
...I knew a dude in college who "majored in hiphop" and I thought it was the gayest thing ever...its the first step to living in the past and the thing that always made hiphop great was the constant innovation and change that occurs...same thing happened with jazz...once "jazz studies" was accepted as a legitimate major we get more kenny g's and less coltranes...and those kenny g's probably had to transcribe or play a coltrane solo in college but that does not make them anything like coltrane...
I'm not necessarily AGAINST academics in music (I have a music degree) but I do think that we should acknowledge the fact that once we start breaking things down and studying their cultural impact AND technical aspects we are setting standards, therefore any innovation in the genre might have to create its own new genre because we now have standards to compare it to and a box it must now fit in...