I know this sounds weird, but I have a soft spot for music that I hate. Not music that I merely don’t like, but stuff that really offends me aesthetically. There’s definitely a train-wreck element to the fascination, but I think it’s mostly just that the music’s very badness engages me—given the choice I’d rather listen to Brokencyde (who make me hate them in such a myriad of ways that it’s actually sort of fascinating to contemplate them all) than the Dirty Projectors (who have yet to inspire any sort of emotional response in me deeper than mild confusion about why other people like them so much).
So it was as much of a blessing as it was a curse when I discovered the blog Stuff You Will Hate, a tribute to the one-way love-hate relationship between a self-described “old” hardcore and metal fan calling himself Sergeant D and, well, scene kids in general. Though he occasionally engages in a bit of Carles-ian faux-naive irony—like in the current entry, “Life’s Big Questions: Are Hollister/Abercrombie Scene??”—he claims that anything he says he likes he actually likes, and he tends to stick up for the kids.
But man is that ever an appropriate name for a blog.