AV Club

Erik Bates | March 5, 2012
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Samir Mehta | March 5, 2012
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Scott Hardie | March 7, 2012
Big fan here too. I started reading AV Club and The Onion together back around the time I started running this site, so it's been a while. I miss some of the random weirdness of the old days, but the writing has gotten really smart in recent years. TV Club was a wonderful addition. The weekly Deep Space Nine reviews, written by a virtual newcomer through whose eyes I get to re-experience an old favorite vicariously, make me inordinately happy.

Elsewhere online, how in the world did Cracked.com slowly morph into one of the best sources of social criticism around? Their transition from mediocre laff-machine to sincerely engaged citizen of the world (and even funnier to boot) has been Daily Show-esque. Their post from yesterday is the latest example, and it's excellent: 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.

Scott Hardie | September 14, 2013
I still enjoy the AV Club daily because they produce some funny stuff, but increasingly I'm reminded how little taste I share with them or their readership. In an interview ostensibly about how Lenny Kravitz sucks (which I was surprised didn't mention the viral video where he spontaneously jams with fans and seems nice), the comments section quickly turned into a long debate about whether the Red Hot Chili Peppers always sucked or have only sucked since 1990, with the consensus leaning towards always sucked. One commenter was right to point out that the AV Club's readership may be too young to appreciate how ground-breaking and well-regarded the Chili Peppers were in the early years, but I was sad to see very little support for their 2000s records. If all that people know of this period are the annoyingly ubiquitous hits like "Scar Tissue" and "Otherside" that modern-rock radio keeps playing despite everyone being thoroughly sick of them by now, then yes, I can see believing that RHCP haven't produced worthwhile music in decades and were maybe incapable of ever being good. But as we discussed when it came out, Stadium Arcadium requires multiple listens to appreciate, and I would say the same of By the Way. There are many lovable little songs like "Hey" and "If" that don't make their pleasures known immediately, and hidden gems like "Tear" and "Turn It Again" that should have been hits. I still adored Stadium Arcadium a year later and continue to listen to it today. It's not great or important rock music, but it's far from terrible, and rushing to pile on blanket criticism of a generalized variety ("it sucks") demonstrates to me that the AV Club community is full of uninformed snobs and hipsters. That's always been true, but it's only lately that I've started to find it so off-putting. Is this just an age thing (meaning either a generational difference or that I'm getting too old to have patience for people's need to act cool), or is it true that I really do have terrible taste in music merely for finding plenty to like in late-period RHCP after listening to it at length, or both?

Erik Bates | September 17, 2013
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Scott Hardie | October 7, 2013
Many people claim to dislike Nickelback, but I wonder how many of them can name even one of their songs.

The Onion summed up how interest in DMB wanes with age. I knew some passionate DMB fans in high school, and I guess they've proven that their interest is genuine by continuing to enjoy them and post about them on Facebook well into our mid-thirties. That band was never my thing ("Crash Into Me" seemed so pretentious) but i can't begrudge anybody else their preferences.

Would Bob Marley fit into this category too? There are lots of genuine fans, but also lots of college kids who latch onto him as a safe and popular choice, decades removed from his actual work. Or at least, that's the way it was when I was in college in the nineties; maybe that trend has faded since.

This conversation is making me miss Rock Block, damn it.

Scott Hardie | October 7, 2013
How about the Grateful Dead, and Jerry Garcia in particular? He died while I was in high school, but plenty of kids in my generation latched onto them as a safe thing to say that they're into. The Dead's music seems more complex and sophisticated than a high-schooler should appreciate. One of those kids is a friend of mine on Facebook and continues to post stuff about Garcia to this day, so I guess it wasn't just a phase with him.

Erik Bates | October 7, 2013
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Scott Hardie | October 20, 2013
Ah, so a pro-Marley poster on the wall is an encrypted, parent-safe, RA-safe way of having a pro-marijuana poster on the wall. I hadn't thought of it that way. It must work, because I'm aware of their connection and I still never thought of Marley fandom quite that way, and I'm as square as a parent or RA.

Some people do claim to like popular things that they don't actually like, but it can leave some folks on the outside wondering even more why their cultural preferences are so unpopular, something alluded to in another current discussion. Measurers of popular opinion like IMDb with their ballot system should compile a list of anti-popularity: The highest proportion of negative votes (roughly 1-3 on a 10-point scale) among popular titles, sort of the way that politicians are measured on unfavorability alongside their favorability. That way, we might discover that (guessing here) titles like Citizen Kane have a high number of negative votes among their popular votes, while others like The Wizard of Oz are universally beloved with few negative votes. The raw averages in the Top 250 are not enough to tell that story.

Samir Mehta | October 20, 2013
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Scott Hardie | October 20, 2013
Yes! Context can skew simple statistics as well. If Pandora were to release a list of the songs with the most "thumbs up" and most "thumbs down" votes, it would be less a list of what songs their listeners genuinely liked and disliked, and more a list of the songs that best fit into certain molds such as "alternative rock" that many playlists are made of and which songs were misfits much more difficult to categorize.