Patrick Stump (Photo: Astrid Stawiarz)Do you hate Nickelback? Okay. Ever stopped to wonder—why exactly do you hate them? What did they ever do to you, anyway?
That’s the question Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump posted on his personal blog Tuesday, with an extended lament on how society seems to be so darn critical in general these days.
"We derive our own identities from the act of hating,” Stump pointed out, adding, “We’re so busy broadcasting our latest cultural disdain that we scantly notice anything we enjoy.”
He noted that “everyone’s a critic” and it’s actually starting to affect art today as a whole. “’Oh man, this Rebecca Black kid is terrible! Let’s laugh at her!’ has become more culturally relevant than ‘I really love this new Bilal record.”
“Criticizing art and the artists that make it is a lazier pass time than creating or appreciating it,” Stump wrote.
The singer admitted that professional critics serve a worthy purpose—indeed are “artists in their own right”—but in today’s generation of social media users, “it’s very easy to lose sight of anyone else’s opinion.”
Stump posed a challenge to haters: What’s so bad about bands such as Nickelback, anyway? “I’m sure Nickelback…worked (and potentially still are working) to be the best damned Nickelback they can be,” he stated. “All of the agreed upon pariahs throughout pop-culture history put their identities into the thing we decry.”
He went on to wonder why this critical disdain seems to be concentrated so strongly on music and art in particular. “We don’t go into a grocery store and go 'Ew! Hey, look at barbecue sauce! Don’t you just friggin’ hate barbecue sauce?'”
“I’m not saying everyone needs to go around playing nice and never admitting that they dislike things,” Stump concluded. “That’d be ridiculous. But perhaps we as a culture have exhausted (at least for a little while) whatever can positively be gained by ignorantly dismissing things as loudly as we can.”