Why are there so many haters?

Well, there are so many haters, simply because it is easy.

I started writing music reviews my first year of college in the year 1999. Because like every other male in their early twenties I wanted to write for a music magazine. The only remotely unique part of my dream was I preferred Spin to rolling Stone. I earned my sea legs by covering concerts and doing album reviews for the then University College of the Cariboo student newspaper oMega. The school is now known as Thompson Rivers University and was actually where I also started this blog.

While critiquing cd's specifically I started to notice how much easier it was to write negative reviews. Not because the actual writing birthed itself out of my fingertips more easily but more that I could stay emotionally detached. That way I wouldn't be vulnerable if the album was universally panned and my view stood out.

I didn't want to be "the guy who liked that terrible (fill in the blank) band" but rather be "that guy who knows what he's talking about because he doesn't like that shitty new album from (fill in the blank) that everyone says they like because they are swayed by the record label".

This is often referred to as "drinking the kool-aid" because the negative people like you to think you were tricked into liking it and are crazy for adoring something that is obvioisly garbage. 

The term "drinking the kool-aid" is a referrence to the act of people's temple leader Jim Jones ordering his cult to drink cyanide laced grape Kool-Aid (also less expensive Flavor Aid) killing roughly 918 people in the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. (Babies and other people who couldn't drink were giving involuntary injections).

The metaphor simply means that if you were to give some critical thought and exploration you would never agree to drink a poison laced fruit drink no matter how delicious an idea it seemed at first. No matter how flashy the band's cover art or even how sexy the artists were you would never drink their juice by saying their music was good.

Now fast forward 14 years. Today with the proliferation of the internet everyone views themselves as a critic. Actually, frighteningly, with the spread of information in the global village, everyone has become a critic.

It takes mere minutes for someone to ham fist a review by stringing together a couple of paragraphs about their opinions on a movie, T.V. show, book, album, photo essay or even, heaven forbid, a spoken word showcase. Throw in some anecdotal side tracks about a mass suicide in Guyana (that's where the Jonestown Massacre took place) and you can throw a blog post together in barely any hours from anywhere.

I wrote this post on my galaxy s3 while sipping on an unsweetened cuppacino frappe outside of an un-airconditioned cafe named after a play on words with beans and zebras. I didn't like the drink at first because the unsweetend flavor seemed bitter and unrelenting but it did relent. My palat grew acustumed to the lack of sugar and revelled in the nuance of a drink made with nothing more than the flavors of esspresso and homo milk smashed together with ice.

With everyone being a critic how many percents of these semi-verbose people did you think would take the easy way out. Well an ill-proportionately large amount obviously judging from the vitriol seeping out of the internet.

I mean really who wouldn't go negative to finish an opinion piece faster and look cool on the internet where it's only ok to love something everyone else does and you can only love it for two weeks.