When somebody says they don't like something I like, my usual impulse is to dive in and say, "But this particular thing is really good, have you given that one a try yet?" I think it's a common thing to do -- when somebody *likes* a thing, they want to find other people who can get the same pleasure out of it that they did. And when I see that somebody doesn't like a thing, my first impulse is to assume they didn't try hard enough, or they didn't listen to the right things, or they're just misinformed somehow -- and that's usually wrong. We don't have to like everything, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate that the things we don't like were often made with the same care and intention as the things we do like.
Actively hating forms of art and music is kinda stupid. People tend not to do this, because we kinda intuit that there are better uses for our brains. The numbers of people who spend meaningful parts of their life hating things are smaller than it seems.
Talking about things we don't like is weird in one sense: It's easier to write about the ways something is bad than the ways it's good. But the opposite of love (of the arts, if not people) is usually indifference, not hate. If it's hard to write well about the things we like, it's even harder to explain why something doesn't matter at all, since the act of doing so seems to make it matter. Pretty much any adjective one can use will impart a value of some kind to the subject, and struggling to explain our indifference to things will come out sounding more aggro than intended, and that leads to more heated circular arguments.
So anyway. I'm all for evangelizing *for* things. People here tend to be fairly chill about the things they don't care about, setting aside Precision Bass-related topics. But there's enough disagreement to make people want to be proactive about defending their positions. I try to keep the following comic handy for the times it feels like somebody's trying to wind me up...
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