On the fundamental pleasure of hating stuff

A regular reader suggested this might make for appropriate/interesting reading:

Why I Hate the National – And how I decided it’s OK to hate the bands that I hate.
By Carl Wilson, Slate

In the end, it simply seems too repressive and stultifying to demand that we give up entirely on the fundamental pop pleasure of taking a side. Too often that instinct has manifested itself in discarding important genres, or valid modes such as sentimental or aggressive music, and especially in masking a social prejudice as an aesthetic one — hating artist x as a stand-in for hating “the kind of people who listen to x.” In this case, though, I’m the kind of person who listens to the National — adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy. If the competition is merely intramural, merely Beatles-versus-Stones, I get to choose my colors.

I think I might actually have some thoughts on this, but like everything else these days I probably need someone else to get the ball rolling in the comments section to actually begin to formulate a coherent sentence about any of it. All I know is, whenever I think of The National, I think of…