Where Did All The Haters Go?
Whether You're A Swiftie, A Livie, or a Tatertot, This Is How Fandom Is Replacing Taste
Donald Fagen, the living frontman of Steely Dan, has a very punchable face. And his personality, from what I've read in interviews, doesn't diminish that urge, either. For twenty years, I've maintained this position with the stubborn consistency of someone defending a deeply held, or rather, steely political belief. Steely Dan represented everything I hated about 1970s music: pristine production, jazz-fusion noodling, lyrics that felt like they were written by a particularly pretentious MFA student who'd read too much Thomas Pynchon (or, alternatively, a Substacker who references Thomas Pynchon).
Then, a few weeks ago, I was driving in my trusty ole Honda Odyssey when the 1972 hit song "Do It Again" came on the radio, and instead of reflexively reaching for the dial, I found myself... not changing the channel. The song played through to the end. I even sat through the–gag–electric sitar solo. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either. Then the next week, "Dirty Work" came on the SiriusXM Yacht Rock station, and again, I let it ride. I was a fool to do your dirty work. Oh, yeah.
This unsettled me more than it should have. I wondered what it said about me as a tastemaking arbiter of high culture, a self-appointed designation I take very seriously even though no one else does. I wondered if my auditory tastebuds were dulling much like the way our brain does when get older and we start forget things like how we dislike Steely Dan. I wondered if Fagen and his deceased creative partner Walter Becker had incorporated subliminal messaging that only men of a certain age can hear. Spin the record backwards and it says, "play me loud in your minivan." And I gave this a lot of thought mostly because I used to have a visceral reaction to their music. Like if my ears had a gag reflex, they would have activated during "Peg."
To me, this small surrender felt indicative of our current moment: we're not rehabilitating culture so much as we're being trained out of having strong negative reactions to anything. The path of least resistance has become the default cultural position. Case in point? I have formally downgraded Donald Fagen's face from punchable to slappable.
But also consider the journey of nu-metal, a genre that spent the better part of two decades as a punchline and rightfully so. [After all, you can only be taken so seriously once you reveal that you did it all for the nookie.] Slipknot and Korn were symbols of everything wrong with late-90s rock: aggressive posturing, juvenile angst, satin Adidas tracksuits. Yet this week, Pitchfork, the same publication that once handed out bad reviews like parking tickets at the end of the month, gave Slipknot's self-titled 25th Anniversary reissue their "Best Reissue" designation. This rehabilitation is largely driven by generational turnover: The kids discovering these bands on TikTok don't carry the critical baggage that made loving nu-metal socially unacceptable in 2002. To them, it's just music that sounds freaky, divorced from the context that once made it embarrassing. And I was there. Trust me, it was hella embarrassing. And we used words like “hella.”
Oasis underwent a similar transformation during their recent reunion tour this past year. I saw them multiple times during their original run in the 1990s as a huge fan—I can even prove my bonafides with a robust collection of import CD singles—and they were always a fine live band who wrote fantastic songs, or rather, appropriated the finest melodies from their influences. But they weren't known for on-stage charisma or consistency. I even vividly remember one show where Liam refused to get on stage and sing and sat in the audience while Noel handled vocal duties. I’ll put it this way: I’m not quite looking back in anger, but I’m not looking back in fondness, either. Yet their reunion shows sold out instantly, with tickets reaching astronomical prices. I should know because I tried to buy a couple. FOMO is real.
Yet of all the bands I saw in small venues a decade or so back, My Chemical Romance has experienced perhaps the most dramatic rehabilitation. A group of gothy emotional men with a propensity for making concept albums that incorporate show tunes and Liza Minnelli (hello? when is the MCR Broadway show happening?!?)? The Black Parade, the band’s seminal emo masterpiece, is nineteen years old, yet the Jersey-based emo rockers played the biggest venues of their career this year to audiences full of teenagers experiencing "nostalgia" for an era they never lived through. They're not connecting to memories of the music. They're connecting to membership in a community—on TikTok, everyone is emo now!—or to the social identity that comes with being part of the Black Parade. Never mind that the original fans earned those memories through years of getting stuffed into lockers by jocks everywhere. This commodification of authentic experience isn't unique to MCR—it's become the template for how all modern fandom operates.
Which brings me to a fundamental shift in how cultural consumption works. We've gone from the occasional subculture—Deadheads, Trekkies—to every major artist having a named, organized fanbase with its own internal mythology. Swifties, Livies, Arianators, Monsters, the Beyhive. Even Tate Mcrae has one and they are in fact called “tatertots” and no, I am not joking. Look it up. In a fractured society where traditional community structures have weakened, fandom has become one of the few remaining sources of collective identity and belonging. This is why Slipknot, Oasis and MCR can sell out stadiums without having released new music, in decades. They're not selling songs, they're selling belonging.
But modern fandoms operate differently than their predecessors. They're more defensive, more territorial, more focused on protecting their investment from criticism. When Taylor Swift fans can effectively end careers through coordinated harassment campaigns, the rational response for critics is to find something nice to say or say nothing at all. The economics of outrage work in reverse now—negative opinions carry such social and professional costs that positivity becomes a survival strategy.
This creates a feedback loop of performed enthusiasm. You like something, post about it, others see you liking it and feel pressure to like it too, then they create content about liking it, which reinforces your own investment in liking it. The cycle becomes self-perpetuating cultural momentum that has nothing to do with the actual quality of the thing being liked. We're not just consuming culture anymore—we're performing our consumption for others who are performing their consumption for us.
As Kelefa Sanneh observed recently in The New Yorker, music criticism has lost its edge almost entirely. The days of music critic legend Lester Bangs calling something "s***" or the self-appointed “Dean of American Rock Critics” Robert Christgau handing out D-minus grades are over. Pitchfork hasn't given a 0.0 review since 2007. Rolling Stone abandoned its star system, then recently brought it back in a neutered form. Critics have become cheerleaders, afraid to hurt feelings or trigger the kind of mob harassment that can destroy careers.
The shift reflects broader changes in how we consume and discuss culture. Social media has erased the distance between critics and artists, making negative reviews feel like personal attacks delivered directly to the subject's mentions. Writers who criticize major artists report receiving death threats. Publications now sometimes remove bylines from negative reviews to protect their authors. Swift’s last album The Tortured Poets Department, for example, was reviewed anonymously in Paste Magazine by the “Paste staff.”
But when everyone becomes a fan and nobody is allowed to be a hater, something essential gets lost. Hatred, it turns out, requires more effort than we're willing to invest anymore. It's easier to feign mild appreciation than to maintain active distaste, especially when you're expected to perform your cultural consumption for social media. We're living at an all-you-can-eat buffet where we're eating everything but tasting nothing, sampling each dish just long enough to post about the experience.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the current music landscape, where algorithmic optimization has created a new kind of musical product: songs designed to be unhatable from the moment of creation. Take Alex Warren, the TikTok star whose earnest Summer I Turned Pretty-ready love songs have made him a streaming sensation among Gen Z. My kids love him, and I can understand why—his music is quite “vibey,” well-produced, emotionally direct. It's also completely derivative.
Warren is essentially a rehash of Noah Kahan, who was a rehash of Of Monsters and Men, who were a rehash of Mumford & Sons, who were themselves a sanitized version of nearly a century of American bluegrass tradition [I'll never forget Dan Mumford admitting in an interview that his introduction to bluegrass came via the O Brother, Where Art Thou? ].
Each iteration in this chain gets more algorithm-friendly, more focus-grouped, more stripped of whatever made the original compelling. Warren represents the endpoint of this process: music that's pre-rehabilitated, designed to avoid the possibility of strong negative reactions. He's Mumford & Sons without the potential for backlash, bluegrass without the cultural specificity that might alienate suburban teenagers.
But Warren's success isn't just about the music—it's about providing his young fans with a ready-made community, a tribal identity they can join and perform online. The music becomes secondary to the social function it serves. Kids aren't discovering Alex Warren so much as they're joining his fanbase—or as his fans call themselves, Warren Nation, which sounds less like a following and more like a Fox News segment.
This systematic avoidance of negative assessment carries a cost that extends beyond individual taste. When everything is deemed worthy of celebration, celebration loses its meaning. When no one is allowed to say "this sucks," declarations that something is great carry no weight. We've created a culture of enforced enthusiasm that flattens all aesthetic distinctions into a homogeneous paste of mild positivity.
The fear of having strong negative opinions has led to the elimination of strong opinions entirely. We've moved from genuine aesthetic engagement to a risk-averse cultural posture where everything must be tolerated, if not celebrated.
There's something both liberating and deflating about this realization. My slow acceptance of "Do It Again" probably says less about my evolving musical sophistication and more about taking the path of least resistance. I haven't learned to appreciate Donald Fagen's genius. I've just stopped expending energy on dislike.
The machine that rehabilitates everything isn't making culture more democratic—it's making us more indiscriminate. When Donald Fagen's punchable face becomes tolerable, when Slipknot gets critical acclaim, when Alex Warren builds a career on the xeroxed ghost of American musical traditions, we haven't evolved. We've just stopped caring enough to object.
In a world where everything is supposedly worth loving, nothing ends up being worth the effort to love deeply. The rehabilitation of everything becomes the mediocritization of everything, and we're all just too comfortable with bland consensus to notice the difference. Or as the poet Corey Todd Taylor once said, "If you still care don't ever let me know." Just kidding—that's the lead singer of Slipknot on the song "Snuff." But as a fan, of course, you already knew that.