The Sacrificial Band

Nickelback. Dave Matthews Band. Creed. Imagine Dragons. Greta Van Fleet. Coldplay. NAV. ICP. Smash Mouth. Hootie & the Blowfish. The Black Eyed Peas. Kid Rock. Limp Bizkit. Maroon 5. Macklemore. I could probably think of a few more if I tried, but hopefully, you see what these bands and artists have in common.

For as long as there’s been discourse on the internet about music, there’s always been bands or artists we love to hate. (Note, from here on in I’m going to start using the term “acts” a lot, even though I hate it because that way I won’t have to type “bands or artists” over and over again.) In my head, I’ve started calling them Sacrificial Bands. Or The Sacrificial Band. Whichever works better in whatever grammatical context.

The Sacrificial Band. An act that we all choose to shit on for our own amusement.

There are worst bands than the ones listed above. There are acts not enough people know about to reach Sacrificial Band status. There’s a band or artist that’s garnered a lot of acclaim but you hate on an equal level as any of the acts above, or maybe even more so. On top of that, times change, and sometimes a hated band finds a new life. There are many nuances to the acts we loathe.

But there’s always a band or an artist that seems to capture all of our collective hatred the most. An act that’s palatable to enough people that everyone can hate them, and not just fans of the hypothetical genre or niche they belong to. These are acts that have penetrated the mainstream and annoyingly gained enough of an audience that they can more or less stay there. The bands that are popular or cool to hate. The ones everyone knows.

It’s a concept that I think about more and more and as I sink deeper into not only music discourse, but the internet in general, and it’s a concept I have increasingly mixed feelings about. Of course, there are good reasons to hate an artist or band, particularly when they do or say something outside of the realm of their music that’s actively disgusting and they show themselves for who they really are.

Still, this need for us to all collectively enjoy throwing stones at an artist is a perplexing one. I have thoughts, thus I made this written content. 

The Pros of Having a Sacrificial Band

It’s nice to have something that bonds us.

Granted, it’s a bond built around negativity, and in this internet age of ours, bonding over a negative emotion has made everyone’s life much much worse. But there’s (hopefully) a collective understanding that we know there’s minimal stakes in a bunch of nerds talking about music, and though this might be naïve, I can’t help but find comfort in the idea that someone with completely different taste and ideas about music and I can both say we hate X band, and we can discuss why. In turn, we learn what our values are.

Let’s take Imagine Dragons.

What do we not like about them? 

First of all, we should probably define what “we” means. “We” is, unfortunately, not everyone, as Imagine Dragons are an enormously successful band regardless of what a bunch of random people on Twitter have to say about it. When I say “we,” I’m really talking about the people who have an emotional investment in music. The people who put in an active effort to find material outside the mainstream and care enough to be vocal about it. We’re not always the best people. In fact, we can be pretty fucking insufferable. But sometimes, we mean well! Sometimes. 

So regardless of what end of the “we” scale you fall on, we can agree that Imagine Dragons have, shall we say, a certain reputation. Where did it come from?

First and foremost, there’s the reason most big mainstream bands get shat upon, which is that they’re big and mainstream. There is, of course, the attitude that all mainstream music is trash that still exists in many who never left that ‘90s/2000s way of thinking behind. (Personally, I’d be shocked if Renaissance didn’t make my top 10.) However there’s also the feeling in a lot of mainstream acts that the fans didn’t pick this band, but rather, they were forced on us. That their success isn’t due to the factors that should elevate a band to worldwide success like talent or artistic ability, but rather, the machinations of large corporate voices in the music industry who wield too powerful a hand in what we listen to and when we listen to it. Their success was given to them. They didn’t earn it.

There’s also just general taste, and maybe there isn’t a need to overthink it that much. Personally, based on the time I’ve spent with Imagine Dragon’s music, I can’t stand lead singer Dan Reynolds’s voice, particularly when it goes big for the hooks and it reaches screechy territory, and I’m at odds with the tonality of both their lyrics and their sound.

However,  if I had to put my finger on the universal reason we all seem to hate Imagine Dragons and a lot of bands that have occupied their space in the industry before, it’s a complete lack of edge. It’s the feeling that the members of the band and a bunch of people at the label observed everything that was popular at the moment and made music by committee. A little bit of EDM here. A sprinkling of hip hop there. A big showy hook. Voila, now we have a music product that’s designed to sell well, but doesn’t come from a place of expression.

The problem isn’t the commerce, but rather one of bastardization. We all have skin in the music game because of an emotional connection. EDM fans love EDM. Hip hop fans love hip hop. Pop fans love pop. Imagine Dragons took all those genres and more and rendered them meaningless, making music pliable for everyone that ignores those who really care. In a word, they’re soulless, not in the commercial bent of the term but in the sense that all identifiable traces that their work was created by human beings was severed and focused tested into oblivion. At least when it comes to the larger mainstream Sacrificial Bands, appealing to as many people as possible means sanding off the edges that speak to people with a deeper emotional investment. The parts people actually enjoy.

Every band or artist that can be considered Sacrificial has different reasons for earning that status. But the thing they all have in common is that they dilute what we love. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but we often hate the bands that are closest to the music we care about the most, and there sure are a lot of different music fans out there.

One more point before we move on to the cons. Personally, I enjoy hearing the defenses of these bands. Mostly just out of curiosity, but partly because it’s always fun to see which bands get re-evaluated and which don’t. After all, the more the internet hates on something, the more the backlash to the backlash is bound to come. Forgive me for clicking on the things, but I always wonder what act is going to get the “X is good actually” treatment. But at the very least, these opinions are just interesting to me. That’s all.

The Cons

We know we hate certain bands. But do we really know why?

Let’s go back to those days when you were younger and you were a lot more impressionable with music, and you had an experience I feel is somewhat universal. At some point, you heard someone speak about an act they hated with a certain passion and intensity. Your older brother or your cousin or, nowadays, somebody on the internet. Thanks in large part to whatever’s going on in your head, you latched onto the attitude and held on.

How long did it take you to question it, assuming you ever did? And when you did, how deep did you really dig?

The problem with The Sacrificial Band is that the concept discourages adventurousness. It’s a mode of thinking that keeps you trapped in your wheelhouse, reinforcing a pattern of behavior where you basically listen to the same kinds of music over and over again. Apologies on breaking out the hyperbolic language, but it’s the equivalent of subjecting yourself to a kind of subjective form of inbreeding. The only kinds of music that attract you are what you already know.

I’m not advocating that you must listen to everything. But I am advocating that you keep an open mind, if only so you can articulate better why you hate a Sacrificial Band. Hating a band because you feel like you’re supposed to isn’t helpful for yourself or for music in general.

There is another problem with our need for a Sacrificial Band, one that may not seem important on the surface. It’s the good ol’ fashioned issue of the internet beating a dead horse for so long that the horse’s body has fully decomposed and you’re just hitting the ground. Or, in short, hating the Sacrificial Band is boring. I’ve heard your jokes about Nickelback. I’ve seen your Creed memes. I realize, random person who hated emo slightly too much in the 2000s, that you have a lot of opinions about Fall Out Boy. We get it. Leave me alone.

The bigger issue with this, other than the tediousness, is when the joke doesn’t die. It’s not just that you hated a band at a certain time. It’s that you still hate that band now, and as a result, your tastes don’t change and the music itself can’t evolve because there’s a loud portion of the internet who demands that everything stay in its place to their standards.

I’m a hip hop fan. The behavior of newer hip hop fans is frequently obnoxious and toxic. The constant referring to fans who like older rap as “old heads,” (assuming that’s a term people still use, I deleted my Twitter), the pedestaling of toxic rappers and toxic behaviors, the harassment fans of certain artists partake of on social media. Indeed, the newer generations of hip hop fans make themselves easy to despise. 

The behavior of older hip hop fans, however, is equally as obnoxious and toxic. Calling all the new rappers “soft” and holding everyone to a hyper-masculine standard that was A) shitty and B) a lie, the making up of language to poison the well against new styles (“mumble rap”), an expectation of a certain kind of homogeneity in all artist’s styles. In other words, a legion of fans clinging so tightly to what they think is good that they can never move on, and now they’re this negative force who shits on everything and makes the space worse.

The same logic applies to all music, and this is a thought pattern that gets reinforced by the presence of Sacrificial Bands. It’s fun to hate a band or an album or whatever. But the rub is when to let it go and, more importantly, move on.

What’s the Point?

Really, it doesn’t matter what I say here. 

We’ll always have a sacrificial band, be it the big mainstream act or, these days, the TikTok song. Criticism and negativity are, unfortunately, aspects of the human brain that we’ll never fully detach from art. Nor, arguably, should it. Your emotions are your emotions, and you have every right to feel them. You don’t have the right to take those emotions out on people in a dangerous or harmful way, but the point is that I’m not here to police your thoughts and I don’t know what to do about Sacrificial Bands. I hate many of these bands as much as the next person, and I’m also aware of what I’m contributing to.

In the end, I walk away with a reminder of something simple. It’s always worth thinking and talking about music, but we should maybe give just as much thought to how people react to it. Large swaths of people seem to hate this album or this artist. Why? Do the reasons seem legit? Many a Sacrificial Band came out of the ‘90s during the rise of boy/girl groups, and a lot of that heat sure felt justified at the time. But what does it say when we react so strongly about media intended for a younger female audience, and what does a “female audience” even mean?

There are legit reasons to hate a band. Kid Rock, for example, is not only a vile human being, but he rode the coattails of black music to fame, then proceeded to use his platform to shit on everything black artists care about.

But there’s also bullshit, and that’s what we need to look out for.