...because it's a well written, well played and well produced song played by a group of capable professional musicians.

I can see why some people might not particularly like it - for all sorts of different reasons - but I can't see why anyone would actively *hate* it.

The same is, of course, true of Hall & Oates as discussed extensively here not so long ago.

The opportunity to continue hating the Eagles - and especially Lying Eyes - is one of the main things that gets me out of bed in the morning. Absolutely anything by Queen runs a very, very close second.

Its astonishing the sort of soppy drivel women can stomach. For example, it turns out that my wife, who does the ironing to the first Sugar album also likes Mandy by Barry Manilow. Mandy for f**ksake!! I may have to divorce her.

The idea that women "get it" is frankly laughable. Now grow a pair and lets have some tortuous prose from you about how much you like some obscure Beatles track or other, and be quick about it or the entire premise upon which The Word is predicated is in danger of crumbling into an untidy heap in the middle of the internet. And then where will you be? Sipping white wine spritzer and singing along to Mamma Mia with your wife and her twenty closet friends. Probably.

Richard has a pair and will be a staunch advocate of any Beatles track you can find. Unfortunately, some of the curmudgeons see the Fabs as anaethema enough to fear the paired organs you exhort to be as chest borne and hence fulfilling of the prophesy. Oh, probably.
(P.S. Richard, none intended, back handed support implied!)

Just music one likes and music one doesn't like. And the chances are that someone else likes the music one doesn't like. Is that clear?

I think it was the 'tortuous prose' bit that gave it away, but I suppose everyone reads everything differently.
Mind you, if you're going to say "It's stupid to hate The Eagles" that sort of circularly ends up at Mr. Wonderful's point. As it happens, my wife hates The Eagles.
I must confess, though, to being mildly confused about the concept of records that "...sound worse than they are". And I speak as fan of Big Bam Boom.

women are less full of shit than men. Or rather they are full of shit in different ways.

I'm sure you all mean very well, but as a woman I reserve the right to be just as full of shit as any man. And I rather like to think that I am.

...to hate Lyin' Eyes by The Eagles because it's waste of energy, and hatred is not a good thing. Doesn't stop it being awful.

1. "Lying Eyes", "Desperado" and - yes, indeed - "Hotel California" are songs that in every measurable respect are superior to anything ever released by Robert, Mark E. or T.V. Smith.

2. While wife and children are in the kitchen, adjust your apron-cape and play them three consecutive tracks from the Word Spotify playlist, starting anywhere at all. Then play Boston's "More Than A Feeling" and ask them, "Happy now?" Unless the children have already transmogrified into emo-stricken shoe-starers, the answer will be a resounding, unanimous yes.

3. Music that is calculated, processed and marketed to make as many people as possible feel good is just as valid a proposition as any confectionery product designed to have a similar result. Conclusion: if you like Milky Ways (see recent thread), you're in no position to bitch about "Mandy".

Men are unable to separate their reactions to the sound of a record from the things that they happen to know about the people who made that sound. Just as George Bernard Shaw said "it is impossible for one Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him", it is impossible for one hardcore music fans to express an opinion about music without making another hardcore music fan take the opposite point of view. And what they're usually arguing about is not the record so much as the people who made it and their emotional relationship with those people. Everybody else just thinks, with some justification, I just like the tune.

the would that make Word magazine a mens publication?

Everyone likes to generalise. It's like we are always looking for the quick, magic insight that explains away aspects of human behaviour. Hence the silly profile that Handsome.P.Wonderful linked.

Sigmund Freud invented all kinds of traits that went some way to explain why people feel or do what they do. When those weren't exactly watertight, further sub-traits were invented until we end up with more traits than people.

Although I fit the profile linked more readily than gollywollypogs(due to having dangly bits), I also feel a little put out by it. All Word readers are different and we are really, really complicated. If the magazine genuinely operates thinking that we can all be categorised in a few paragraphs, then that would be a shame.

Having said that I presume the M.O. of the profile is to convince advertisers that the readership of The Word are not a bunch of dribbling, skint thickos. Even taking this into account, I don't think it is necessary or advisable to make the actually-very-cherished female readership feel sidelined.

...because I don't like the cut of their jib.

I've lost count of the number of times in recent years where I've decided a much-hyped new band must be shite on account of them being young, smug, popular, or whatever... only to hear them by accident six months later and find myself saying "wow, what's this?" as it turns out the girls were right all along.

It's a snob's equivalent of the gag reflex though, and not something you can easily unlearn. The technique that works best for me is to judge the music by its audience: if I think they're decent human beings, then I must be wrong and it's all my fault if I don't "get" whichever hot new sound. If, on the other hand, the fans are mostly grazed-knuckled cloth-eared proles, then I was probably right the first time. It's a flawed strategy but hey! it sure beats being genuinely open-minded. Life's too short.

Just last weekend I ventured into the shabby interior of the rapidly depleting branch of Zavvi in Bristol city centre. Somewhat on the late side for an appointment elsewhere, I assuaged my latent £50 man compulsions by grabbing the first radically marked down CD I didn't already have from the shelf marked 'World', often a reasonable indicator of something interesting, or at least something that the 17 year old Goth sales assistants knew not how to categorise.
I trotted off to my assignation clutching a copy of an album called 'Venus On Earth', a cursory glance at which seemed to indicate that it was by a psychedelic band from Cambodia called 'Dengue Fever'. A vague bell of recognition rang somewhere in the recesses of my recall, I'd read a review in an earlier edition of Word perhaps, but I still returned home later that morning with lazy mental imagery of stooping Cambodian peasants growing rice all week and playing Temptations numbers at weekend dance parties.
The CD delivers, and turns out to be a little belter. Upon reading the eyestrain inducing print on the fold out CD cover, however, I discover that while the female vocalist is Cambodian, the band is made up of session players, and that the whole thing is a concoction of the base root of Amerikan evil that is Los Angeles.
Momentarily, I am disappointed by this sudden knowledge. Then I think to myself, 'Hang on, this is a smashing album, it matters little that it was not forged in the humidity of a backstreet studio in Phnom Penh!'.
The snobbishly male perceived value of having an obscurity, which is hardly likely to have happened while shopping in Zavvi anyway, has happily been replaced by the realisation that I just like the tunes.