Seeing this article really pleases me. I don't even like Hatesong - I'm just refreshed to see something remotely critical of Swift with an AV Club header on it.

I completely and utterly love Harvey Danger. One of my favorite bands, ever. They managed to create three albums where I virtually never skip anything, and I love their songwriting, Sean's voice, everything.

It's the new poptimist AVC. :/

That's pretty much what they've been doing in the IDW comic series - "Here's a classic TOS episode, except with the reboot characters, and kind of different in stupid ways so it isn't as good!"

I'm on the last book of the Vanguard series and have been enjoying it quite a bit.

Joke's on you - I never thought I was cool.

Pastel-washed Instagram filter photo and the Bodoni font? Never seen that on literally every hip indie band poster/artwork for the last five years.

I hate to invoke the dreaded "poptimism" term, because it has become pretty loaded over time, but…yeah.

This isn't punk or even pop-punk in any way. Also, why does this site even bother reviewing music anymore.

There's a fuck-ton of hipster kids making quasi-ironic '80s dance synth pop these days, so you'd think they'd play that whole aesthetic up in the movie. They can't even pander correctly.

That is seriously one of the best openings to a review in some time.

It happens frequently enough on music sites these days that I will at least pull up a song or two. Invariably, it's the same indistinguishable over-processed generic modern pop that every other star is making and I close the tab, because that just really isn't my thing.

…New Formula. Now, no scaling.

Yeah, I don't see anything particularly brave about making a synth album. Everybody is making synth albums. Every week it seems like there's a review of a band abandoning guitars for a synth album.

That is the orange and teal-iest old-timey sailing movie I've ever seen.

I encountered a music-related example of this recently. I'm a big fan of the riot grrrl movement and its various bands, and I recently read an indie female, feminist punk band trashing the riot grrrl movement in an interview, claiming it to be worthless and garbage and "problematic," because its most…

Theres so much popular, influential media that deserves feminist critique. When it's all directed at the creators who are largely doing it right, it seems like nothing is ever good enough.

That's the modern-day AVC for you. It's just poptimism all the way down.

I feel like the modern, poptimist AVC eats this stuff up with a spoon, though. It has to be really and truly awful before it gets even a middling review, and even then there's plenty of qualifiers about how it doesn't really matter because it's all about Interchangeable Mega-Star X "expressing themselves" and the…

I honestly thought MiB III was a pretty notable step up from the second one, and the first I still think is a legitimately great bit of sci-fi comedy.