Meg White vs. Neil Peart Steel Cage Match

Here's The Onion AV Club's Noel Murray on "Exclusionary Preferences":

I’m not sure which part of this method of arguing bothers me more: the automatic assumption that if one doesn’t like one particular great thing, they must like only awful things, or the insistence that people’s taste should be necessarily narrow. I understand the impulse to rank things, and I understand some people’s need to define themselves as much by what they dislike as what they like. But when people get didactic about it, it’s hard to take them seriously. Do they have no CDs in their collection that they find hard to explain to their friends? No dopey movies or TV shows that they like? No junk food they crave?

Internet people like to pretend that they have perfect, impeccable taste. They rip anyone who makes a mildly positive comment about Steven Spielberg to shreds, as if they only watch the films of Fellini, Goddard and Truffaut, maybe a Scorsese if they're in the mood for something mindless...Yeah, right.

Everybody's tastes are at least a bit all over the map. Everybody has some pretty silly and humiliating things in their media collections. I mean, I've got Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" and "Sketches of Spain" in my CD collection...but I've also got Miles' simply dreadful final album, "Doo Bop" in there right alongside. I've got the Beatles, the Clash, the Police, U2, the Rolling Stones, the Violent Femmes, the White Stripes, REM...lots of generally-agreed-upon good stuff, right? But I've also got a Jars of Clay CD I bought back in the day because they had a catchy tune on the radio and I bought it without really realizing that they were a Jesus band. I've got Chumbawamba. I've got Styx' Greatest Hits, for God's sake. It's not just stuff that stays in the book and never sees light of day, either - I listen to the Dave Matthews Band's "Under the Table and Dreaming" with some regularity. No, it's not as embarrassing as Styx, but it's not exactly brimming with cool-guy cred, either.

The DVD collection is just the same. Yeah, I've got The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Fight Club, Almost Famous, The Royal Tenenbaums and Lawrence of Arabia. But I've also got The Patriot, Mission: Impossible 2, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, For Love of the Game and Titan A.E. Some of these are more defensible than others, but none are exactly all-time classics.

In short, come off it, internet! We're all perfectly capable of enjoying trash just as much as gold-plated classics. We can all go from appreciating the greatness of "Abbey Road" to singing along with "Mr. Roboto," and still be secure in our intellectualism/hipsterism/coolness/whatever. It's really okay.