A more fulsome list will have to wait, but I'm enjoying the debate, particularly the figurative dagger throwing, vagueness of intended target notwithstanding.

My interjection, and here I'm quoting a band a song Stu played at the contest, "It's not the band I hate/it's their fans" ('Coax Me'. Sloan, speaking of Consolidated) may be a big factor for me.

The guys at my grade and then high school who liked heavy metal? Yeah, not people I gravitated towards and therefore avoided any band whose name happened to be etched onto the back of their jean jackets, embossed on their 3/4 length baseball shirts, or scratched onto their desks. So metal, or anything tangentially in the harder rock category, into which, however incorrectly, a band like Rush fell, were never gonna fall into my zone of interest during their hey day. I've since come to dig 'Tom Sawyer' to a certain extent, but in the same way that I appreciate that GNR's 'Sweet Child O' Mine' is a great song but never, ever listen to it of my own volition.

In fact, it's safe to say that anything that falls into the brand category of Q107 (Toronto classic rock station, for the uninitiated) is never going to be more than a guilty pleasure. This is in part due to the inane cock-rock (Motley Crue, Poison, Van Halen, etc) that is still played round the clock but mostly due to the culture, which I associate with the smoking of Players Light cigarettes, reading of the Toronto Sun, a political philosophy defined largely by negative visceral reaction to the unfamiliar, and tired sexist bullshit. So if you're a Q band, rightly or wrong, I'm never going to give you the time of day.

A corollary to the Sloan maxim is the 'Because a friend overlikes a band and seemingly won't shut the fuck up about how great it is, I'm hesitant to embrace its greatness'. I think this accounts for a lot of the widely divergent takes on certain bands among the posters here, especially the lack of appreciation for bands which, artists who, tend to be held in wide esteem, like the Beatles, Arcade Fire, and Bruce Springsteen.

Anyhoo, my list coming up. That it will kick the shit out of whatever Stu gets around to posting almost goes without saying. But I thought I'd say it anyway, just to stir the pot, throw another dagger, butcher my way through other metaphors, etc.