Great Chapters in Hating

I used to worry that I spent too much time hating on things, but recently I've taken steps toward accepting and celebrating the hate. With this in mind, here is the first of what I hope will be a "best-of" series with hating as its subject matter.

Gang of Four, "Entertainment!"

One of the best ways to exasperate your peers in American society is to hate on consumerism, which is the ideological foundation of our country. Our forms of self-expression, from punk to gangsta to the girl at my office who wants a $1,000 Gucci bag for Christmas, are so tied to what we buy that only the most priggish haters would devote an entire album to railing on the identification-through-consumption that we enact every day. Of course, that's just what Gang of Four did on "Entertainment!" The album portrays day-to-day life in a Western capitalist democracy as a nonstop purgatory of alienated tension. Best piece of hating: "Love'll get you like a case of anthrax/ And that's something I don't want to catch," from the song "Anthrax."