Taste has no system
I don't like "My Humps" any more than Hua Hsu does, but I still don't like his article on it. Starting with a great Susan Sontag quotation which he precedes to completely ignore, he never actually lays out any really compelling reasons why the song is so bad, in fact so offensively lazy in its performance - it's more like he's assuming we all agree with him, almost always a fatal trap for the critic to fall into. I'm sure some of the mass downloading/buying/listening of "My Humps" is driven by people laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all, but the fact it's been so massively successful indicates that plenty of people like it beyond that (yes, I know some people who fall into that group). Hsu argues briefly (but not convincingly) for conceiving of things as "objectively" bad again (ignoring the fact that outside of what we laughingly call the critical community, people do this all the time), but never gives any real reasons for "My Lumps" fitting into that category. His argumentative effort is almost as lazy as the lyrics of the song he's trying to castigate.
