"And I hate the f*cking Eagles, man" - The Big Lebowski

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One of the most influential rock critics of the last couple of decades doesn’t write for Rolling Stone, Spin, or Pitchfork; he’s not a writer at all, actually, or even a real person. You could call this figure the man for his time and place. Even if he’s a lazy man—and this person is most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest in Los Angle-less County, which would place him high in the running for laziest worldwide—sometimes there’s a man, sometimes there’s a man …

I’m talking about The Dude here. Specifically, I’m talking about The Dude hating the fricking Eagles.

Like all great surveyors of culture, The Dude didn’t tell people what to think when he famously declared his dislike for L.A.’s biggest country-rock band in the back of that guy’s cab in The Big Lebowski; he merely articulated what they were already feeling. He could’ve said, “I hate fricking James Taylor,” or “I hate the fricking Doobie Brothers” and been equally justified. But he wouldn’t seem nearly as right.

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I’ve spent most of my life as a music fan believing that the Eagles suck. But I never realized why I thought they sucked, or that hating the Eagles is only a few millimeters removed from loving the Eagles. (Which makes hating them a defense mechanism, like carrying a can of mace or blaming your DVR for “mistakenly” erasing all those episodes of Treme.) If you hate the Eagles, you probably hate them for at least one of the following four reasons. And there’s somebody out there who probably loves them for the exact same reasons. With the Eagles, “success” and “sucking” go hand in hand. If you’re not careful, you can forget which side you’re on.

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