Pineapple on pizza. Wearing socks to bed. The word “moist”. Listening to Nickelback. This is just a small selection of relatively harmless things that people make a great performative show of hating, just because everybody else does the same thing.

The thing that puzzles me about all of the above isn’t so much the hatred itself – dislike what you want, all the more Hawaiian pizza for the rest of us – but rather the lack of rationale behind it. Aside from a few sweeping statements (too lame, too cheesy, too manufactured, too whatever) I’ve yet to hear many decent arguments that dig any deeper.

In my mind Nickelback are a quite-literally-fine, broadly inoffensive band who have been lucky enough to land a handful of incredibly catchy hits along the way, and yet you would think people were talking about the Antichrist.

I have had enough of the disrespect. Leave my harmless sweet princes and their well-kept goatees alone!

This phenomenon is now the subject of a new documentary Hate to Love, which shows the band moping about their nasty detractors.

Though even my sympathy for Nickelback does admittedly have its limits – 50 million album sales worldwide and six Grammy nominations does tend to take the edge off some people being a bit mean about your music – I’ve still never really understood why they attract such vicious levels of ire when far, far worse bands get away scot-free.

I’m not about to sit here defending every second of their back catalogue to date – their music leaves me feeling too ambivalent for that – I will say that the hits officially slap, and anybody who pretends otherwise is simply too cowardly to admit that they’re just being a bit of a snob.

If you’re in any doubt at all about this, I’d encourage you to pay closer attention next time Chad Kroeger’s opening “neeerghhhh” of How You Remind Me pops up at karaoke.

The urge to screech along with the boys is irresistible, every single lyric effortlessly imprinted on your brain whether you like it or not. Like Rockstar, like Animals, like Photograph, it is undeniably a stone-cold banger.