why would the AV Club review a Korn album?

That's what I wondered the minute I saw the review, by Jason Heller. Are there a lot of AV Club readers who are on the fence about buying the new Korn album?

The "F" was about as inevitable as such a thing could be. That's not even my complaint, though. It's just that I can't see any purpose for a Korn review on the AV Club beyond inviting the kind of hooting and condescension that the review and many of its comments contain. (I should point out that a commenter or two makes essentially the same point I'm making.) To me, it points to my recurring suspicion that a lot of our analysis of pop culture exists more to help people position themselves above (what they presume to be) culturally and socially undesirable groups, such as Korn fans. And that is happening with the large majority of the comments, people jockeying to see who can be more clever in declaring their superiority to those who like different media. (I tend to find that's true in any AV Club comment thread, but here it's a little more naked than usual.)

I remember being struck by the fact that Steven Hyden, in a piece explicitly worrying over this dynamic, couldn't resist saying that he "wouldn't know many of the newer bands lodged on Billboard’s top rock songs chart—Cage The Elephant, AWOLNATION, Five Finger Death Punch, Young The Giant—if they walked up to me in an Ed Hardy shirt and white baseball cap and handed me a lukewarm can of Coors." Ha! Ed Hardy! White baseball caps! Coors! And all of that while ostensibly writing about the legitimacy of the popularity of those bands. It's like he can't help himself. I've always been frustrated by the idea of coastal elites who look down their noses at their middle American counterparts, in large measure because I think that phenomenon is vanishingly rare.  In contrast, cultural condescension (which has no convenient geographic or political groupings) is totally real and almost inescapable online.