The Luv Doc: Terrible Music

Dear Luv Doc,

My friend's husband is in a terrible band. This would not be a big deal to me except that whenever they play – which thankfully isn't too often – she always posts about it on Facebook, tags me in the post, and then asks me to share her post ... and I DON'T EVEN LIKE THE BAND. She is persistent, I'll give her that. And she is obviously in love with her husband even if she is not in love with his music – which I hope she isn't. I know I'm not, but how do I get her to stop pestering me to help promote her husband's terrible band? I don't want my other friends to think I like terrible music. How do I tell her that?

– Earmuffed

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Look, nobody likes smooth jazz, no one with a beating heart that is. You know who likes smooth jazz? Eric Trump. Eric Trump and that guy who owns Jimmy John's who hunts white rhinos. Oh, and Martin Shkreli. In fact, all three of them are probably sitting naked in a Miami Beach rooftop hot tub listening to Fourplay, drinking Michelob Ultra, and talking about how much ass they've crushed. Meanwhile, we're wasting perfectly good cruise missiles on Syria.

What I'm saying is: I feel your pain. On the one hand, I don't want to deny the Eric Trumps of the world the overly unctuous, needlessly jammy elevator music that makes them feel even remotely human. Better to have smooth jazz drifting through that cold, dark vacuum between their ears than the psychotic thoughts that would fill it otherwise, right? But when I actually hear smooth jazz – that being the time it takes me to sprint out of an elevator or shopping mall or dentist's waiting room – I just want to burn it all down and start over. It's the same feeling we all had after the 2016 presidential election.

That said, being bombarded with Facebook posts for bad bands – especially for the sake of not hurting someone's feelings – is sort of the cultural tax we pay for living in the live music capital of the world. In other cities people have to put up with Facebook invites from experimental theatre actors, Bible study groups, and people whose children are "celebrating their first birthdays." Show me a 1-year-old who can put together a decent birthday party and I will fucking be there with a paper party hat and a bottle of Cristal, but we know that party is going to be an illiterate shitshow – just like a Bible study, and no amount of balloons or confetti or Mistral font is going to convince me otherwise.

You have to draw a line somewhere though, don't you? You can't just let your friends get away with tagging you willy-nilly on every sort of sick fetish that piques their interest – goat yoga excepted, of course. So, I highly recommend – before you end up getting tagged on some NAMBLA mixer invite or obnoxious alt-right meme, that you let your friend know you don't want to be tagged on anything that isn't an absolutely pulchritudinous picture of you, and even then it can't include something embarrassing like you naked in a hot tub with Eric Trump and his psychotic, rhino-murdering, smooth-jazzing buddies.