It was there in Nico & Vinz' international hit "Am I Wrong" (Sample lyric: "So am I wrong/ For thinking that we could be something for real?/ Now am I wrong/ For trying to reach the things that I can't see?"), it was there in Sam Smith's "Like I Can" ("Why are you looking down all the wrong roads?/ When mine is the heart and the salt of the soul") and it was there in "W.D.Y.W.F.M" ("What Do You Want From Me") by the Neighbourhood, aka proof that every generation gets the Third Eye Blind that it deserves. I'd go into the lyrics, but you saw the title. I'm sure you get it.

If we'd done this a few years ago, I think I'd have even more popular examples to work with, but recently it seems that the pop audience has begun to lose patience with male performers. No fucking wonder.

I don't like any of the songs I mentioned above. And sure, it's fair play to say "well, yeah, of course you don't, you have strong opinions on what should have been on Pitchfork's Year End List," but pop music is supposed to reroute your brain and make you like it even when you don't want to like it. This is a feat that Sheeran's songwriting, which sounds like an unholy alliance between Simply Red and G. Love and Special Sauce (but, like, really white) was unable to achieve.

But this begs the question, could I possibly like music told from the morally toxic nice guy viewpoint if the songs were better? Jesus, of course I could. And I bet you could as well.

It's worth pointing out, first and foremost, that only really pious assholes and aging Bob Dylan fans listen to music purely for moral gratification and to have their world view ratified. It's an uncomfortable but inarguable fact that the listening public is willing to embrace some deeply dubious attitudes when they're delivered with enough panache, and from Axl Rose to Mick Jagger to Future, we love ourselves some magnificent bastards, even if, in the art anyway, they make it clear that they're also just bastards-bastards. How else can you explain that, 18 years after their last great album, many people you know were willing to give that new Weezer album a shot?

But there's more to it than the old "it just sounds good, man, don't overthink it" bon mot that we repeated in the '90s every time Death Row released another album. There is value to lyric writing that reveals some ugly shit, and not just because it provides a handy "do not date a person that does this" guide. Just because you're writing about nice guys doesn't always mean you like nice guys, and just because you're writing about yourself doesn't mean you like yourself.

Sometimes being a nice guy is a phase you have to go through before you see how much of a shithead you're being. Though he didn't write the song, Lou Barlow grabbed the Nice Guy™ crown for the rest of eternity when he took a then rare vocal turn on another song called "Don't", the last song on Dinosaur Jr.'s seminal album Bug. The lyrics to this song are, famously, "why don't you like me," repeated ad nauseam, and they probably aren't even about a lady (that band had issues back then), but artists only have a certain amount of say about how their work gets to be interpreted.

After that album Barlow was, more or less, kicked out of Dinosaur Jr., and went on to explore the nice guy archetype in depth, adding real pathos to the patheticness, struggling to be less passive aggressive, failing, then trying again, or as he said in Sebadoh's "Willing to Wait", "I'm willing to wait my turn to be with you/ But I still have a lot to learn about me." Though Rivers Cuomo introduced himself to world by describing, in detail, how a girl should act if she wants to date him and then threw himself an epic pity party when that didn't work out, and on the last truly great song he'll ever release, conceded, "I guess you're as real as me/ Maybe I can live with that," which, contextually, was pretty generous of him. Then there was a metric fuckton of backsliding from him later, but that's for a different essay.