Vinyl Maelstrom

Does "Guilty pleasure" music exist?

• Ian Forth

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Some people say there's no such thing as guilty pleasures in music. You either like it or you don't. So, own it.

Still, would it have a name if it didn't exist? 

(Well, yes, it might. There are no unicorns, after all.)

This episode seeks to understand why some people do feel a sense of guilt when they listen to certain types of music and why that should be. We cover the history of the idea, subjectivity versus objectivity, musical canons, forms of identity and so much more. 

See where we end up, if anywhere.

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

GUILTY PLEASURES

Introduction

The guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment. If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.

Not my words, but those of Jennifer Szalai writing in the New Yorker. I was prompted to do this episode after my recent interview with Steve Pringle where he voiced very similar sentiments to the New Yorker columnist. But it prompted me to question the very concept of a guilty pleasure. Let's take a medium sized dive

Medium Sized Dive

Jennifer Szalai’s some goes on to provide a very useful thumbnail sketch of what a guilty pleasure actually is.

Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal—genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies (foreign action “films,” no matter how awful, tend to get a pass), TV shows other than “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire”—that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification.

Before the term became a pop-cultural epithet, the moralism made more sense. For Aristotle, the pleasure associated with honorable action was virtue, whereas the pleasure associated with “evil action” was vice—a genuine mix of guilt and pleasure by another name. Aristotle and Plato believed that the higher orders of pleasure entailed an expenditure of intellectual effort. Kant took the idea further in his “Critique of Judgment,” distinguishing between “the agreeable,” “the beautiful,” and “the good.” One is pleased by the beautiful; the good is held in the highest esteem, whereas the agreeable merely gratifies. A guilty pleasure ever since has contained this element of gratification—of a need that’s met, almost despite oneself, rather than a pleasure one freely chooses. The mind that chooses is disembodied, abstract, and therefore pure; the body that needs is demanding, material, and messy—in other words, not to be trusted. When “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel.

Brothels feel a long way away from our usual interpretation of a guilty pleasure. Let's try and unpack the concept a little more.

Is all music subjective?

The first point of view is that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. All music is subjective - indeed all art is subjective. To accept that there is such a thing as a guilty pleasure is to accept that there is some sort of canon as to what is respectable and what is not. By a certain age I should have shrugged off such traditional and conservative thinking. And yet one can't ignore the fact - or perhaps it's just me and I don't think it is - that some music feels less acceptable to listen to in a group environment, some less so with family and friends, but even when one is listening on the headphones or in the car, reactions to certain songs are ambiguous. You might even like a song a lot before discovering who it's by. Let's talk a bit more about different types of guilty pleasure.

Actually Bad Music

You might say that there is such a thing as bad music. Music that is played deliberately badly. Music that is out of tune. Music recorded when drunk or under the influence of drugs. Music that only uses one chord or even one note. Music where the same lyric is repeated over and over. Just some examples. But I can pretty much think of songs which match all of those criteria which I love. Punk and heavy metal are set up in anthisesis to what is “proper” or “right. Indeed if one produces the inverted commas “perfect” piece of music it would necessarily be bland and lacking in distinction. Can we though make an exception to our anything goes rule when it comes to artists that have gone bad.

Actually Bad Artists

We all have to adjust to certain revelations about artists as we get older as well. Many a hero has feet of clay. Some feel that the art can be separated from the artist. But that might be easier to do listening to This Charming Man than admiring Hitler’s early watercolours. What about tapping the steering wheel along to Billie Jean or Thriller? I’d say the best definition of a guilty pleasure might be the person who publicly disavows The Smiths or Michael Jackson, but sometimes succumbs to playing them in the safety of their own car. But as I mentioned earlier the concept of a guilty pleasure must surely be predicated on the idea of a canon providing non guilty pleasure. Where does that come from?

The Canon Idea

I well remember my Latin teacher confiscating my friend’s book of cartoons that he just received as a birthday present, explaining quite forcefully, that this was a waste of his time. Yes, I was educated in a grammar school in England in the 1970s. The school inherited the idea of a strict canon, presumably from the English public school system, and there was plenty of Latin, plenty of Greek, English literature was Beowulf, Shakespeare And Thomas Hardy. Music was classical with the exception of the last lesson in term and Mr Barnes allowed us to bring in our own records. For those of us educated this way, I suspect that the guilt lingers whenever we listen to something that lies outside any traditional canon. It's easy to identify a classical musical Canon Beethoven Mozart and all that. But is there specifically a modern musical canon?

A Musical Canon

Towards the end of the 1960s It became clear pop music was a new cultural force that was here to stay. Mick Jagger appeared with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the BBC debating serious topics. Albums which previously had consisted of a few singles plus fillers began to be taken very seriously. Music journalists led by Lester Bangs in the US then Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray in the UK began to develop a new language in talking about what mattered in music. Before long a musical canon emerged, featuring mainly white men playing guitars in bands, sometimes as solo artists, from America and the UK in 4/4 time. The honourable exceptions were Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell. And so a lot of people for a generation felt that they were getting it wrong if they liked music that didn't fall within that prescription. These days Sergeant Pepper and Blonde on Blonde are no longer regarded as the Mozart and Beethoven of modern music. Rolling Stone had to radically revise its greatest albums of all time quite recently. A younger demographic has emerged much more interested in R&B hip hop rap and hybridised music across genres - and just this year country music.  But just like that Catholic guilt the sense of a guilty pleasure for older listeners lingers.

Music and Postmodernism

One of the paradoxes for me is that music decided there was a modern canon at almost the exact same time as art and architecture and literature were embracing the postmodern concept of “anything goes”. Here’s Jennifer Szalai again. “In some ways, the timing seems strange; the guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter. But maybe it was precisely because those distinctions were becoming moot that people felt emboldened to use it. The guilty pleasure could then function as a signalling mechanism, an indicator that one takes pleasure in something but knows (the knowingness is key) that one really shouldn’t. Once distinctions were blurred, you could announce a love for pop culture that, in an earlier era, you would have been too ashamed to admit.

For the rest of this episode I’d like to talk about three different types of identity and why it’s significant in the concept of a guilty pleasure.

The Adolescent Identity

It’s a tough old life trying to form an identity through your teenage years. Sometime around maybe 17 or 18 things begin to fit into place a bit more and our adult identity becomes more stable. It's no coincidence that most people's favourite record is from a time when they were 17 or 18. Listening to the music of our pubertal years reminds us of an immature phase in our life. To go back to those records of one’s earlier adolescence feels like a betrayal of one's adult self. Conversely it may be that music that we really disliked during that era and found difficult, rather like the first taste of whiskey or beer, becomes a badge of honour later on. Eventually by the time we get into our 50s or 60s we might come to terms with the fact that the music we liked in early adolescence does have some values that we'd resisted for a long time. Slightly cheesy disco music from the mid-70s reminds me of listening in on a transistor radio with my mother in the kitchen, for example. Music is rarely capable of being divorced from the context of your life.

Older Identity

I used to have, incredible as it might seem, young people who worked for me a few years ago. I remember I gave one a lift and my Spotify playlist was playing some bedroom pop. I like bedroom pop for its simplicity, its DIY nature and a reminder of what I felt like when I was 17 years old. But I realised listening to music from the pov of an 18 year-old female might almost come across as a little creepy – or worse. In the end who cares but I did kind of care a bit. On the other hand, perhaps listening to heavy metal or some Best of 80s playlist would have caused different problems - of seeming like an out of touch dinosaur. Is there age-appropriate music? Should you stop wearing jeans and T shirts when you get to my age? Fortunately the generation gap that used to exist now seems negligible at best but I do feel that there are some types of music that one does feel a uncomfortable to listening to as one gets older. Sure, listen to what you want, but few of us are completely impervious to the quizzical glances of others.

Self-Identity

It's interesting that even when we are listening to music in our car for example and driving on our own that we're still pursued by the concept of what we should and shouldn't be listening to. We all have an idea of ourselves that we like and that we often fail to live up to. To get up early, go to the gym, eat more vegetables etc Listening to the inverted commas “right type” of music can broadly fall into that category - the urge for self-improvement perhaps and that's fair enough, there is some music which rewards investment when at first it might appear difficult. Perhaps in the end we will have got it right and arrived at the ideal version of ourselves - the one who reads all the Booker shortlisted novels every year and listens to all the albums that are recommended on the Quietus best of year list. But, in the meantime, there's always another Marvel movie o watch while eating a big box of Maltesers and another pop music hit to get us through a bad day at the office.