The Decline of the Guilty Pleasure
A few weeks ago we were sitting around listening to one of my favorite records, Bob Seger’s Stranger in Town with some friends. I might be alone in this in some circles, but I like Stranger in Town completely un-ironically, I believe it’s truly a great record. It’s not a ground-breaking record, it’s not a lesson in musicianship, and it’s certainly not challenging in the way that a lot of great music is, but there’s more to great records than those things.
Right?
The album features a close up photo of Seger, completely entrenched in ’70s ton-of-hair goodness, pasted over a cityscape at night. The look on his face is telling me something like, “I’m a quiet dark man, and I came to this town for one reason: to give you some kind of relief from your day-in, day-out. I want to show you what it’s like to see the city from up here, where my faux leather jacket keeps me warm (but not hot) and my feathered tresses blow softly in the night wind.” With songs like “Hollywood Nights,” “We’ve Got Tonight” and “Still the Same,” Seger proves my intuitions right. Stranger in Town even has “Old Time Rock & Roll,” a song so over-played and bastardized by popular culture, it’s barely considered a song anymore, it’s more of an experience based on our collective conscious’ movie watching history and appreciation of commercial television.
But there’s a reason songs like “Old Time Rock & Roll” get to that point, and it’s not an accident. The same way no one really ever craves a good solid all-the-way-through listen to Led Zeppelin’s IV (mainly because each individual song has become its own version of “Old Time Rock & Roll” in our minds), there’s never really a moment when we feel lacking in Seger. But if we were somehow able to strip away pop culture’s influence from the songs, we’d probably find ourselves able to recall exactly why IV became that type of album … the songs are fucking great, and IV is the easy answer to “Which Zep album is the best?” even amidst hardcore anti-mainstream listeners. Now, no one is going to argue that Seger is on par with Plant or Page in the songwriting department, but listening to Stranger in Town is more likely to earn you some disdainful grins than a spin of IV’s side one (yeah, that’s the side with “Stairway”). Does that make my enjoyment of Stranger a guilty pleasure?
The question was asked at some point during our conversation about the album. I stood up to get a beer and said –maybe flippantly– that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. I believed it, but I didn’t think it through until a few days later. Then it came up again in a Klosterman essay I read about The Ashlee Simpson Show. He doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a guilty pleasure either, and his argument is pretty convincing, though not necessarily about music. I want to talk about music.
The short answer is that no, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure because you like something or you don’t, and if you’re qualifying your like of something (which isn’t wrong in itself), you can’t use an imaginary culturally imposed standard as the benchmark for your taste. Your taste has nothing to do with culture’s, and if you’re going to argue that something is guilty, you’re implying that you’re willing to sink below some objective good in order to sample your secret tastes. That’s absurd for many reasons, the two most important being a) there isn’t an objective good, and you’re an egomaniac for assuming that if there was, you’d be able to identify it and b) things can’t be guilty, and neither society’s general tastes nor your secret iPod playlist know right or wrong, they just are. It’s you that’s deciding something is better or ‘worse’ than something else, not the rest of the world.
Now, there are things universally agreed upon to be less good than others. I’m not sure I could find ten people who were really really excited about the new Bon Jovi record, but I know ten (and then some) exist. And to them, Bon Jovi is awesome. Just like Ashlee Simpson’s record is “amazing” to a twelve year old girl. And there are people who would consider me totally insane if they listened to Wowee Zowee and then I told them it was my favorite record ever. There’s no accounting for taste, and so on. So why do we impose these bizarre standards on ourselves and apologize for things that we like?
Klosterman points out that there needs to be a moment in which we all acknowledge the difference between ironically liking something and considering something a guilty pleasure. Both acts are in some ways obnoxious and pompous, but liking things for irony’s sake is undoubtedly more offensive than simply using a common turn of phrase (which I am sure is how most people use “guilty pleasure”). Liking things for irony’s sake is a complete waste of time, a total trivialization of the chance you’ve been given as a human to experience art and culture, and does little more than confirm your position as a simple-minded elitist masquerading as purveyor of good taste by acceptance of bad. On the other hand, most people use the phrase “guilty pleasure” to denote their enjoyment of something they feel is beneath them. It’s a common phrase, and most people don’t use it to purposefully imply that their typical standards are far higher, or that their guilty pleasure is a mere distraction from their more meaningful pursuits, or to impress people or to claim superiority. But when you say that something is a guilty pleasure, what the hell else do you mean?
I might be over-thinking this, but I do want to promote a rejection of this kind of language. At the very least, it’s inaccurate: what we’re implying is not what we mean. Besides, we should have the fortitude to claim what we like and stick by it. Revisit things that you would normally consider a guilty pleasure and spend some time identifying why it is you are drawn to that song, record or artist — chances are the conversation you’re having with yourself is a legitimate argument. And if it’s not, who gives a shit? You like what you like, and if what you like is the over-the-top album cover, the fact that while each song is simply a reinvention of the previous one, they all take you to a place and time where workin’ a livin’ wage and blowin’ off some steam at night were all folks really needed to be happy, and that being the poor man’s poor man’s Bruce Springsteen isn’t so bad … well, you’re listening to Stranger in Town.
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