I’ve never liked the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’ when it comes to music. It’s hardly an original question, but why should anyone ever feel bad about enjoying a piece of music? One thing I found especially annoying about the phrase was that, when it became popular, suddenly it wasn’t considered possible that you might genuinely dislike a popular or uncool record. It was assumed that you secretly liked it, but we’re afraid to admit it for fear of looking ‘uncool’.

Take ‘Africa’ by Toto. It’s a song I really do dislike, but everyone assumes it’s a guilty pleasure, just one that I can’t bring myself to admit. Can a record really be a guilty pleasure if 90% of people are professing it to be so? It’s like when so many people start to describe a film, album or sportsperson as underrated that you start to wonder who could actually be doing the underrating.

There was a profusion of Guilty Pleasure club nights in the 2000s, (still going strong today in some cases) which were essentially just people going to dance to records they enjoyed, like at any nightclub, but with added plausible deniability. A thick coating of irony, that enables them to say “I know this music is kind of naff, you know it’s kind of naff, but aren’t we cool and funny and interesting for enjoying it anyway”.

It’s not clear who decides what qualifies as a guilty pleasure anyway. When my mum was teenage in the early Seventies, The Beatles would have been considered a guilty pleasure amongst her folk loving friends. The same was true during the punk era (“No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977”), but I don’t think anyone would call The Beatles a guilty pleasure now. Abba have been round the popular/unpopular/guilty pleasure/popular again cycle multiple times it seems.

There isn’t a cabal of secret hipsters out there designating what records are cool and uncool, but it feels like people think there is. It almost seems to enhance their enjoyment of music, imagining other people out there who just can’t enjoy these songs because they’re trying to be cool. It seems a very strange way to behave. I may sound like a stupid hippy, but why can’t everybody just enjoy the music they enjoy without caring about what other people think about it?

Side note — I was once went to a work event where the icebreaker was to name your ‘guilty pleasure’ song. It was highly amusing to see everyone mentally scrambling to think of a song that a) they liked b) they thought most other people would like c) that people would believe they genuinely thought other people think is naff. No-one was genuinely naming records that they thought the other attendees would think is terrible (I was as guilty of this as anyone, choosing ‘A Little Respect’ by Erasure, which everyone knows is brilliant, but may possibly have been considered cheesy by some people at some point)

Despite believing that you should never feel guilty about liking a piece of music, there are some songs that I still genuinely do feel guilty about loving. However that is more down to the creator than the creation. For example, there are many songs by The Smiths that I love (and even a handful of Morrissey solo singles), but I hesitate to talk about or recommend them, as Morrissey has turned out to be such a massive asshole. I say ‘turned out to be’, but in reality the signs were there all along. It’s just that some of us didn’t want to see them until it became impossible not to. I can justify it by thinking he was only one part of a band, that he was a very different person when he wrote these songs, but the fact remains that I find it hard to listen to any of songs without thinking about the person he is now. I still enjoy them, but perhaps not quite as much, and that makes them if not a guilty pleasure than at the very least an uncomfortable, embarrassing one.

There is the argument about separating the art from the artist of course, and I agree with that up to a point, but it has its’ limits. Knowing more about an artist’s worldview can and does affect how you view their art for better or for worse. And there are some artists whose crimes are so horrific that it becomes a moot point. I don’t think anyone is separating the art from the artist when it come to Lostprophets for example. The only question becomes, where do you draw the line?

Then there is the case of another of my favourite songs, ‘Cry Me A River’ by Justin Timberlake. Now, I don’t think Timberlake has committed any actual crimes. And he’s almost certainly not as much of an asshole as Morrissey, although the way he treated Britney Spears was pretty shameful. The particular problem with ‘Cry Me A River’ is that the despicable treatment is embedded in the song. The song and video are essentially just a (partially successful) attempt to portray Spears as the villain of their relationship, causing their break up by sleeping around. It’s a real dick move. If you didn’t know anything about the Spears/Timberlake situation, there would be no feel bad about liking the song, and I doubt I would feel as bad about enjoying any other Timberlake song. Unfortunately, ‘Cry Me A River’ is by a long distance his best. It remains a pleasure, but very much a guilty one.

So when people talk of guilty pleasures, I don’t think of songs that are considered cheesy or naff, I think of songs I truly love sung by people I truly don’t. Morrissey, Timberlake & more, the real guilty pleasures.