Guilty Pleasures Are Not So Guilty
When indulging in your so-called guilty pleasure, you don’t find it to be guilty at all. In fact, you (gasp) actually happen to love it, so why should you feel guilty about listening to it?
I recently went to a conference where Mike Diver, the online editor for Clash Magazine, was giving a speech. He confessed that he doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, asking, “What music’s right, what music’s wrong? No music should be more authentic than something else. Embrace it.” This really struck a chord in me.
Society creates a blockade around certain music that gets spread as a general consensus. Think about it. Some people like Nickelback, but they wouldn’t dare confess that aloud. Once songs, or even artists for that matter, get too popular or cliché, the public makes a bad name for it and throws it aside. It’s a natural bias that comes from society’s desperate need to put a label of shame upon certain music.
It’s easy to get lost in thinking that liking something outside your own realm of musical taste makes this music ‘wrong’ to enjoy, but chances are, some 50 billion other people in the world think its good as well. Your own musical taste isn’t special; the music wouldn’t be ‘popular’ in the first place if other people didn’t like it.
So dance around in your underwear to that poppy upbeat rendition of Rebecca Black’s latest hit if that’s what you want. If it makes you happy then it’s simply pleasure, which is by no means guilty.
