"It's time to redefine the 'guilty pleasure'"
Chal Ravens at FACT writes:
In 2004, Radio London DJ Sean Rowley launched a clubnight-turned-phenomenon based on a simple idea: everything you thought was wrong is right.
Steely Dan? Toto? Lionel Richie? You love it really, said Guilty Pleasures, just admit it and dance. The concept was an instant hit. These days it even has its own week on X-Factor, where the upstart karaoke addicts get to maul school disco fodder like Carly Rae Jepsen and the Grease soundtrack (though neither of these chime with the taste of Rowley, whose Guilty Pleasures compilations star the terminally naff likes of Manfred Mann and Hall & Oates).
Point being, ‘guilty’ is no longer a word we much associate with pop. You’d be hard pushed to find a music critic who feels guilty about their love for Lorde‘s world-beating ‘Royals’, say, or some vintage Electric Light Orchestra. Everything is up for grabs, and music previously written off as cheesy or trivial (often the kind that attracted a typical fan outside of the young, straight, white male orthodoxy, like teenybopper hits or glitzy disco) now stands a chance of a fair (and irony-free) hearing. If the idea of a ‘guilty’ pleasure ever did make sense, it doesn’t anymore.
All to be applauded. But what if we were looking in the wrong places to identify music’s shameful spots? What if some records really can – or should – make us feel deeply uncomfortable? I’ve been ruminating on this lately in response to a handful of seemingly unrelated musical events, the first being the ill-advised return of Eminem, a rapper who seems hell-bent on pissing all over his legacy with ever weirder and and more unloveable comeback albums.
The story continues at FACT.
And speaking of Toto, if you’ve never seen the video of author Steve Almond deconstructing “Africa” by Toto as part of Tin House Magazine’s 10th Anniversary celebration in 2010, you can watch it below…
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Steve Almond on Africa by Toto
