Tuesday 4 August 2015

Guilty Pleasures

Here's a little something I wrote for a wee music page I'm part of on Facebook (The Dicky Crisps Radio Show). Think of it as a palate cleanser between the two sprawling parts of my Russian political epic.

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One of the most fundamental rules of SquidDisc Corner is that there is no such thing as guilty pleasure.

Well, not quite. There is such a thing, it's just that it isn't remotely close to what people think of when they hear the term. For most, a 'guilty pleasure' is something one loves despite knowing how low an opinion it suffers amongst the world at large. This, obviously, is complete horse shit. The idea one's enjoyment of something should be so much as lightly caressed by the enjoyment of others is self-imposed emotional blackmail. If you can put on black lip gloss or guyliner or an inverted cross to push back against (what you perceive as) the mainstream, but you can't admit you quite like 'Agadoo', then who is it who's really holding you back?

(What is an actual guilty pleasure? It's something you like even though its politics/message/philosophy is sufficiently broken or unpleasant that you worry it says something unflattering about you that you can still draw fun from it. 'Tomb of the Cybermen' is a guilty pleasure. Game of Thrones is a guilty pleasure. 'C'est La Vie' is a fucking song.)

All of that said, though, I do have songs that I love without having any idea why. Songs that, by my own internal judgment process, I should by all rights hate. This is one of them. I've no idea why this song works for me. The over-earnest bombast is entirely too in-your-face, the lyrics are alternately obvious and gibberish, and I'm always automatically suspicious any time a bunch of white people start singing about how things were better in the old days, even if in this case the nostalgia is tempered by the sheer insane impossibility of what is being claimed 'the old days' actually were.

Despite all of that, though, I love this tune. Partially that's because of some associated memories, but I suspect the song does more to sweeten those memories than the other way round.



So how about you fine people? What songs do you have in your playlists that totally don't fit with what you'd usually describe as your type of thing?

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