No guilty pleasures

mms said:

strange because music is generally now just seen as light entertainment, the feeling that it factionalises or really means much politically is not really there anymore for most people.

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Maybe music with depth & meaning is the real guilty pleasure these days then?

I think a part of the problem is there's no negation now. If all the people in a certain genre or demographic held their hands up and said "Guitars are over now." or "Breakbeats are over" etc, not in a shallow style mag way, but rather as part of a process of moving foward, reducing your options so you have to come up with new ones. I think there was a lot of sloppy ecelecticism at the end of the 90's and that hasn't really been resolved.

Hmmm...decades always seem to get better towards the end (punk, acid house, etc) maybe we'll get some better tunage in '07-'08.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. There's really very little music that is just beyond the pale and doesn't have serious defenders.

Well, I know one - psytrance. Though it's interesting to see Woebot and Blissblog mention it recently.

I guess there's also all that terrible mid-80's pop/rock and hair metal. Though if you admit to liking the latter people will probably shrug their shoulders as someone here put it. Post-irony and all that.

And their second album did so well.

DigitalDjigit said:

I guess there's also all that terrible mid-80's pop/rock and hair metal. Though if you admit to liking the latter people will probably shrug their shoulders as someone here put it. Post-irony and all that.

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Read some Chuck Eddy. He actually seriously defends this stuff in a completely non-ironic way. I think one of his favourite records of all time is Cherry Pie by Warrant and he's a massive Def Leppard fan.
I'd actually go as far as to agree with him that much of this stuff is infinitely better than the traditional rockist idea of what serious rock should be, too (Whitesnake versus Clapton? Absolutely hands down for Whitesnake every time).
The idea of guilty pleasures has always baffled me to be quite honest, it's simply a matter of not having confidence in your own taste. I like a ton of absolute crap, but I can tell you why and I guess that's the key thing - being able to articulate the reasons for liking something as part of a wider cultural view almost totally negates the need for irony, and that's a good thing, because irony is often an intellectual cop-out, sheltered behind when people can't explain why they can't help liking something.

surely there must be some guilty pleasures still out there...I can't imagine how any right-minded person could get into/defend the hate-fringe of Oi! (Skrewdriver, et al) or Prussian Blue, but I'll bet there's a few of them out there...seems like the stuff of personal conflict to me...

stelfox said:

being able to articulate the reasons for liking something as part of a wider cultural view [...]

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of course nobody really ever comes up with a convincing explanation why they like things. most "explanations" are a mix of

• thingly guised tautologies "I like the new ... album! Why? it's got interesting african polyrhythmic influences" Why is that important? You don't hear that sort of thing normally, Yeah, but why do you care about this polyrhythmicity? It's like really interesting ..."
  
• References to the (alledged) social makeup of the audience of a particular type of music ("MIA is for middle class wankers").
  
• A variant of the latter is to refer to (un)desirable features of the music makers "I really fancy the bass player of ..."
  
• Wild claims about the social effects of the music under evaluation "Junior boys approach to songwriting subverts Neoliberal Kapitalism".
  

Given threadbare nature of such justifications, why bother. I think the answer is that one expects them to be effective only with peers who are assumed to share a similar aesthetic outlook and are easily swayed and infected by statements of enthusiasm, regardless of cognitive content.

oh that's just daft. you can shred any argument by throwing up the absurdities of bad practice as counter position. taking your points into account, i'm wondering why people bother writing books, making films or music, formulating theory at all, ever — it's all been done before, frequently really badly and even when it's done well is often only understood by a minority of people. however, if you look at positive examples of criticism/theory etc (which are just as much art as the texts they assess/deconstruct) or just plain, solid, unpretentious knowing where you're at and being capable/not scared of expressing your ideas, the almost-twin concepts of irony and guilty pleasures don't hold much water any more, they just become pleasures without guilt, things that you like.

I agree that essentially most reasonings are little better than post-justifications, however, there are some positions which are non-tautological: ie I prefer hings in certain modes and with certain chord progressions. These remain relatively fixed over time and work across genre. Of course, this only works to describe the way in which I enjoy something, rather than work as a convincing explanation to anybody else... it does come down to personal taste (this is not necessarily a relativist argument) you can probably describe that taste in some detail, break it down into factors which lead you to like and dislike something... In essence all you can say is given these predicates of taste, this music will be enjoyable to you. Most music reviewers appear to work under certain assumptions about the tastes of their audience, and therefore will point to those facets of the music which they think will please or displease them (and themselves of course)...

In terms of "guilty pleasures" I agree with Stelfox, if you like Hair Metal (which I don't- but I did try to...)then for fucks sake just enjoy it... "ironically" enjoying something is grotesque, although I would add that there is a certain element of perversity which can be at work here, and which could link into a "guilty pleasures" minus the guilt, and relieved of the irony (which is little better than a po-mo justification for guilty tastes)... to take deliberately perverse pleasure in something one is not supposed to circumvents guilt as it turns the thought of the "big other" (here presumably the guardians of musical taste, whatever the hell that is/they are...) from a parent who you feel guilty for disobeying to a system which you wish to oppose- so MOR becomes more punk than punk as perversely everyone already accepts that Punk is correct, punk was right all along... therefore MOR is the most offensive thing to listen to... I have more sympathies with the perverse view as it almost certainly leads to a finer appreciation of the music for its merits, (and enables the weaponisation of banality) rather than the emptiness of irony.

borderpolice said:

of course nobody really ever comes up with a convincing explanation why they like things.

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A lot of people seem to come up with explanations for why the stuff that they like is good (eg the fact that 'hardcore' scenes tend to throw up more interesting stuff than 'progressive' ones) that then tend to get turned into criteria. Or people spot that certain assumptions (eg that scene A is a more intelligent, experimental version of scene B) aren't true, and then end up assuming that the opposite is the case (actually, scene A is incapable of making anything other than boring twiddling) and end up missing out on a lot of good music because of it.

IDM and alternative hip hop both seem to fall foul of these quite a lot, for instance... and the sort of popist-fascism that's terrified of anything that might signify authenticity or 'proper music' seems to be a particularly heavy case of the latter...

gek-opel said:

I agree that essentially most reasonings are little better than post-justifications, however, there are some positions which are non-tautological: ie I prefer hings in certain modes and with certain chord progressions. These remain relatively fixed over time and work across genre.

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i agree with you, however, very rarely, do people describe music in this way (e.g. with reference to specific musical terms like modes and scales). This is likely to be the case because the existing languages used for technical discussion are either inappropriate for most music (like the language of scales, and clef and modes), or are way too technical, like sequencer notation.

Slothrop said:

and the sort of popist-fascism that's terrified of anything that might signify authenticity or 'proper music' seems to be a particularly heavy case of the latter...

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well, i guess i'm a pop fashist, but i'm not terrified "of anything that might signify authenticity or 'proper music'", it's just that rockist apologia is especially given to bogus rationalisations

stelfox said:

oh that's just daft. you can shred any argument by throwing up the absurdities of bad practice as counter position. taking your points into account, i'm wondering why people bother writing books, making films or music, formulating theory at all, ever — it's all been done before, frequently really badly and even when it's done well is often only understood by a minority of people.

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this was not my point at all. my point was that what claims to be a justification of musical preferences, one rarely encounters a true engagement with the aesthetic object. this isnt even necessarily a bad thing. it's just that discourse about music works differently from what people think. it usually boils down to (1) using music as a launching pad to talk about something else, or (2) suggesting: given what i know about you, you may like this song/band/genre, give it a try. both are valid language games, i use them all the time. it may be fun to realise how the work though, which is what i was trying to communicate.

Theres no accounting for taste

I think when it comes down to it, when you discard all of the intellectual and social arguments for why you, personally, like or dislike a song or album or band, then it comes down to taste. And the old adage is correct: There really is no accounting for taste. I find that it seems to be some sort of interior switch in my brain: On for liking, Off for disliking.

But then, there could be no "Guilty Pleasures" could there?

I think there still can be. I see that term as meaning one of two things. 1) I have general tastes that i have defined: i dont like progressive house; i find it dull, bland, and quite usually extremely annoying. i also dont like the crowds that usually enjoy it: fake plastic people. but then, for some reason, i find that i actually like Alice Djs - Better off Alone. Its not a great song. Its cheesey. Its definitely progressive (by my definition). But I still like it. So personally, its a "Guilty Pleasure".
2) My tastes, while my own, are partly influenced and definitely contained within my own social circles and their sphere of tastes and beliefs. So, within my social circles, hair metal (i call it "butt rock" so it can include GnR) is cheesey, poorly made, and not to be taken seriously. But I really like it. I always have. I could sit and try to defend it, but its a taste. So, while its not opposed to my own "rules" or personal definitions of taste, it is defintely in contrast to my social tastes, and so could be considered a "Guilty Pleasure" socially as opposed to personally.

In the end though, I like what I like, and i feel no need to justify it to anyone. So on some level, I cant really be guilty of anything i like.

@Boarder police--- but it can usually be brought down to these levels... certain interactions of specific and replicate-able timbres, rhythms, melodies, chords and harmonies will usually evoke a similar level of approval (in me anyway!) Exactly how helpful such taxonomy is in terms of creating a persuasive argument to someone else who doesn't share the precise (or similar) taste points (ie preferred aesthetic features of a given piece of music) as yourself... I'd say its pretty much useless! However, rather than looking at analysis as being a justification of music (as it is often presented) it could perhaps be viewed as an extrapolation out of the music, because analysis often has real merit if you already know you like the piece of music involved... in terms of placing it in a broader intellectual context. But said context does not, and perhaps cannot create persuasive argument as to why you ought to enjoy listening to that music (perhaps the best it can do is to persuade you to listen in the first place?)

Perhaps one form of legitimate "guilty pleasure" could be where the listener enjoys certain aspects (say- a rhythm track) but dislikes others (say a chord progression in the same track) as such there is a certain cognitive dissonance as they listen to the piece between the elements they like and dislike *at the same time*... take for example a pop garage track where the chords seem too wrote, obvious and over diminished (in a technical sense) and played on an overly lush Rhodes sound... but at the same time the percussion is a slippery, syncopated beast with amazingly crisp and defined snare sounds... however it might be more accurate to describe this as a kind of musical self-doubt as you listen, rather than "guilty pleasure" (which obviously presumes "guilt", ie- a certain self-reproach for supposed inadequacy or wrongdoing, which presumes some kind of musical law of taste...)