Unknown Pleasures

I have this friend, a weird little kid who dresses up like a mod and worships Andrew WK. He’s the guy I always end up with at the party, on the gamey loveseat in the corner, passing back and forth the last bottle of champagne. By this point someone has inevitably put on the Duran Duran, and the kids are raging right over us, crunching toes, and so we have to yell at each other over the din. The new Devendra record is brilliant! Really? Yeah! And British Sea Power too! Who? British Sea Power! They called their debut The Decline of British Sea Power! How badass is that?

It goes on like this every night, with the champagne and the bleary eyes, until one of us passes out, or my roommates drag me home. His taste is impeccable, his style refined. His parents are both storied academics, and he claims to be a cat person.

The other night we were yelling at each other, and he leaned in real close—
“I’ve got a confession to make,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” He passed the bottle and waited for me to swill the rest.
“Yeah, but you can’t tell anyone.” I crossed my heart, just trying to focus.
“I’ve been listening to a lot of Jamiroquai lately.” As he said this he winced, like a mutt beneath a rolled-up newspaper.
“Jamiroquai, huh?”
He nodded.
I smiled. “That’s great, man.”

Iron Maiden is not a guilty pleasure. People are always trying to say their dirty secret is heavy metal, especially Iron Maiden. They giggle a bit when they say it, and they fake like they’re blushing, but you know they don’t mean it. They aren’t really ashamed, because they know they haven’t confessed anything. Iron Maiden is not a guilty pleasure. Maybe they were, once, long ago, but by now they’ve been accepted wholesale, and they’ve become as legit as any T. Rex or Roxy Music. There’s nothing guilty about the Maiden, and people who try to pass them off as some dark secret are faking the funk—they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too. If you want to tell me something guilty, well by God do it. But when you make like you’re letting me in on a secret and give me Iron Maiden, then fuck off. Same goes for Cyndi Lauper, or Devo; these are not guilty pleasures. (And God help you if you try to admit to that Kelly Clarkson song—that’s just a great record, straight up.) You can’t have it both ways, chief. You’re either a cool cat who won’t admit to his dirty laundry, or you’re a badass who’ll cop to an unhealthy Jamiroquai obsession. You can’t be both though. You can’t confess to something that’s cool.

I suppose I should address another possibility, one far more terrifying than either of these—that a person could be guiltless, without any shameful Jamiroquai’s to cop to. I’ve been assuming that everyone has their secrets, and they either choose to admit or not, but it’s possible that some people don’t have any secrets at all, not a single guilty pleasure. Could you imagine? How boring it must be! Could such people exist, these robots programmed only for Pitchfork-approved music? No Soul Asylum? No Ja Rule? Come on, little Automaton! If you want to rock out to Lou Bega, then by all means do it. I won’t think less of you. Your friends won’t think less of you (unless they’re automatons too, in which case you deserve each other). No, I think everyone should have some good slutty secrets, a few Sugar Ray records hidden away somewhere.

Furthermore, I think people should be completely up front about them. Enough of this cool-cat bullshit, this snobbery and these impeccable record collections. Sure, The Kinks are transplendent, but they’re even cooler side by side with a Chumbawumba record. Alone they’re kind of boring: everyone’s got a Kinks record. It’s the imperfections that make things interesting. So you listen to Toby Keith in the shower? Wear it on a t-shirt. Cranking Slipknot when no one’s around? Shout it from the rooftops, tag it on a subway car.

There’s only one question left now, I suppose--what’s my own unknown pleasure? And I’m afraid, for the sake of a healthy blogger-to-imagined-audience relationship, that I can’t answer. Would you still respect me in the morning, if you knew I listen to “Trapped in the Closet, pts 1-87”, every morning before I brush my teeth? I’m supposed to keep up a certain level of decorum; my taste is impeccable, my style refined.

But fuck that. There will be no hypocrisy here, no hiding behind lame-ass expectations. I listen to some terrible shit. I can throw you a bone, and I’ll do it without a shred of dignity:

It’s Hootie. I’m a huge sucker for Hootie. “Let Her Cry”, “Time”, “Hannah Jane”, any of them. “Hold My Hand” is a little bit cheeseball, but it’s not like I’m gonna skip it when it comes on, right? I wasn’t a big fan of Fairweather Johnson, but Cracked Rearview was a stone-cold classic. I even liked Darius Rucker’s soul album from a few years ago. Is that guilty enough for you? Christ! Put that one in your pipe.

So are you sated yet, you vultures? I’ve laid myself bare, sinned against the critic’s nature, and now I lie down at your feet. Take your potshots if you will. Just promise not to tell anyone, OK?