"guilty pleasures"

I've been accused numerous times of being elitist and stuck up when it comes to my taste in music, films, books, etc. But let me clarify- I don't only love "high-brow" things like going to the museum and sipping on tea with my pinky in the air... I also need my weekly dose of contrived reality television (e.g. "The Hills," "Top Model") and I find myself only able to jog to Top 40's pop music. And it's so irritating when I feel the need to justify myself to others for watching such shows or listening to such music. Like I have to acknowledge how bad it is before I indulge with a little disclaimer: "This stuff is below me. But I'll watch it anyway."

Also, I don't like things for the sake of their obscurity or not like things for the sake of their "mainstream-ness." Though I still do believe that J.K. Rowling & (ESPECIALLY)Stephenie Meyer are more lucky than talented. It's just easier to like things that are less popular because the expectations are lower in contrast to something that is pre-hyped.

This all reminded me of an article by Chuck Klosterman:


Guilty Pleasures
The curious etymology of a phrase gone wrong

In and of itself, the phrase "guilty pleasure" seems like a reasonable way to describe certain activities. For example, it is pleasurable to snort cocaine in public restrooms, and it always makes you feel guilty; as such, lavatory cocaine fits perfectly into this category. Drinking more than five glasses of gin before (or during) work generally qualifies as a guilty pleasure. So does having sex with people you barely know, having sex with people you actively hate, and/or having sex with people you barely know but whom your girlfriend used to live with during college (and will now consequently hate). These are all guilty pleasures in a technical sense. However, almost no one who uses the term "guilty pleasure" is referring to activities like these. People who use this term are usually talking about why they like Joan of Arcadia, or the music of Nelly, or Patrick Swayze's Road House. This troubles me for two reasons: Labeling things like Patrick Swayze movies a guilty pleasure implies that a) people should feel bad for liking things they sincerely enjoy, and b) if these same people were not somehow coerced into watching Road House every time it's on TBS, they'd probably be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Both of these assumptions are wrong.

I suspect that Entertainment Weekly semiaccidentally started all this way back in the twentieth century with its "Guilty Pleasures" issue. Initially, this was a charming idea. It allowed the magazine to cover things that would normally be nonsensical to write about, and it dovetailed nicely with the primary cultural obsession of all people born between 1968 and 1980 (i.e., profound nostalgia for the extremely recent past). EW still publishes this annual feature, although now it just picks crazy shit to confuse soccer moms in Omaha. (I question whether any contemporary person derives pleasure from—or feels guilty about—Mr. Rogers's puppet-saturated Neighborhood of Make-Believe, which EW inexplicably included in its 2004 installment.)

What's more troubling is the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1,001 Things You Hate to Love (Quirk Books). Ostensibly a reference guide for those who want to feel embarrassed about being engaged with life, The EGP is a compilation of everything that's been popular over the past fifty years, augmented by short essays about why we can't help but adore these terrible, terrible things. These are things like Michael Jackson's Thriller, an album that 1) was produced by Quincy Jones, 2) features guitar playing by Eddie Van Halen, 3) includes at least three singles that are undeniably awesome, and 4) has the single-best bass line from the entire 1980s (the opening of "Billie Jean"). It is a guilty pleasure, presumably, because forty-five million people liked it, and because Jackson is quite possibly a pedophile, and because two dancers had a really unfair knife fight* in the "Beat It" video. This is akin to considering Thomas Jefferson a guilty pleasure because he briefly owned two pet bears. I mean, he still wrote the fucking Declaration of Independence, you know?

The failure of The EGP is its never-explained premise, which is that there are certain things we're just supposed to inherently feel shame about. For example, I have no idea why anyone would be embarrassed to like Evel Knievel (page 144); he serves as a metaphor for what a lot of people valued in 1975. He also broke thirty-five bones, went to jail for beating a man with a baseball bat, and consciously named himself Evel. He's not cool in a guilty context; he's cool in every context. The EGP also suggests there should be guilt associated with the appreciation of prison films (page 216). This makes no sense whatsoever. I feel ashamed when Cool Hand Luke is on television and I don't watch it. And why are gumball machines indicted on page 114? It's not just that I don't harbor guilty feelings about gumball machines; I have no opinion at all about gumball machines (unless I want a gumball; then I'm briefly "pro—gumball machine," I suppose).

What the authors of The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures (and everyone else who uses this term) fail to realize is that the only people who believe in some kind of universal taste—a consensual demarcation between what's artistically good and what's artistically bad—are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else's art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.

Take, for example, Road House. This is a movie I love. But I don't love it because it's bad; I love it because it's interesting. Outside the genre of sci-fi, I can't think of any film less plausible than Road House. Every element of the story is wholly preposterous: the idea of Swayze being a nationally famous bouncer (with a degree in philosophy), the concept of such a superviolent bar having such an attractive clientele, the likelihood of a tiny Kansas town having such a sophisticated hospital, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Every single scene includes at least one detail that could never happen in real life. So does that make Road House bad? No. It makes Road House perfect. Because Road House exists in a parallel reality that is more fanciful (and more watchable) than The Lord of the Rings. The characters in Road House live within the mythology of rural legend while grappling with exaggerated moral dilemmas and neoclassical archetypes. I don't feel guilty for liking any of that. Road House also includes a monster truck. I don't feel guilty for liking that, either.

But let's say I did.

Let's assume that I was somehow humiliated by the fact that I watched The Ashlee Simpson Show, which is something I did almost every week for two months. I think it's a fascinating illustration of what's wrong with young people, how the music industry operates, and how modern celebrities aspire to view themselves. But let's pretend this wasn't the case. Let's say I considered this program a guilty pleasure, and let's say my desire to watch Ashlee explain how her boyfriend ruined Valentine's Day was something I needed to apologize for. Wouldn't this imply that The Ashlee Simpson Show was my conscious alternative to something better? Wouldn't this suggest that—were I not watching The Ashlee Simpson Show—I would be working on logarithms, or studying the lin- er notes of out-of-print jazz records, or searching for factual errors in The Economist? Because these are not things I do, and I don't think many of the other 2.9 million people watching Ashlee Simpson every Wednesday do these things, either. We're not losing the battle against cancer because of Ashlee Simpson. If we weren't watching her pretend to be sexy, we'd probably just be going to the bar earlier.

I think it was Voltaire (possibly) who once argued that every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do, and I suppose he had a point. If I spent as much time analyzing Al Qaeda as I've spent deconstructing Toby Keith's video for "Whiskey Girl," we probably would have won the war on terror last April. However, this is nothing to celebrate or bemoan; it's kind of my own fault, and it's kind of no one's fault. These things that give us pleasure, they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we."