Real Actual Guilty Pleasures

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

More a mid-week topic this. I mentioned elsewhere (wrt Merritt and zip-a-dee-doo-dah) that it has only just occurred to me that there really is a category of "Guilty Pleasures" - just not the latest gutless variation on "so bad its good". There can be music you really like, but for some reason the song is actually morally wrong or tainted. And not in the indie ("S club Juniors that's so wrong") or mirror-indie ("all indie boys can't sing they should all die"*) sense. The only good example I can think of right now is

Gary Glitter.

I love you love. Leader. SMASHing, real fun songs. Sung by a man with a twisted brane of badness cubed. (Of course there is a whole vein of pa3d0 british pop which we can take as read here.) But what else is there? Anybody here enjoy fascist/nazi/racialist music? dancehall homophobia i suppose. wot sa u?


(* naming no names, cos we're done with that, right?)

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

Jonathan King?

but yes, i think this mainly leads back to the "right-on white boys be liking dancehall" thing doesn't it?

Another example, with which I agree

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Fear of a Black Planet is best PE album despite "Meet tha G that Killed Me" etc.

Re: Another example, with which I agree

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Black Planet really is the best PE album, but doesn't this kind of logic lead one back to the racial stuff again, where huge swathes of rap and hip-hop have to be written off b/c they glorify violence and/or denigrate women. If you want out of that cul-de-sac, aren't you forced to talk about 'authenticity' (ie., 'it's all just a pose' so it's okay to like it)?

Re: Another example, with which I agree

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

rap is overtly and self-consciously a music of clashing opinions (even just in the rapped words alone), before you even get to the (implicit?) ideologies of the samples -- and plenty of the very ferocious stuff is also an expression of conflictedness in any one mind-voice

think of it as a play w/o a moralistic last act yet("it's all acting so..."): authenticity needn't come into it (TS: mannerist acting vs method acting); and YOU'RE the one who'se being dragged on-stage to direct-act-cause the closure