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

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

So what is at subliminal war in the work of Gary Gl1tter?

I can actually see this more - staying with the same area of crime - with W1ll1am M4yne, the way in his work there's a sense of children as individuals, moral agents and still very 'allowed to be' children. (But then on the other hand the horror of his case is the way that - before it all came out - he struck me as a writer who really understood children. Which then led me to think - really understanding children is a v v useful skill for a p34d0 to have, it's something both - ugh - 'aspects' of WM's life would have tried to foster.)

Somewhat grim thoughts for a Friday afternoon eh!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well i have never LIKED gg's work (in the face of MUCH POPTIMIST HIVEMIND STUBBORNNESS back in the day) so i am inclined to argue that attractions and replusions really ARE present, like, empirically

but actually identifying the strands is the work-not-done that i am invoking (rather than, say, DOING it)

(the kind of work i'm talking abt = like when kogan sez a GREAT musicologist wd be able to link up doors basslines with meltzer's vomit-pill)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

the good side of GG

Green Gartside
Gina G
Gloria Gaynor
GoGo's

the bad side of GG

G*ry Gl*tter
Gus Gus
Goo Goo Dolls

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I'm with Tigger on this. GG is a very different case from latter day Jacko (cited below), where you can see the 'crimes' he ascribed to him seeping into his work. There was -- drawing on very vague remembrances now -- certainly something lascivious to his songs, but lots of rock n pop is. At the time, no more likely to be a pedophile than, say, David Essex.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well the point i am arguing is one which (for example) sets the ideology of the BASSLINE against the the ideology of the brass section, and in this case it's pretty hard not to find yrself reading bad stuff back into not-at-the-time obnoxious material (tho as i say i ALWAYS found him obnoxious so i have a teenytiny get-out here)

what i once wrote about j.king (http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/jking.html)

one of the reasons i haven't finished my "teach mark s a lesson" about m.bolan's unicorn is that i find the formerly innocent topic of HOT GOBLINISM is these days a bit toxic