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

[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