Is It A Guilty Pleasure If You Don’t Feel Guilty?

By Christian Lipski

These two don’t look
like they feel guilty at all.

The “pleasure” part of a guilty pleasure is easy enough to pin down—you’re doing something that pleases you. That doesn’t mean that it makes you feel happy, as sad things can be pleasurable; it’s just that you enjoy the experience. The “guilty” aspect is harder to define, as the guilt involved is subjective. In general, a guilty pleasure can be thought of as habitual indulgence in something that you feel has no redeeming qualities but still pleases you. I include “habitual” because there seems to be a need for the person to return to the experience more often than would be assumed based on the “value” of the object. For example, chocolate has little nutritional value, but it tastes good. Having chocolate once in a while as dessert wouldn’t necessarily represent a guilty pleasure, but having a candy bar or two every day from a secret stash might.

For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to focus on the guilty pleasure as it relates to music, and specifically to my own tastes, since that’s a subject I’m well acquainted with. We all have our musical peccadilloes—songs or genres that we tend to skip when they play on our iPods, glancing around to see who may have recognized them. I have my share, but there are some cases where I refuse to admit guilt, no matter what public opinion may try to make me feel.

American Hair Metal by Steven Blush

Hair Metal was a trend as big as its coiffures in the late 80s/early 90s. The subjects of the songs were not intellectually challenging to say the least, being primarily about sex, partying, and I’m not sure if there was a third option. Most people my age who lived through that time have an album or two tucked away in their collection, and will only play it in public when drunk. I love hair metal unashamedly. Sure, in the periodical world it would be the Mad Magazine to more serious genres’ The New Yorker, but there’s a value in Mad Magazine if you consider its purpose, which is to entertain. The same applies to hair metal for me—it exists as lighthearted fun, and I love that about it. When I play it, it frees me from worries about “real” things like my job or world politics, and that’s something everyone needs. The only hair metal that I do feel slightly guilty about liking is Firehouse, a band that came on the scene at the tail end of the era and whose songs seem a bit more calculatedly vacant than most, although their ability to maintain that pose through five albums makes wonder if it’s a pose at all.

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