The nonsense of "guilty pleasures"

We use the terms as an excuse not to think too deeply, and a defence against embarrassment, but it is worth examining the cultural artefacts we enjoy

It will not surprise readers to know that I have enough bugbears to rewild the ancient forests of pre-Roman Britain, but here is one which is at the forefront of my mind at the moment. We’re all familiar with media interviews with celebrities which revolve around a collection of set questions asked to a number of subjects. An iteration I see quite often, because I try to read The Times on Saturday and The Sunday Times properly, is “My Culture Fix” in the Review section of The Times, which this week happens to be actress musician Myleene Klass. There’s nothing wrong with this format: within its own constraints, it’s efficient, the questions are well chosen and you usually learn something interesting about the subject.

The bugbear is celebrities who seek to assert their individuality by subverting the premise of the questions: saying that they do not have a “favourite” piece of art, or that they wouldn’t want to have written or created a work of art which is by someone else. It’s an annoying and solipsistic “too cool for school” pose, as if they are simply too complex and sophisticated to be constrained by the boilerplate questions, when we all know that they are merely pegs on which to hang an answer which reveals something about them, their lives, their tastes, their influences. I end up rolling my eyes and wishing they would just play the game.

There is one exception. In “My Culture Fix”, interviewees are asked to name “My guiltiest cultural pleasure”. This is, of course, a familiar concept and we all have things we could name quite readily as guilty pleasures without having to devote much thought to the matter; certainly I could. In the unlikely event I’m ever the subject of “My Culture Fix”, I hope I’ll have the humility and perspective to co-operate and give vaguely interesting answers. In truth, though, if I really analyse it, I don’t believe in the concept of a “guilty pleasure”.

Labelling something as a guilty pleasure is usually a defence mechanism. What we mean is that we like a film, a song, a book, a painting, but we realise that it is generally regarded as infra dig, unsophisticated or unfashionable among people whose opinions on cultural matters we value. We are holding up our hands to a fault in ourselves—getting our cringe in first, so to speak—but we are also giving ourselves a degree of immunity because we acknowledge the apparent faults of the artefact. It is only a “guilty pleasure” and we should not be judged on our liking for it.

We are also being intellectually lazy. The notion of a “guilty pleasure” absolves us of the need to analyse why we like something and means we do not have to defend it or our taste. Essentially we set aside our critical faculties as unnecessary and inapplicable. And we shouldn’t. I’m not one of these people who thinks every cultural artefact is laden with hundreds of layers of meaning, and I agree with (I think) John Updike who said something like “When I want to know what I meant, I read the critics”. On the other hand, I am a great advocate of understanding yourself and picking apart why you think and so things the way you do, and it can be both interesting and illuminating to understand why you like something.

When we say something is a “guilty pleasure”, what do we mean? An obvious explanation would be that we are conceding that something is artistically bad but still gives us pleasure, but I don’t think that’s right. I think the intensely examined category of art that is “so bad it’s good” is different from a guilty pleasure. Take, for example, the awe-inspiringly bad film The Room, an exemplar of the genre. The 2003 romantic drama directed, produced, written by and starring the strange, intriguing Tommy Wiseau is regarded by many people as the worst film ever made (though I would dispute that can be possible in a world which contains an all-dwarf Western musical called The Terror of Tiny Town). Certainly, it is very, very bad, with wooden acting, jarring dialogue and an intense sense on unreality pervading the whole thing, and its sheer dreadfulness does make it very enjoyable.

The Room is not, however, a guilty pleasure, for the simple reason that its lack of artistic merit or even basic competence is widely recognised and celebrated. To say that you enjoy it would not make anyone think that you regarded it as good art. That encapsulates the conundrum of the guilty pleasure for me: when we describe something that way, we are unconsciously saying that we do not think it is irredeemably bad but that it has some merit. We are also saying that we are uncertain about our reasons for liking it and feel embarrassed about articulating, let alone defending, them. But no-one genuinely enjoys a piece of art which they honestly think is in every way bad.

It follows that we think our guilty pleasures have merit. They may not be masterpieces, but I have long believed that art can be enjoyed in all kinds of ways and on all sorts of levels without being “bad”. A bright, breezy half-hour sitcom need not aspire to the cultural heft of Citizen Kane. We have all read novels which have gripped us and given us a great deal of pleasure but which we will never re-read because we have taken from them as much as they had to give, in that moment, in that single reading. They need not be bad books, unless they had aspired to do more: there is both virtue and skill in the beach read.

The example I keep returning to is 1988’s There She Goes by Liverpool indie band The La’s. It is only 2:31 long, barely the blink of a cultural eye, and is hardly a work of deep lyrical complexity: it has no verses, just a chorus sung four times with minor variation and a bridge. It gained a reputation for being an allusion to heroin use (“There she goes again... racing through my brain... pulsing through my vein... no one else can heal my pain”), but this was an ex post facto attempt to imbue it with more meaning than it has. Lee Mavers, the lead singer of The La’s who wrote the song, has admitted trying heroin, but not till two years after he penned There She Goes, and has explicitly denied that the song is about drugs.

Short and lyrically uncomplicated it may be, but it is, in my opinion, very close to the acme of a pop song. Lean and concise, it is instantly recognisable and catchy, with an uplifting, 1960s-revival jangly guitar part which was an early trailblazer for the Britpop movement of the 1990s. Musician Ben Gibbard, of Death Cab for Cutie, argued that There She Goes:

defines the perfectly written pop song: an instantaneously recognisable melody and lyric set to simple, economic musical structure. It is such a simple song that it boggles the mind that someone hadn’t already written it.

I would never describe There She Goes as a guilty pleasure. It is short and simple but tinged by genius, and it shines within its own context as a punchy pop single which lifts the spirits and provides a huge rush of pleasure. It would make no sense to judge it against, say, Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb or Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, because it was not created to fulfil their purpose. It remains an outstanding piece of artistic endeavour.

The guilt of a guilty pleasure derives not from the art itself but from our perception of other people’s opinions of it, and their consequent opinions of us. And in order to challenge this and throw off the burden of the guilty pleasure, we need to analyse why we like something and what effect it has on us. I am not a relativist who thinks there is no such thing as “good” and “bad” art, but at the same time art does not exist in a vacuum. If we like something, it has resonated positively with us on some level and therefore achieved something: there is a quality there worth exploring, however little others may recognise or esteem it.

This struck me some time last year when I was watching the first ever episode of Coronation Street, which was transmitted on 9 December 1960 (the soap opera is now well beyond 11,000 episodes and shows no signs of slowing down). The Britain into the homes of which it was broadcast was almost unimaginably different from ours. Harold Macmillan was prime minister, Elvis Presley was topping the singles charts for the fifth time with It’s Now Or Never, it was five weeks since the Chatterley Trial (R v Penguin Books Ltd) had acquitted the publisher of infringing the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and a month before Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy had narrowly beaten Vice-President Richard Nixon in the race to the White House.

Soap operas are ingrained in our cultural milieu now: as well as Coronation Street’s survival, Emmerdale has passed its half-century, the BBC’s EastEnders will celebrate its 40th birthday next year and the most venerable of them all, The Archers, has been on the airwaves since 1951. Brookside was a fixture of Channel 4’s schedules for more than 20 years (1982-2003) and Grange Hill entertained the nation’s school-age children from 1978 to 2008. In 1960, the landscape was very different. Granada Television only commissioned 13 episodes at first, not at all certain it would be a success, and The Daily Mirror’s Ken Irwin, dismissing it as “awful” and “doomed”, predicted it would be dead by New Year.

Even now, the 25 minutes of that first episode are electrifying. Penned by young actor and scriptwriter Tony Warren, it is taut, spare, lightning-quick and funny. At a time when the news was delivered by impeccably spoken Oxbridge men like Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall, and the sonorous and legendary Richard Dimbleby presided over Panorama, authentic Northern accents and dialect were dazzlingly fresh and authentic. Coronation Street in its infancy was not only good contextually, because it was expanding the field of what television showed, but it was inherently good, with sparkling scripts, engrossing storylines and outstanding performances from the veteran, brooding Violet Carson as Ena Sharples, regal Doris Speed as Annie Walker, the glamorous Pat Phoenix, revivified by her performance as Elsie Tanner and the intense young Bill Roache as Ken Barlow, a role he continues to perform after 63 years.

Let me try one more illustration. If you Google “guilty pleasures”, and if you ever make it back from the rabbit holes which will open up in front of you, one record which will appear again and again is Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley. It has taken on its own distinctive place in popular culture, culminating in the internet phenomenon of “Rickrolling”, which involves the unexpected appearance of the video of the single in apparently unrelated links. Released as his debut in July 1987, it went to number one but would represent the high point of 21-year-old Astley’s career in chart terms. The fact that he never repeated its success has given him some hint of the one-hit wonder, someone who lucked into commercial success briefly; in addition, in a year dominated by the “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, female stars like Madonna, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson and the impeccably stylish and ironic Pet Shop Boys, the neatly groomed former choirboy, resplendent in navy blazer and chinos, is recalled as irredeemably naff.

Yet there is a powerful argument that Never Gonna Give You Up is an exceptionally fine pop record. It was written by the factory-like behemoth of Stock Aitken Waterman, and while it may not match Dylan at its peak, the lyrics were composed after Astley had spoken to Pete Waterman about his relationship with his girlfriend and his devotion to her, so there is a thread of genuine emotion running through them. The instrumentation relies heavily on synthesisers but that was the mainstream sound in mid-1987, and the synthetic strings and brass added by arranger and producer Ian Curnow are distinctive.

It all results in a hugely infectious and memorable melody and a strong, urgent beat. Most strikingly, Astley has a great voice. His rich baritone was honed in the working men’s clubs of the North West, an exacting proving ground, and has a depth and smoothness that goes well beyond good-enough-for-the-charts. On its release, Music & Media concluded that it was a “carefree and cheerful pop ditty, sung with that youthful, muscular voice”.

To reiterate, this is not to say there is no “bad” art. For curiosity’s sake, I have read (at least) two Dan Brown books, Angels and Demons (2000) and the all-conquering The Da Vinci Code (2003), and, while their commercial success is undeniable, they are bad books. They are not well written, the plots veer from thinness to rampant improbability, the characters aspire to two dimensions, there is a veneer of research patchily covering wild errors and inaccuracies and they are unoriginal. Yes, something about Brown’s work connected with a vast buying public, a phenomenon I cannot explain, but they are technically, stylistically and compositionally bad.

So let’s try to do better than hiding behind “guilty pleasures”. If you like something, think less about the verdict of received cultural wisdom and more about the qualities of the work and why it appeals to you. You don’t have to become an evangelist or the sort of person who writes contrarian articles for modish publications arguing that Wannabe is a better record than Eleanor Rigby, but deeper self-examination may give you a new appreciation, richer and more satisfying, of art you like. Judge cultural artefacts fairly but firmly, and be comfortable explaining your assessment to others. Stop hiding behind guilt, and you may even win some new fans over to your chosen pleasures.