Owning Your "Guilty Pleasures"

I think someone unfriended me for posting a Cher video.

Now I know that's silly and most likely not true. I was probably unfriended for a good reason. Maybe I offended him in some way I couldn't uncover by my combing through my most recent posts. Or maybe I was unfriended for the unforgivable crime of being terribly un-clever. Either way, I'd like to believe my greatest infraction was my questionable taste in music, 'cause I totally own that:



I honestly don't remember this song existing, but I know every word. I'm pretty sure I owned "Save Up All Your Tears" on a cassingle, the 80s and early 90s equivalent to downloading the one good song on a record. (Downloading itself is a huge guilty pleasure enabler.) And I'm pretty sure I belted it out in my bedroom when no one else was at home. Fear of having a Sue Sylvester moment keeps me from doing that right now.

I came to music late in my adolescence. I was still bopping along to Wham! when most of my peers had discovered REM, and it wasn't until my twenties when I became aware that some artists came with a critic's seal of approval. I bought myself a copy of The All Music Guide and scoured used CD stores for the highest rated records. Some of them, to my surprise, I liked, and some of I hated with the fire of a thousand suns and wondered why this dreck was even allowed to be recorded. A lot of them I just sort of pretended to like. Being a music blogger requires me to rewrite my own musical history a bit: no one wants to appear less knowledgeable than she really is, especially in the male-dominated music, indie=good, everything else=bad music blogosphere. And no one wants to think she has "terrible taste." But you know what? I simply don't care anymore. I refuse to label anything that makes me happy a "guilty pleasure."