Guilty as charged

Stephen King’s column in the 8/10/07 Entertainment Weekly charmed me. Struck by a silly YouTube video, he launches into a paean to entertainment that, without regard for artistic integrity or prestige, purely entertains:

I sat there amazed and full of happiness, thinking: ”Yeah. This is exactly what I wanted today.” I feel it every time I listen to ”Jump” by Van Halen or ”You’ve Got Another Thing Comin”’ by Judas Priest. I feel it every time I put on my club mix of Lou Bega’s ”Mambo No. 5.” I’m sure some of you think that’s silly, but you probably have your own personal joy buzzers (for a very hip friend of mine who shall go unnamed in this piece, it’s the Dolly Parton version of ”I Will Always Love You”).

It’s easy — maybe too easy — to get caught up in serious discussions of good and bad, or to grade entertainment the way teachers grade school papers (as EW does, in case you missed it). Those discussions have their place, even though we know in our hearts that all such judgments — even of the humble art produced by the pop culture — are purely subjective. And as a veteran grade-grind in my youth, I have no problem with awarding A’s, B’s, and the occasional F to movies, books, and CDs (which is not to say I don’t also have reservations about such drive-by critiques). But artsy/intellectual discussions have little to do with how I felt when I saw Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. This movie made virtually no one’s top 10 list except mine, but I’ll never forget some exuberant (and possibly drunk) moviegoer in the front row shouting: ”This movie KICKS ASS!” I felt the same way. Because it did. (Stephen King: The Pop of King (EW))

King is talking about guilty pleasures, of course, although he claims that the phrase “is meaningless, an elitist concept invented by smarmy intellectuals with nothing better to do.” Perhaps as a writer of guilty pleasures, he’s sensitive to the strange fact that our personal joy buzzers usuallydo make us feel guilty or embarassed. I bubble over with elation at the first strings of “Come on Eileen,” and can’t help skipping to the electronic staccato of Fatboy Slim’s “Magic Carpet Ride” remix. Yet I remain completely indifferent to Beethoven. I’m horrified that I respond this way, but I can’t help it. Guilty pleasures, like crushes, are intense and irrational.

Unfortunately, iPods can make musical guilty pleasures mortifyingly public. All it takes is one revealing random playlist, and I’m blushing at the inopportune appearance of “MmmBop” while my friends say, “but we thought you liked Damien Rice?” I now preface use of the iPod with the reminder that workout music must not be held to the same rigorous standards as “real” music. It’s like the disclaimer before an early-morning infomercial: this is my iPod, but the musical tastes it espouses are not necessarily the tastes held by my educated, discriminating cerebrum.

Why do we feel guilty for responding emotionally to things that don’t quite live up to the (arbitrary) standards of art? Why do we judge ourselves, or fear others will judge us, for having genuine emotional responses? It’s not just entertainment – consider “comfort food.” I like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, but I don’t respect them. I could claim to be enjoying them in a meta/ironic/kitschy/subversive way, and I’d probably get away with it, but it wouldn’t be honest. I just plain like them. Why do I feel guilty about that? It’s puzzling, isn’t it?