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?
(notionally) high-fives cicada, right after the mention of Mmmbop, which is what always springs to my mind when the subject of guilty pleasures crops up.
Most of what contemporary hipsters might consider guilty pleasures – certain Elvis tracks, certain Abba tunes (not the obvious ones), the first two Britney singles – I feel no guilt at all about enjoying these, and the hipsters can bite me. Hanson, though… I must admit I have encountered a certain skepticism when I bring up Hanson.
Sure, you can pick the stuff apart, analyse it, and find that there’s almost nothing there, but it would be perverse and bone-headed to conclude that this, therefore, is somehow “lesser” art.
Really great pop music is every bit as great art as any other great art. If producing great pop fluff so obvious and easy, why can the might of the music industry only come up with one (or, just maybe, two) in a given year? And by no means every year? Great pop music is a rare and precious thing.
I like my “serious” music as much as anyone, but I still think that “artistic seriousness” is possibly the single most negative thing that ever happened to music.
I’m going to stop now, I can feel a rant coming on, and nobody wants that…
I suppose we tend to feel guilty over our enjoyment of pop-cultural trash because often, we’re sure that we could be doing something more rewarding with our time. When I read this post, I instantly thought about the afternoons I spent as a youth, lying on the couch after school watching “Beverly Hills Teens.” (Then I went and watched an episode on YouTube. Dude, that show was, like, SO TOTALLY BAD!) I knew the show was the quintessence of stupidity at the time, but somehow, I found it irresistible. If I ever felt guilty about watching it (which I’m sure I did), it would have been because I could have spent that time reading _Middlemarch_ or practicing the piano. Trashy music, on the other hand, is something we can enjoy while we multi-task, so I feel much less guilty about indulging in it than in trashy movies, TV, books, etc. We have to have *something* cheerful to listen to while we do menial chores or drive around town. Besides, I know enough educated people who not only listen to, but even BUY Hilary Duff’s music, that it’s hard to feel too guilty about that sort of guilty pleasure. It probably helps as well to be a trained musician. If I had to, I could give you good, musicological reasons why Beethoven doesn’t do much for me, either, so I don’t give a bit of thought to defending my preference for Madonna when I’m cleaning house.
I should begin by admitting that I actually “score” every movie or season of a television show that I watch. I use a 1 – 10 scale, 10 being the best. Rarely does a movie dip below the 5 mark, unless it’s a real stinker, a film enjoyable neither as an artful, thoughtful creation nor as pop spectacle. But it’s all silliness. I agree with King for the most part.
A work of art judged irrelevant or frivolous today may be hailed as superior two centuries from now (if it is lucky enough to be preserved for future consideration). Stock rises and falls as art becomes valuable to a society. Carravaggio was forgotten for several centuries, and dismissed by critics for a time even after his stock in the western canon began to rise. Now he’s considered the grand master of chiaroscuro and the prince of the Baroque.
“Mmm-Bop” remains a popular treat today, almost a decade (can that be right?) after it’s release. Many people would argue that it is good art, a rare pop gem. Sure…it is, even if I don’t like it much myself. What matters isn’t the critical consensus, but rather the communicative relevance. If Hanson’s jingle is still moving people’s booties in two hundred years, I’ll be surprised – it seems a fleeting hit, like so much music of the 50s and 60s – but it will still be good art then. The works of the avant garde elite are always melted into the general mixture in time, like memes, so everything high is eventually everything low.
Hooray for guilty pleasures! I remember seeing a panel called “Academics and Guilty Pleasures” (or something like that) at one of the big Humanities Conferences a few years ago. I was a broke grad student and couldn’t afford to attend the conference, but I still often think of that session and how cool it would have been to attend it.
Wow, what a beautiful, rich site you have. This is one of the few times I actually feel inspired to put a link on my site to someone else’s. It’s always warming and encouraging to see someone successfully juggling a multiplicity of interests. Cheers!
Thanks, Wm!
Maybe this site can be a guilty pleasure. . . ?
I don’t even want to think how long it’s been since Hanson topped the charts. I’m old, ok?? The eighties dance party I attended the other night was full of 30-somethings in denial, trying to recapture our youth, which we squandered on too much education. What were we thinking?
Hyaena’s description of the ebb and flow of artistic credibility is right on. I don’t feel any guilt about failing to appreciate today’s critical darlings. I have confidence most of them will end on the dustheap of art history, along with a few overlooked geniuses. History ain’t fair. But Beethoven is a different case. . . which is why it bugs me that I can’t *feel* the grandeur in most of his work. I don’t want to be all Emperor’s New Clothes, and pretend I can feel it, when I can’t. I’d rather just have the muscial equivalent of that McDonald’s cheeseburger. So thanks, mdvlist, for the admission that he’s not your favorite, either.
That means a lot (and is surprising) from you.
pilgrim – I love the idea of crafting a popular hit from practically no substance, as an artistic challenge! It really is. The only problem is that since most artists, like Hanson, end up as one-hit wonders, they seem to stumble into this situation by dumb luck. Accidental artists, I guess?