August already, huh. I made this playlist last August, and meant to share it then, but I moved around that time and started writing fewer newsletters and never got around to it. I’ve been thinking about “guilty pleasures” again lately and this playlist ties into that.
I find that most people take “guilty pleasure” to mean “song that people I think are tacky like, but I also like”, which ties together a lot of aesthetic judgments that I don’t think have that much to do with guilt. Or at least, it seems silly to me to feel guilty for liking something harmless but garish or unserious or whatever adjectives roll up into “tacky”. What is the transgression you’re supporting or enacting? Perhaps one has a feeling that you’re enjoying the musical equivalent of ice cream, sweet and enjoyable but not nourishing, and the guilt is similar to eating a couple scoops when you’re trying to watch your diet. But most people aren’t choosing between Taylor Swift and Tchaikovsky or free jazz or what have you, so the analogy would be more like you ate a couple scoops of ice cream instead of an order of cheese sticks. It’s fine to have a preference but it’s not the same as choosing between indulgence and delayed gratification. I feel guilty for liking things for totally different reasons, but the strongest feeling I can muster for liking something tacky is occasional vague embarrassment, and when that rears its head I normally just need to get over myself.
So here’s a playlist of songs that I think are cheesy but great, at least in small doses. Creating it kicked off after I started listening to Chrome Neon Jesus, by Teenage Wrist, which came out in 2018 but would have fit in perfectly on the $10 CD rack at Target in 2002, from the songwriting to the production. It’s slick alternative rock with big feelings and big choruses, and though I couldn’t bring myself to love it, I listened to it a lot. Nostalgia has to be a big part of that (I was working at a Target in 2002, the example wasn’t completely random), but it’s also really good at what it’s doing. A lot of albums I remember listening to in high school had one or two good songs and the rest were pretty formulaic and uninteresting, but Chrome Neon Jesus actually works throughout.
My personal nostalgia has a lot to do with this playlist in general, as several of the songs are random one-offs from my youth that never found wider purchase and barely qualified as a hit of any sort but somehow resonated with me. Now that so much music is on Spotify I could dig them back up without shelling out for used CDs from some internet rando for the one song I care about at all. “Feed It”, by The Candyskins, is from The Waterboy soundtrack. “Gain”, by Virgos Merlot, is something I heard in a WWE promo. “Camera One”, by the Josh Joplin Group, was the sort of song that occasionally got played on VH1 early in the morning while I was getting ready for school, and later was on an episode of Scrubs. It’s a collection of also-rans that nonetheless slot in fine among better-remembered acts like Weezer, Bush, and Hum. Why they got the push they did to poke onto a national stage but not enough to endure is one of those aspects of the music business and general cultural memory that is mysterious and interesting to me, the contingency of it all.
I have to admit I still feel a bit embarrassed about liking those songs. Look at that list of places I heard them: Adam Sandler movies, wrestling, VH1. It paints a picture, and it’s not wrong, but I think of myself as having been uncool in high school in totally different ways than that, so it fucks with my self-image a bit. And the music itself is painfully earnest. I like to think I’ve mostly escaped the irony poisoning of my generation: I straightforwardly like things and don’t shy away from plain emotion in art (at least I hope, and of course one might ask how well I do plain emotion in my personal life, but this is not that kind of newsletter). These songs test that somehow; they somehow feel unreflective but also self-serious to me, and it makes me wince a little.
It is the combination that gets me, I think. The second half of this playlist is pop-punk and third-wave ska, and it’s cheesy as hell. But I don’t feel a shred of embarrassment about liking it, even something like the Blink-182 song which was from one of the big teenage boy albums of my youth, Enema of the State. (And to be clear, that album is definitely adolescent in several senses of the word, good and bad.) A lot of these songs are unreflective too (though Reel Big Fish were always pretty self-aware), but there’s no seriousness there. Just hit some major chords, keep the tempo up, and have some fun. I found out about Rozwell Kid when I saw them open for The Hotelier and The World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, two very serious emo bands, and during their first song when they went into a little double-guitar harmonized riff like something from a Boston song I laughed out loud, and you can tell from their lyrics and performances that that kind of joy is what they’re going for. The Aquabats dress up like superheroes, have a literal children’s show, and title their songs stuff like “Super Rad!” and you know what, it is super rad.
I guess that’s what I was trying to get at when I made this playlist, a theory of what I find cheesy and what I find embarrassing. It was only after I was done making it that I realized the two things weren’t the same, and splitting that out helped me think about what tastes I’m actually embarrassed by. I still don’t feel guilty about it though. I’ll talk about that next time.
Track listing
“Stoned, Alone”, Teenage Wrist, Chrome Neon Jesus
“Stars”, Hum, You’d Prefer an Astronaut
“Warm Machine”, Bush, The Science of Things
“Gain”, Virgos Merlot, Signs of a Vacant Soul
“Feed It”, The Candyskins, Death of a Minor TV Celebrity
“Camera One”, The Josh Joplin Group, Useful Music
“The World Has Turned and Left Me Here”, Weezer, Weezer (Blue Album)
“Wendy’s Trash Can”, Rozwell Kid, Precious Art
“DVP”, PUP, The Dream is Over
“Wendy Clear”, blink-182, Enema of the State
“Everything Sucks”, Reel Big Fish, Turn the Radio Off
“Super Rad!”, The Aquabats, The Fury of the Aquabats