In Defense of the Guilty Pleasure

Let’s stop treating our favorite songs like dirty little secrets

By Madelyn Kincel

Graphic by Natalie Horvath

Some time in between late November and early December, the year’s most anticipated musical release arrives: Spotify Wrapped. In the days following, listeners post their Top 5s across social media and brag about being in their favorite artist’s top 1% of listeners. But when you check your Wrapped, there always ends up being one statistic, one song, or one artist you don’t want to let everyone know about. For me, this was 2019, when my fourth-most listened to artist was the Glee Cast. I shamefully skipped over questions regarding my Wrapped, unable to admit my fondness for the campy soundtrack.

Maybe you’re a purist for classic rock, but you couldn’t help but bop your head when “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen came on the radio in 2013. Maybe you’re a rap connoisseur, but you know all the words to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” (and maybe you’ve seen the music video a few too many times).

Why do we feel the need to hide this bit of ourselves and our taste?

Your taste in music has become akin to your personal brand. We curate perfect playlists and collect physical evidence of our taste through vinyl records and CDs. Somewhere along the way, the artist you want people to think you listen to becomes just as important as the ones you actually listen to.

The concept of a guilty pleasure in music stems from the idea that some music is inherently “better” than others. Say you claim to only listen to music made before 2000, but you find yourself humming along to the sounds of a modern boyband’s greatest hit. Does liking one mean you can’t appreciate the other? The real problem seems to lie in the fact that society often believes music taste is equivalent to one’s sophistication or even intelligence, rather than it simply being a reflection of what you enjoy. After all, there’s nothing wrong with singing along to the Glee cover of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The only problem is pretending not to know all of the words.