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In defense of shameless pleasures

Posted By Chris Matarazzo On In art & entertainment,language & grammar | 6 Comments

We’ve moved on, right? We’re not still lying in bed at night trying to figure out ways to get in with the cool kids, right? Peer pressure is just an unpleasant memory from the past. Now, we can teach our kids to avoid the riptides under popular currents and to do their own thing. Right? If this is all true, then can someone please tell me what a “guilty pleasure” is?

Like all of the pre-fabricated phrases that clamp onto the face of popular conversation and wrestle it into a mumble, “guilty pleasures,” this relatively old — but still trendy — cousin of “at the end of the day” and “on the ground” and “comfort food” gets merrily juggled around at parties and long lunches like a hacky-sack. “What are your guilty pleasures?” a friend asks you. (Bub, you don’t want to know what my guilty pleasures are — but I can tell you they don’t happen anywhere near a Manilow album.)

I will tell you what “guilty pleasures” should not be: the music, movies, shows and books we enjoy. What are we afraid of, not getting asked to the prom? Whirlies in the locker room? Do we really feel such a deep need to broadcast that I-have-Hanson-on-my-iPod-but-I’m-just-kidding vibe? (By the way, I have Hanson on mine, and I will not apologize. Nor will I tell you who is also on there, in order to show that I really do have sophisticated tastes. Furthermore, if you don’t like “Where’s the Love?” you are a dark, dark person.)

You were not drunk when you downloaded “that song,” so stop saying so. What’s next, explaining away the Hall and Oates greatest hits CD on your kitchen counter by putting your coffee cup on it — or blaming the cleaning service for planting that well-worn copy of Twilight on your bookshelf between Kafka and Proust? For God’s sake, you are stronger than that, my friend.

Seriously, if Paula Abdul can . . . be like that, you can have the courage to read Cosmo in-between your 19th century British Romanticism and quantum physics classes. Even I used to occasionally feel the urge to hide my Stephen King novel behind a copy of Chaucer’s Major Poetry, but I came out of this around the same time I stopped calling movies “films”.

Where does it come from, this guilt? If it is a reaction to an artist’s image or to the un-hip style of a movie or novel, well, wouldn’t that just make us a little superficial? And if it is based on a knowledge that the work in question isn’t top-notch artistic or intellectual craft, what are we implying? — that we really are above this drek and that, one night, it jumped us in an alley and romper-stomped us until we yelled “uncle”? Silliness.

My boy draws pictures of smiley-faced people with arms and legs sticking right out of their heads and four bolt-straight hairs on tippy-top. Really happy little people. Clearly, the lad doesn’t have the facility of a Michaelangelo, but I would bet my teeth that his little dudes would warm your heart more than most of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel. So what’s to be guilty about?

Have no shame, O lapper-up of the delicious and creamy confections offered to us by the purveyors of pop! What brings you pleasure brings you pleasure. If it connects, it connects. Don’t let the fact that you are in a post-graduate program in comparative literature stop you from weeping through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

If you feel compelled to comment below, I hope you will partake of the catharsis that comes with saying, “I dig what I dig. Now where’s my Men Without Hats mix tape?” Don’t see it as a confession, but as a boast. It is not a “guilty pleasure” — it is what moves you. Be shameless. Granted, the thump of a kick drum may not be as lofty as a Mozart concerto, but it’s a lot sexier.

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Chris Matarazzo [4]

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music can be heard on his recent release, Hats and Rabbits [5], which is currently available. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy [6] and he performs in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His blog, also called Hats and Rabbits [7], is nice, too, if you get a chance...