Your secret shame?

Do you have a Secret Shame when it comes to music?

Well, let me put it to you this way - do you have a song that you start singing along to, humming, grunting, air-guitaring, tapping your thighs or the table as if you're the drummer, nodding your head...that sort of thing...even though you hate it? Or probably should hate it...

We've talked about Guilty Pleasures a lot here at Blog on the Tracks. Well, a few times anyway. And I like to re-introduce the topic because, well, I think it's fun. And I also think you should get through life, listening to music, guilt-free.

My love of Phil Collins's Face Value album is not a guilty pleasure. It's a fantastic debut solo record; the songs are strong, the drumming is brilliant, there's a Beatles cover (and yes, competition results/winners to this post are coming tomorrow! Promise!) and there is pioneering use of drum-programming within pop songs to conjure a mood. You can disagree with me - that's fine. But I feel no shame listening to this.

Ditto my love of Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual and we saw with this recent post that there should be no shame in listening to Cyndi.

I tend to think of my guilty pleasures, these days, as things like Joe Satriani's Flying in a Blue Dream or almost anything outside of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. I'm not embarrassed by them - but I am not sure why I hang on to them. Until I play them...roughly twice a decade...and I am transported to why I first liked the music. And then, shortly after (or while it's playing) I think I never need to hear that ever again!

But, though we should, in a strict sense, feel no shame for the music we retain, for the music we sing along to, for the music we pump into our ears, I also think it is fun to have - and admit to - guilty pleasures; they don't have to exist but for the sake of this blog let's run with it...

I write the music reviews for North & South each month and each month we get a "New Zealand personality" (that's the briefing) to admit to a guilty pleasure. I've documented some of the past selections in an earlier post (last year) but recently:

Recently departed Nightline entertainment reporter David Farrier waxed lyrical about "Christian band DC Talk" and how he has "all their albums, including their magnum opus, Jesus Freak".

DJ Sir-Vere discussed his High School memories of Stiff Little Fingers' Inflammable Material.

Political reporter Barry Soper chose Cat Stevens's Teaser and the Firecat.

TV3 wnwsreader Juliet Speedy picked Tiffany - specifically her iPod favourite, I Think We're Alone Now.

And witer/cmedian Jon Bridges picked The Indigo Girls, happily stating, "I know - Christian, I know - lesbian, I know - country-rock, whatever, I LOVE them".

Normally I get in touch with someone, exchange some emails and they write a 150-wordabout their guilty pleasure. But the most recent person to cough up a kitsch classic was Paul Henry. And when I got in touch with him he preferred that I ring for a chat. This was fine. And I did. I mention this because the whole time I have been collecting these guilty pleasures I have struggled to really explain the concept to people - beyond suggesting that it's music they have a nostalgia for that they might not want to admit to; something they know is not cool but they don't care. That sort of thing.

I usually go on to use examples of previous guilty pleasure items. The best ones, for me, are Chris Knox selecting The Sound of Bread and Keith Quinn's love of Babyface. I don't know why but to me that seems to tell the story of the guilty pleasure sidebar in my North & South column.

With Henry I used a few different examples and in trying to show that not everyone thought the same way, what was a guilty pleasure to someone might be a classic of pop to another, I used the recent example of Roger Gascoigne selecting The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds as his guilty pleasure.

Henry fired back, "hmm, I would have thought that a Roger Gascoigne album would have been a guilty pleasure?" I would have said touché but it would have been drowned out by that laugh.

We chatted about the concept for a few minutes and Paul Henry agreed that he was into the idea and he gave me a fantastic definition for a musical guilty pleasure; a way of looking at it that seems to sum it up. He said, "for me, I listen to music in my car. And I suppose you are talking about the music that I would play in my car and be singing along to but I'd die of embarrassment if I had any passengers". (Again, the laugh.)

This leads me - finally - to where the secret shame aspect comes in.

If there's one thing worse than a guilty pleasure it has to be a secret shame. (I don't know why, it just seems more powerful; more ominous - if it's secret then you are really embarrassed and the word shame is in there too, so...)

Recently Katy mentioned that David Gray's White Ladder was her secret shame. She used that exact term. So I guess I have just put that out there - no longer secret.

She said this - because she was keen to listen to the new David Gray album when I received a review copy of it. So we put it in the stereo. And were both promptly underwhelmed. It was, tonally, the colour of dishwater. The best thing about the album is that I think it has (at least partly) cured Katy of her David Gray love. It'll be a while before we hear "Whiiiiiite Laaaaaader" squawking from the kitchen stereo (I hope). It's a separate post entirely but Gray was ruined for me by my working in a music store where he was hideously overplayed. Interviewing the man years later and finding him to be a total grump, uber-defensive, didn't help.

So, I take Katy's call of White Ladder and Paul Henry's idea of singing in the car - but only when alone - and I realise what my secret shame is.

I would probably, not that this has happened, but I would probably sing along to Boom by P.O.D.

This is ridiculous. I do not like P.O.D. I have had to see the band live, twice, and I mean it when I say had to. Last year I had this to say when reviewing the concert that saw them play with Disturbed:

P.O.D sounded absolutely shocking, worse than my previous encounter with the band (at 2006's Edgefest). The big anthems Boom and Alive sounded like the musical equivalent of a limp-wristed bar-poured shandy and at best snatches of the songs sound like Rage Against the Machine tunes boiled down to cellphone ringtones.

But if Boom was on in my car - and I was driving alone - it might be a case of Look out. This may be disturbing for you, but it is horrifying for me. At the time that I am admitting this to myself I am also telling all of you.

So now it's your turn. What is your secret shame? It only has to be one song. What is the one song that you quite enjoy even if you hate the band? Maybe you didn't know it was a band you disliked but they pulled out a song that you thought was half-pie okay? (Like the time Blink 182 almost tricked a few people with this.) And have you ever been caught, busted, singing along to your secret shame tune/s?

Come one, come all - admit to your secret shame.

(Oh and if you want to know Paul Henry's guilty pleasure...he likes to drive in his car, with no passengers, cranking out the Neil Sedaka. I didn't see that as being anything of great shame.)

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