What is a guilty pleasure in 2025?
At the time of writing this, it’s 2025. By several measurements, I’ve been writing about music longer than I haven’t. In that time, more than a few people have presumed that what I do is tell people whether music is good or not and weigh in on whether they should listen to a band or artist. After all, on the surface, that is what a music critic is there to do, isn’t it?
Prior to music being as available as freely as oxygen, that may have been true. Today, though, my job is something quite terrifyingly nebulous, and not just because the days of having a steady job are quite comfortably a thing of the distant past.
This is because people’s relationship with music seems to have irrevocably changed. Therefore, anyone who puts food on the table by writing about it is scrambling to keep up, myself included. By being the most accessible it’s ever been, music is something simultaneously less valued yet possibly even more beloved than it ever has been.
Which is a strange thought, right? Surely, the two should go hand in hand, but in the era of streaming, everything is basically a novelty. It makes sense; when you’ve got the entire recorded history of pop music spread out in front of you like a cosmically large buffet, it takes someone much more disciplined than me not to try everything you can. Think of it this way. The first time I heard Tom Waits, I was revolted. It sounded like rabid coyotes fighting while a toddler practised the xylophone next door. Had this been in the current streaming age, it would have been very easy to move on to other corners of the endless ocean of music available to me. I didn’t, though, since my options were limited, so I was forced to understand exactly what I was listening to.
Over time, that’s more of what I did. I was able to contextualise his music as a combination of vintage rhythm and blues, cutting-edge indie rock (of the time), and sounds lifted from avant-garde jazz and cabaret. Yes, finding some of his more “accessible” works also helped hugely, but all of it allowed me to actually understand what I was listening to.
Today, Waits’ scraping howl that rabbit punches the listener at the start of ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ is one that can spark tears of joy if caught on a rough day. I wouldn’t have been able to let his work enrich my life the way it has if I’d just let the algorithmically generated current guide me further down the river of content sans contentment.
Conversely, the first time I heard Morrissey’s singing voice, I was also revolted. This was pre-streaming, and people wouldn’t stop telling me how much of a genius he is and how The Smiths are the greatest band ever. So, I listened and listened, yet no matter what, his mannered, tuneless warble and tiresome faux-Wildeisms just pissed me off and still do to this day. Far from the only things that piss me off about Steve these days, but that’s beside the point.
Without that time I dedicated to their music, I wouldn’t know why I like and why I don’t like those artists beyond the shallowest of reasons. Those two experiences guided me towards what I believe is the key to developing a good taste in music. It has absolutely nothing to do with ‘what’ you like and everything to do with ‘how’ and ‘why’ you like it. In short, if you know what you like and why you like it, you have good taste in music.
Today, though, the streaming age basically means we never have to engage with music that we don’t like. On the one hand, high fives all around, right? Music becomes our personal kingdom, where we dictate as we like. One would assume that in a world where everything seems to be beloved, this idea of having to defend your love of something would go away.
Yet, if you happen to be even mildly critical of any famous musician, you will absolutely know it. Now, whoever you don’t love has a swarm of angry fans waiting in the wings to take out their frustration on you. The last couple of years have seen the likes of nu-metal, Nickelback and even Rebecca Black receive more positive critical reappraisal. A justified one in Black’s case, and… then there are others too.
People are even coming out of the woodwork to say, “Millions of fans can’t be wrong”. They can be, for the record, and the world has shown that dozens of times. Still, people insist that if a musician is famous and successful, they must be doing something right.
This thoroughly modern state of mind has left me thinking about one of the most enduring concepts in pop culture: the guilty pleasure. When a piece of music so undeniably chimes with you that it doesn’t matter how cringe it is to other people, you love it nonetheless. However, people seem to have taken to this bullish defiance of societal norms and applied it to everything, as if anything that can stimulate the pleasure centres of your brain is great art. The depressing thing is that I think this comes from a place of genuine progression. It’s clearly a take on the cultural movement known today as Poptimism.
Poptimism was absolutely necessary. For years, the culture of music, especially alternative music, was defined and curated by white, cisgender, straight men and the music that they liked was championed above all else. Music that wasn’t aimed at them was dismissed out of hand as not only being “bad” but having no tangible qualities whatsoever.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was something weirdly radical about taking a charting pop act like Britney Spears and championing their artistic merit. NME was laughed out of the building for having TV talent show winners and British pop group Hear’say on the cover in February 2001, whereas Pitchfork reviewed an album by Kylie Minogue as a literal April Fool’s joke in 2002.
I was a budding music fan at the time. While it took me a few years to get on board with it (the first music I fell in love with was classic rock, go figure), fairly soon afterwards, I was willing to die on the hill that the Sugababes were as important a band as any other of that decade. I still am, by the way; it’s a pleasure to have them back.
Now, two decades later, that aggression towards perceived disrespect is more persistent than ever, despite the reasons for it being shallower than before. Gone are the days when you could argue with someone that it didn’t matter that Girls Aloud won a TV talent show; they were clearly mates, and the work they were cooking up with Xenomania was genuinely boundary-pushing.
Now, whatever you bop your head along to absent-mindedly is, that dreaded word, valid. The question I want to put forward here is, for lack of a more delicate way of putting it, is it really? Perhaps the term guilty pleasure, as we understand it, is old hat. There’s not really any such thing as cool music. There’s not really any such thing as uncool music.
However, my theory is whether something is a guilty pleasure or not should come more from how one responds to the music individually than from how other people respond to it. Sure, no one likes being shamed for the things they love, but no one likes going to the dentist either or grouting their bathroom tiles—it’s still necessary sometimes.
It’s like this: If you like the taste of Domino’s Pizza, does that make it good food? I certainly like the taste, but there are definitely high-class, haute cuisine dishes that I would take over one of their mass-produced food items. That is a more or less objective failure of taste on my part, and I’m OK with that.
The fact that I like it doesn’t negate that it’s, objectively speaking, processed mush, crawling with chemicals and additives, which are spectacularly bad for me. I just ignore that for the base chemical rush of dopamine it gives me, and I deserve to be called out for that, especially if I march into L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Naples and demand a stuffed crust.
I think the same can be true for music. For example, as the cesspit known as social media has shown us, there are an alarming amount of reactionary conservative types who are outraged to discover that Rage Against the Machine are, and you should probably brace yourself for this, a political band. What’s more, they’re a politically left-wing band. Shocker.
If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Zach de la Rocha and Co, it’s important to note that they do not hide their politics in any sort of metaphor or leave much up to interpretation. The line “some of those that work forces / are the same that burn crosses” isn’t just a quote from their biggest song and Christmas number one hit, ‘Killing in the Name’; it’s about a quarter of the words in it. Another quarter of those words are “Those who died are justified / For wearin’ the badge, they’re the chosen whites”.
Despite this, it’s a seemingly mortifying blow for a considerable number of people when they speak out against the Trump Administration. Now, social media being what it is, there’s a decent chance these are bots designed to stir up engagement. For the sake of argument, let’s say they’re not, though.
What could a conservative music fan, who cares so much about their conservatism that it would ruin their listening experience if a band espoused opposing beliefs, possibly get out of listening to Rage Against the Machine at any level? They can’t be engaging with the music beyond a surface-level appreciation for heavy guitars and rapped vocals?
I understand this is an extreme example, one that may be very charged as the Overton window hurtles rightwards by the day. However, I’m not saying that every surface-level interaction with music is inherently bad. If a song has a telltale melody that just brings a smile to your face, then you have every right to smile that smile. Do you want to talk about guilty pleasures in the traditional sense, though? I like the core melody of Eiffel 65’s ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ quite a bit, actually. I’d still be a lunatic to argue that the song has any artistic value or is anything other than a piece of disposable content based solely on that slight release of dopamine those vibrations in the air cause.
However, that is how streaming culture encourages music to be consumed, and, as Spotify founder Daniel Ek put it in a blood-curdling statement, “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.” Cards on the table here. If your way of taking in music actively adds to its “contentification”, then that is more of a guilty pleasure than any individual song ever could be.
