By Brooke Lynch
Recently, I have been horrified to find that I have an affinity for 80s hard rock and metal. Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses and other bands whom I’ve had absolutely no love for have been popping up in my playlists and recent listens, and I hate it. My high school years of loving scrappy DIY bands such as Bad Brains or Operation Ivy, and more importantly, my love of grunge bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney, has left me with a bad impression of 80s rock. To me, they were sexist, vapid pop stars not even making the metal they claimed to be making. And while I would still place many of those adjectives on those bands (sexist being the most important), I can’t stop listening to them. The undeniable pop sensibilities of these artists means I can’t stop myself from singing along to “Running With The Devil” or “Shout at The Devil.” Pop seems to be an important part of this conversation.
Looking up guilty pleasure songs on Google turns up lists of pop songs from all generations, with modern songs like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” sitting next to 80s songs like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Looking up guilty pleasure songs in genres like punk or metal turns up punk-adjacent or pop punk bands like Fall Out Boy, and hip hop has its fair share of pop crossover artists to put on lists as well. Despite having pop bands in their genre, fans of harder rock and metal don’t seem to want to have this same contempt for their liking of pop songs. Despite having 147,533,532 more Spotify streams than Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” isn’t considered a guilty pleasure, or even a pop song to some. While there are some who will consider Metallica’s self-titled album that “Enter Sandman” appears on a “sell out album,” meaning an album made in an attempt to achieve mainstream appeal at the cost of a band’s supposed authenticity or sound, the general consensus is that Metallica is still primarily a metal band, not a pop band. And there are a ton of bands that seem to have this pop immunity. Nirvana, Black Sabbath, SlipKnot, Pearl Jam, all hugely popular artists that have evaded the pop label, despite having songs that have similar if not more Spotify streams than some of the pop stars listed as guilty pleasures by many. In fact, many of the artists listed above have songs that are far more popular than some of the pop metal acts I talked about at the beginning of the article. So popularity clearly doesn’t determine a guilty pleasure, but there is one thing that Metallica and Nirvana and Black Sabbath all share, being perceived as authentic.
To many, Nirvana was the voice of its generation, Metallica is one of the greatest metal bands of all time; all of these bands, despite being huge stars, have retained their image of being underground or outside of the major label system. Bands like Motley Crue, Guns N’Roses, and Wham! don’t have this perception of authenticity from the music listening public. Motley Crue and Metallica shared a label in the 80s and 90s but somehow Motley Crue are seen as the ones who don’t make ‘real metal.’ This perception of authenticity seems to have shielded all of these bands from having their songs labeled as guilty pleasures. There are those who might refute this, and say that these bands haven’t evaded guilty pleasure status because of some perception of authenticity, they just have a bunch of good songs, and Britney Spears or Wham! doesn’t. But make no mistake, guilty pleasure songs are just good songs.
As much as some might hate it, “Toxic,” “Wake Me up Before You Go-Go,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and “Party in the USA” are all good songs. I personally have seen a push among some friends of mine, and online in general, to get rid of the term guilty pleasures because you shouldn’t feel guilty for enjoying things, you should just like the things that you like. But that doesn’t explain why when I found “Toxic” on many guilty pleasure lists, a song that I like, it made sense to me that it was considered one. And I think time is a factor.
There were no songs from 2021 or 2020, the most modern ones were from the early 2010s, and I think that has a lot to do with what songs are considered guilty pleasures. Artists like Britney Spears, Wham!, and Carly Rae Jepsen all seem to encapsulate pop music for their time and because of that, these good songs seem to be a surrogate for our ideas of society and ourselves at the time. So if you find the 80s as a campy age of overly optimistic white dudes, then Wham! is pretty much that, so you might find some shame in listening to them. Nothing is more early 2000s than Britney Spears, so it makes sense that there are multiple of her songs that are considered guilty pleasures.
But this doesn’t explain why I consider all these 80s hard rock bands guilty pleasures. These bands in some way exemplify the rock of the 80s, but I love other 80s pop songs without having them as guilty pleasures, so why do I put my music on a private session when I listen to these bands? I think some guilty pleasures have more to do with a person than a collective group of songs that we all find to be guilty pleasures. As stated before, in high school I was someone who hated 80s rock and valued the more underground acts, hating these bands became part of my identity. I was a DIY musician, so liking a major label rock band went against my identity. But as I began actually liking these bands it felt like almost a threat to my identity, so I felt I had to hide it, and that’s also where guilty pleasures come from. If someone’s social circle would make fun of them for liking a band or it doesn’t seem like a band they would be into, it feels totally valid to want to hide that from the people around you out of guilt. This is the kind of guilty pleasure a lot of people want to get rid of, because you shouldn’t feel bad for listening to the music you like, you should just like it.
