The whole GP thang seemed a bit of a backwards step to me. The great thing about the 90’s(when i was in my 20’s and my radar for popular music and musical trends was at its most active) was there was an opening of the floodgates in terms of what was seen as “acceptable” or “cool” to listen to- you could easily appreciate hits by, say,Oasis, Portishead and the Spice Girls equally and dance at clubs to everything from Led Zep to Public Enemy to Kim Wilde without worrying about peer pressure or worrying how it suited your selfmade “image”. The musical tribalism that existed in the preceeding decades was gone and there was a liberating sense of “anything goes”.

With the MP3 revolution at the end of the decade this became for a while even more the case - practically all popular music became available to own at the click of a mouse and (at first,anyway) for absolutely free and, as a result restrictive concepts of “cool” were out-eclecticism was in.

As a result,by the time the concept of GP had arrived it was already redundant.Young people who had discovered, for example, ELO, and enjoyed their music simply because they thought it was GOOD music were suddenly being told that ELO were terribly ‘unhip’to listen to, but that they could still listen to them providing they did so through a veil of sniggering irony(admittedly this notion was present in the 90’s too but never to such a patronising or blatant degree) and treated it all like a big joke.I (and many,many others) had already acquired a large amount of music by artists deemed to fit in the GP bracket, enjoyed it hugely and felt no need whatsoever to have them ‘validated’. We had already done this ourselves on OUR OWN TERMS. GP helped bring back the idea of having to second-guess what music was ’suitable’ for a person according to their class, age, race etc and as such stifled for many the democracization of musical appreciation that had became around in the period previously.

As for my theory of what a GP really is- a record that you know,according to your own values and critical opinion, is terrible, truly musically without any redeeming merit and yet for some inexplicable reason you can’t help loving it. It certainly is NOT loving a track you think is amazing, moving, exciting etc but which the critcal media consenseus has decided is a “bad” record. As Jerry Dammers once put it “theres no such thing as good or bad music”.If you think its good then it IS good. Its not called having a ‘Guilty Pleasure’- its called having your own taste.

With the MP3 revolution at the end of the decade this became for a while even more the case - practically all popular music became available to own at the click of a mouse and (at first,anyway) for absolutely free and, as a result restrictive concepts of “cool” were out-eclecticism was in.

What the GP boom did was change this level playing field and reinforced the notions of what the “correct” music to listen to was-

As a result,by the time the concept of GP had arrived it was already redundant.Young people who had discovered, for example, ELO, and enjoyed their music simply because they thought it was GOOD music were suddenly being told that ELO were terribly ‘unhip’to listen to, but that they could still listen to them providing they did so through a veil of sniggering irony(admittedly this notion was present in the 90’s too but never to such a patronising or blatant degree) and treated it all like a big joke.I (and many,many others) had already acquired a large amount of music by artists deemed to fit in the GP bracket, enjoyed it hugely and felt no need whatsoever to have them ‘validated’. We had already done this ourselves on OUR OWN TERMS. GP helped bring back the idea of having to second-guess what music was ’suitable’ for a person according to their class, age, race etc and as such stifled for many the democracization of musical appreciation that had became around in the period previously.

As for my theory of what a GP is- a record that you know,according to your own values and critical opinion, is terrible, truly musically without any redeeming merit and yet for some inexplicable reason you can’t help loving it. It certainly is NOT loving a track you think is amazing, moving, exciting etc but which the critcal media consenseus has decided is a “bad” record. As Jerry Dammers once put it “theres no such thing as good or bad music”.If you think its good then it IS good. Its not called having a ‘Guilty Pleasure’- its called having your own taste.

My view is that Peer Pressure is EXACTLY the reason for the whole concept. Although there is the qualifying moments of hypocricy from the peers.

An example from my personal experience: In the Metal scene in about 2000/2001ish, Limp Bizkit were the most shunned, disdained and generally loathed band there was. Yet every rock club’s floor would get packed by “Take a look around” and “Rollin’”

I’m sure there are other examples…

(and just to clear up the ELO side of things, “10538 Overture” and “Mr Blue Sky” are two of my favourite singles by anybody; it’s the “repositioning” of them as a kind of derriere-garde that I object to)

Interestingly a LOT of the tracks on the first GP comp (including “Oh Lori” which is fab but NOT the anti-Pistols) came out on A&M as a standard budget-priced thing called Labelled With Love a year or two earlier…no argument about the quality of any of these records but “Pinball” as a guilty pleasure? 1974 - the agony of Nick Drake urbanised and turned only slightly pop? Isn’t this to an extent debasing both song and artist by equating them with tosh like “Afternoon Delight”?

(Plus it sounds better in the context of the excellent ZigZag compilation album which came out on Cherry Red around the same time)

And “Say You Don’t Mind” HAS to be heard in its original context as the closing track on Blunstone’s One Year album which is readily available for about a fiver.

Peter Skellern! Always to me a hugely underrated talent; find a decent compilation, go beyond the admittedly fantastic “You’re A Lady” and it’s the Randy Newman of Bury. Better still, harass Universal to reissue his brilliant Hard Times album from ‘76.

My whole fear is that punters are going to come up and think “well, this was the seventies” and not feel inspired to delve any further or deeper - so that groups like Slik get forgotten about or never remembered in the first place. And the aesthetic Berlin Wall continues; witness Stuart Maconie on a recent weekend show fading Aznavour’s “She” after less than a minute and apologising to his listeners.

Alan - excellent and well argued piece.

That Peter Wyngarde album and especially THAT track…the missing link between Telly Savalas and Throbbing Gristle…

Is everyone else an Accredited Pop Pundit? I’m a really amateur one…

I know as well as anybody what peer pressure can do. It happened in the sixties too and it happened a lot to me. Rosie’s got a funny accent (Wirral, in Hertfordshire). Slap. Rosie enjoys Latin. Twist. Rosie doesn’t support Arsenal. Spit. Rosie likes Motown. What a hoot! Rosie hangs out in funny places like the Mid-Herts Musicians Club and the Barn Theatre. Well, what do you expect.

Being a teenager is terrifying. I empathise with Marcello in his feelings of being out on his own, and I applaud his guts for being true to himself. I still feel the pressure from time to time. As part of another project I recently sent a CD mix to an unknown recipient. I thought I’d put some pretty edgy stuff in there, but mellowed it with some Manhattan Transfer, some Peggy Lee, some Peter Skellern (who I always name when pressed to identify a guilty pleasure). My recipient liked the edgy stuff, though he drew the line at a bit of Beefheart, but his reaction to the mellower stuff was quite aggressive. Of Manny Tranny (against whom I won’t hear a word) he says Aaaargh! Make it stop! Peggy Lee, he said, made him violent. And for about five minutes I felt like hiding under a stone. But I learned one big life lesson from my dad, bless him. He didn’t give a hoot.

Sometimes, in here, I feel that not being an Accredited Pop Pundit makes me a lesser person in the eyes of others. I try not to let it get to me, but just occasionally I fail…

Alan @ 57: Good article, you say eloquently what I have been struggling with.

Re: Guilty Pleasures, this is the sound of my mind boggling at the very idea.

My feeling is, I see no need to get het up about it - hence I don’t worry about the title. I mean, the supposed “cool” set in this model are the real losers, because they’re the ones panicking about looking “right”.

Then again, I don’t get het up because I didn’t really live through the era Rowley plunders, so have nothing to protect. I like your speech though.

My argument vis a vis assumed shared experience is simply that the selection of stuff that gets put in the GP category - melodic 70s pop by and large - is such a thin slice of music, and reinforces the idea that the guilt is always felt by people liking ‘uncool’ music instead of ‘cool’ music. (While also reinforcing the idea that we all know which is which.)

But actually the guilt (which is just ‘conflictedness about ones own taste’) can work in all sorts of directions - the other way round, or “indie” people liking “pop” or vice versa, or white people liking ‘black’ music, or whatever. The ‘guilty pleasures’ idea is a weak version of that, reducing everything to a kind of I-heart-the-70s “what WERE we thinking?” or “they don’t make em like that anymore” response.*

I don’t know exactly how someone is feeling when they say Slik is a ‘guilty pleasure’, but I think it’s kind of similar to how I feel about, say, “Airbag” by Radiohead or “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2: I’m kind of embarrassed by liking something by this band cos I think what they do is a bit lame, but this is a terrific record. But the idea of Radiohead as a ‘guilty pleasure’ doesn’t seem to make sense within the framework of guilty pleasures as used by Rowley, Radio 1, etc. And that seems to me a weakness in the framework, because it takes the reasons for the conflictedness as a given rather than opening up ways to explore them.

Incidentally though we both don’t like “GP” as an idea, Marcello and I don’t agree at all as to why!

*something I like about Popular is the way the serious intellectual responses to apparently flimsy pop, and the personal memories, and the bits of trivia and god-do-you-remember stuff can all mix up together in the comments boxes and bounce off each other. So I don’t think these are BAD responses, just that they shouldn’t muscle other kinds of response out.

Furthermore, who exactly mapped out and constructed this “proscribed path”? Who defined its route and parameters? Why do children of the seventies - not quite Thatcher’s children, but not that far removed - feel the need to whitewash (with the emphasis, I notice in general, on the “white”) a past which they know they experienced? Who exactly “pressured” them?

The things now “accepted” as Guilty Pleasures were the bread and butter of my schooldays; virtually everyone in my year or above or below it was into post-Gabriel Genesis or Rush or ELO or Supertramp and I frequently (i.e. daily) suffered the beneficent stamp on the head: YOU ARE ABNORMAL. HENCE: YOU ARE INFERIOR.

The Guilty Pleasures “phenomenon” is the equivalent of those same smug people coming back a lifetime later, sticking their tongues out and going NYAH NYAH I TOLD YOU WE’D WIN. And I resent that. I resent my history, my experience, being denied or nullified in the presumed interest of proposed demographic unity of thought where “opinion” is reduced to an expression of the tenor of the majority and is thus worthless.

I don’t want a processed, subtext-suffocating “bit of fun.” I want the truth.

But, really, the idea’s sound. It is about peer group, peer pressure. One’s expected to feel guilty about veering from the proscribed path, so you might as well give it a name and accept that the name’s a bit of fun.

Otherwise - a triple retail mark-up for tracks easily available on cheaper and less up-themselves compilations and a gap in the market filled, rather than a new gap being created. And politically and aesthetically dangerous as well as numbing (inuring oneself against the pain of the past and the fear of the future in one smug, swallowing bound).

I must confess that I bought the first two volumes - because I thought that they’d probably have some good songs on with which I was unfamiliar, rather than especially because of the concept. Ought I to feel guilty about this?