Many of these songs I don’t find guilty pleasures. ABBA? ABBA’s awesome. “Happy” by Pharell? It may have been ubiquitous, but it’s a great, fun song. “Blurred Lines”? Some questionable lyrics aside, it’s toe-tapping, hip-shaking joy!
There’s very few songs I feel any guilt about liking. However, there is one. I have no idea why I like this very cheesy 1998 Euro-disco German cover of an early 80s German song called “Ich Will Was Mir Gefält.” It’s Aqua-like in it annoyingness, but, I picked it up on some “Now That’s What I Call Music” type of compilation while I was living in Hungary, and, for whatever reason, its over-the-top bubbleguminess spoke to me. I present to you Das Modul’s cover. Please do not judge me.
Hey thanks! Any time I can oblige - more than happy to.
I can well understand this compulsion (at the complete risk of sounding like the douchiest therapist)…an almost masochistic predilection toward confronting the uncomfortable, or just-barely-fathomable, almost-not-quite-sensible.
Actually, a sad story behind the Wiggins sisters and their truly fucked-up dad. They made a special trip into Boston in '69 to record the legendary “Philosophy of the World” album. Apparently the extremely bemused recording engineer almost told them to come back another time, but took note of the strange instances where, out of the blue, they were tight, not chaotic…from amid a rambling ear-shitload, suddenly arose a three-way vocal harmonizing that was tight enough to convince the engineer that maybe they did have their songs down, albeit quite often, yes - chaotically.
Used to read articles and columns on them in magazines like Guitar Player, and old messageboard arguments over them. About two years ago the New Yorker did a good piece on them, a lot of it revolving around their total and complete wing-dingbat of a father, who drill-sargeant’ed them, religiously, bringing “God’s gift through their music”.
(which was in reference to Das Modul) Thank-you for one of the better phrases I’ve read in some time.
Sweet Heavens to Franklin Pangborn I thought they were the bee’s knees! Really upbeat…hot looks…great comic sound effects, and oh waitwaitwait…right… ok…um…the music, itself…right…um - yeah, ok: it sucked, like…more than exponentially - even the Richter Scale couldn’t quite measure its suckage. Would’ve worked better than Slayer on loop for Mr. Koresh. At least they’d mop the stage with the Shaggs, though.
We should have seen the writing on the wall when it was introduced as a 30-day challenge, but in the OP, it was said the 30 challenges wouldn’t be posted daily.
The funny thing is, there was some thought and effort put into this, and he even made up all 30 challenges in advance. He could simply cut and paste the sentence from his outline and we’d take it from there, as these threads are popular enough. I’ve been reminded of, and introduced to, many songs since we started.
Played this song at a wedding reception. Offered a prize if anyone could guess who did it. At the end of the song an old lady came up and told me who did it. Said she was a fan of them for years.
I like them too.
:hangs head in shame while snapping my fingers to the beat of the song:
I’d listened to both this, and the Shaggs before. I can’t say I don’t like either of them. Yeah, there’s some guilty pleasure in both. I find it to somewhat be a masochism of “the new”. I don’t know if I hate it on the third (or in the case of the Shaggs, the 20th) listen. In the case of the Shaggs, I’m constantly asking myself: “They’re writing pop, but what was their aim?”. Listening to them is a constant attempt to re-arrange them into a rhythmically coherent whole that would make sense as a pop song. Because it sounds like there’s a pop song hidden somewhere in that puzzle.
The relation I find that they have to song-poems, is that they’re both created at a sort of knife point. In the case of the Shaggs, it’s that their father had decided that they’re going to be a band, and they had no choice, no matter their level of talent. In the case of song-poems, it’s generally the opposite. It’s a generally a brilliant or competent musician who’s writing a song with supplied lyrics. You know they’re making a pop song, but the subjects are as varied as the stars in the sky. But they still seem to usually rise to the challenge, and somehow write something that addresses the idea. Even the Apollo 11 song develops a meandering charm.
All I know is if I’m listening to my ipod and a song poem comes on it gives me real joy and I’m kind of almost glad it’s not some famous band I have on there.
I guess you’ve heard Rodd Keith “I Died Today”? If not check it out, and the back story is the coolest ever.
I can’t figure out if I like it or hate it either. To be honest, I respect the endeavor of listening to challenging ideas of what music can be. Some days, I feel like song-poems are somewhat like the output of everyone else who’s life is filled with “I don’t want to do, but I have to do it anyway”, but in a more acute sense, because the task is creative. To provide a parallel, my life is (among other things) filled with writing computer code that fulfills it’s purpose, in languages that I did not know before I began the project. But it brings me no joy other than writing computer code that conforms.to the specification I was presented, and the intellectual achievement of at least getting functional in a new language.
In the case of song-poems, it’s a creative solution to the dare that was specified by the lyric writer. I’m saved from that in my personal musical life by having a day job. If I don’t like some aspect of the music, I can walk without having to miss anything in my life. These people don’t generally have that choice, and the solutions they arrive at are amazing, if not always completely successful in my view. In fact, they have such unorthodox problems, it’s hard to judge the effort after several listens. Either way, you don’t hear them without searching them out, and I will search out “I Died Today” as soon as I am vertical, conscious, and coherent.
Apparently, **Idle Thoughts **has better ways to fill his time, though all this takes is a simple copy/paste. Or perhaps he’s realized that he can’t afford the 100 bucks.
I think it’s the definition. I don’t think of good bubblegum, disco, novelty, or other genres like that a guilty pleasure. The song Windy by The Association or Brandy by Looking Glass - hey, those are good songs. Most of the stuff folks are naming: bring it on.
To me, a guilty pleasure is when I don’t like the message. Lit Up by Buckcherry is a slimy pro-drug, no irony song. I hate how much I think it rocks. Brandy is a guilty pleasure, not because of its cheesy 70’s story-song craft, but because the perfect-70’s-haired traveling stud-captain reads even more hilariously now, but it’s not aggressively offensive the way some songs were. It’s dated, but a fine song.
I have no idea if that makes any sense, but damn it sounded fascinating rattling around my brain
I know what you mean! I hear ‘Windy’ and I think it’s kind of comical. Men so entranced by one of those early manic-pixie child-women skipping down the street in her miniskirt! Smiling at everybody she sees! (not unlike Marlo Thomas (“That Girl”) … Now, ‘Brandy’, I always pictured this song set in the past, maybe Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1800’s - early 1900’s Brandy wears not a barroom wench outfit, but a proper Victorian blouse and ankle length skirt, and she is in love with a proper sea captain. But he is married to the sea! (more likely a girl in every port).
