Guilty pleasure All the music we hate to love and love to hate

The whole notion of so-called guilty pleasures is a difficult one for most music fans and almost any music critic to justify. After all, if a song, a band, an artist, or an album is good enough for us to fall for, then why feel guilty about it? Or, more to the point, doesn’t feeling somehow bad about enjoying that song, artist, band, or album imply elitism or snobbery?

Well, maybe. But whether you’re a diehard music fan who lives and dies by the quality of the music that fills your aural environment, or a critic who makes a living passing judgment on musicians and their work on a daily basis, there’s simply no way to get around constructing and defending a solid aesthetic framework with which to make those judgments, even if deep down we all know it amounts to nothing more than building castles in the sky. Or, to put it more simply, there are exceptions to every rule, aesthetic or otherwise. And before long you find yourself encountering songs and artists who are somehow irresistible, even though they break every rule in your book.

With that in mind, we set a group of our critics on a soul-searching mission to dig up that one artist or band they’ve always had a soft spot for that’s difficult to justify. Of course, the list below is the tip of the iceberg. I for one recently found myself wrapped up in Glen Campbell: The Legacy (1961-2002), a four-CD Capitol Records box set that’s just loaded with utter crap. And, yet, I couldn’t help coming back to the first three discs over and over again to hear perfectly performed renditions of "Rhinestone Cowboy," "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman," and even a particularly cheesy version of "MacArthur Park." Is it nostalgia that gives those songs such power to tap into my emotions — half-buried memories of carpooling to grade school in Cincinnati with the AM radio tuned into the Top-40 station as I anxiously awaited the inevitable Campbell cut? Or are they just really great songs — songs that have held up to the test of time and that still resonate with all those intangibles that make pop music a crucial part of our culture? I’m too close to it to tell or even to care. And, in my book, that’s really what having guilty pleasures is all about.

Since we’ve only touched on some of the more obvious guilty pleasures here, we’re encouraging our readers to e-mail us their own favorite guilty pleasure. Two weeks from now, we’ll print some of the better responses on our "Cellars By Starlight" page so that we can all revel in the beauty of that song you hate to love but just can’t help falling for. Just send an e-mail to guilty_pleasures[a]phx.com.

— Matt Ashare, Music Editor

CHICAGO

You can’t mention Chicago nowadays without watching people cringe over Peter Cetera’s high-register vocals (even though Cetera left the band a good decade ago), or some of the band’s more obnoxious power ballads. All quite different from the band I saw at Madison Square Garden in 1973, when the opening act was an upstart named Bruce Springsteen. At the time of their 1969 debut Chicago Transit Authority, the band weren’t a guilty pleasure at all. They had all the requisite underground elements — long freaky jams, political lyrics, jazz/classical aspirations, and a guitarist (Terry Kath) whom Hendrix reportedly admired. The main reason I was a teenage Chicago fan, however, was because of singer/keyboardist Robert Lamm. In retrospect, Lamm’s early songs for Chicago were the prototype for Billy Joel’s career — he borrowed equally from classic soul and Tin Pan Alley pop and vented lyrically about whatever was on his mind that week — but Lamm pulled it off with more panache. Thus we got singles like "25 or 6 to 4," — the only hit ever written about writer’s block — and "Saturday in the Park," a peace-and-love novelty that’s actually literate. Most of the 1973 album Chicago VI — recently reissued along with the rest of Chicago’s catalogue on Rhino with better sound and bonus tracks — concerned Lamm’s struggles with celebrity. Nowadays that may ring as the most overplayed topic in the world, but at the time it felt like a guy I admired was being honest about how his world worked.

Of course Chicago went down the tubes as a creative band after the self-destructive Kath shot himself in 1979. They put their career in the hands of big-shot producers and song doctors, which is where Cetera’s prominence and the power ballads came in. At least some of those ballads were so silly that they were charming despite themselves: there’s a moment on "Hard to Say I’m Sorry" where Cetera tries to get sensitive, singing "Couldn’t bear to be kept away, just for the day . . ." and a roomful of grown men who should know better (alas, Lamm included) chime in with the chorus ". . . from your body!" They truly don’t write ’em like that anymore. Yet Lamm’s just released a solo album, Subtlety & Passion (Blue Infinity), that plays like old-school Chicago and proves he didn’t completely lose the knack.

— Brett Milano

FOREIGNER

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, and one of the reasons is Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm, the only real rock star ever produced by my beloved hometown of Rochester, New York. Foreigner are so uncool that they come right out and say so in the first paragraph of the Jerry McCulley-penned essay that accompanies 2000’s excellent double-disc Anthology: Jukebox Heroes (Atlantic). After establishing the band’s populist cred, McCulley acknowledges that many critics consider them "a soulless band of skilled musical mercenaries assembled by shadowy figures in some boardroom to plunder unsuspecting music fans with machine-tooled guitar riffs and burnished vocal hooks." Ouch.

In working-class Rochester, however, Foreigner are more like the second coming of Led Zeppelin. On classic-rock radio WCMF, "Hot Blooded" and "Urgent" are as essential as "Stairway to Heaven" and "Whole Lotta Love," and just about any song from their first four albums is bound to show up on the air at any time. In 1997, the city held its breath when Gramm was diagnosed with a brain tumor; two years later he was healthy, and Foreigner were back on the oldies circuit for a triumphant comeback tour with Journey.

In 2002, I was living in New York City with my friend Adam, who grew up listening to WCMF with me during high school lunch breaks. When we heard Foreigner’s 25th Anniversary Tour was going to be at the Rochester-area Six Flags on a Saturday night in June, we got into the car with my girlfriend, Heather, and headed upstate. By the time they hit the stage with "Long, Long Way from Home," a song Gramm wrote about leaving Rochester for NYC, I was already shitfaced on Labatt Blue along with the rest of the cross-generational crowd. Gramm welcomed one of the few local celebrities who rivals him in stature, Buffalo Bills Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, to the stage for kicks, and everyone screamed their way to the "Hot Blooded" finale. The band just released their home movies from the tour on the DVD 25: All Access Tonight (The Orchard).

A few days later I was back at CBGB, checking out modern-rock hopefuls Thrice and Coheed and Cambria. Six hours on the highway isn’t really such a long, long way from home. But as Lou Gramm knows, it sure does feel like it sometimes.

— Sean Richardson

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Even before I bought Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome (still in print on ZTT/Universal), almost 20 years ago, I knew it was going to be a problem. Frankie had had two gigantic hits in 1983 and 1984 with "Relax" and "Two Tribes" — sex-as-apocalypse and apocalypse-as-sex, respectively — but the rumor was that they were just the puppets of producer Trevor Horn and publicist/designer Paul Morley, the braintrust behind the Zang Tuum Tumb label. Well, no, not the rumor, exactly: the blatantly obvious fact. (Paul Rutherford’s job consisted of dancing around in bondage gear. He ended up making the best ex-Frankie solo records.) Those two mammoth, throbbing singles, and later the title track, were remixed and re-remixed and reissued to within an inch of their flimsy little lives. Every new presentation of the same thing was housed in an exquisite, witty sleeve, jammed with quotations from 20th-century writers and variations on the snickering, homoerotic iconography that Morley had come up with for the band. And every new mix was a masterpiece of sound engineering and arrangement: deep, evocative, bursting with detail. And I bought every goddamned one of them I could find in East Lansing, Michigan.

Then I brought home Welcome to the Pleasuredome and realized the awful truth: Frankie had forgotten to write songs. Beyond the two early hits, there was a hideously sarcastic power ballad, "The Power of Love," and the chorus-inflated-to-a-12-minute-epic that gave the album its title (or had perhaps gotten its title from the album), and then smirky covers of Edwin Starr, Bruce Springsteen, and Gerry & the Pacemakers, and . . . nothing, really. Nine tracks worth of nothing, out of 16: half-written songs and not-even-compositions, filled up with production tricks, Fairlight synthesizer flourishes, snatches of Holly Johnson’s weedy little voice. Horn and Morley had made absolutely sure everybody who bought the album knew that they’d paid for two LPs’ worth of style, not substance.

"Relax" and "Two Tribes" still turn up in new mixes every year or two. Please don’t ask me if I still buy them.

— Douglas Wolk