Why guilty pleasures need to die

Pleasures? Yes. Guilty? No.

dusk fubar guilty pleasures stirling nightlife

Stirling’s buzzing nightlife scene had a brand new night thrown into the mix this week – Dusk’s Guilty Pleasures! This night promises to play all the cheesiest songs that you know you shouldn’t like, although I still reckon they’ve realised you’d have to feel guilty for enjoying a night in there.

It is, of course, just another random buzz phrase attempting to get people excited for the same club week after week, much like Fubar’s Damn Glam (shortened from my personal, baffling favourite “Too Damn Glam”).

Nevertheless, Guilty Pleasures got me thinking. If a club plays these songs proposing that they’re guilty pleasures and then everyone has a genuinely good time… how can they be guilty pleasures? I’ll go one step further – do guilty pleasures even exist? In a bold, and most likely wrong, statement, I propose they don’t. Or rather, they do. But only because we let them.

“This song is so shit, but I, uh, like it ironically because I’m surrounded by people.”

One song advertised on the Guilty Pleasures flyer is Journey’s classic Don’t Stop Believing. The very notion of this makes my blood boil. This song would never have been put in that category before Glee had their wicked way with it. Since then, the song has been ritualistically sung at every karaoke night worth its salt. However, this doesn’t mean that a once well loved song has to be cast away as a guilty pleasure. Just because it was taken by the masses and played into eternal oblivion doesn’t take away the fact that it’s a great song. Isn’t any song you take pleasure in great? Isn’t that the whole point?

Our election candidates never stopped believing

Why should an unnamed 22 year old male feel ashamed to listen to All the Right Moves by OneRepublic in the privacy of his own bedroom? The answer is that he shouldn’t. And yet he will, because he thinks it’s expected of him. Just let him listen to it. Let him sing along. Let him have a bit of a dance, if he wants, because it’s his own room and he can dance if he bloody well wants to.

Anonymous male

Maybe Dusk’s Guilty Pleasures will make everyone realise that it’s ok to like the music that we think we shouldn’t. At the very least, it allowed me to ramble nonsense at you for five paragraphs. That’s assuming you made it this far. Come back next week, when I will be discussing just how damn glam really is TOO DAMN GLAM.

Oh, and here’s a little pleasure for you…

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