This, printed in full below, is my first feature article for my online journalism class (the entire reason behind starting this blog in the first place!) After deliberating for days over a suitable music-related topic, I stumbled upon the prevalence of guilty pleasures in pop culture. I know I have more than a few (handily included on my Muxtape, where all of you can go and view/listen to 12 of my personal favorite guilty pleasures) and, through interviewing some of the most intelligent music fans I’ve stumbled upon in my few years of music journalism, I’ve found that it’s a complicated topic.

Hopefully you’ll be intrigued enough to read along and find out just what fellow music fans really think about guilty pleasures!

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Christina hands over her iPod for inspection, as if she knew it was coming. Like any college student, her iPod is a constant companion, soundtracking even the most mundane moments in her life. However, scrolling through the seemingly never-ending list of artists, filled with the usual indie rock suspects like Cat Power, Vampire Weekend, and the Shins, something looks amiss in the Bs. Sandwiched between the B-52s and Badly Drawn Boy, one name becomes glaringly obvious: The Backstreet Boys. Upon further inspection, she has the entirety of both their self-titled debut and its follow up, Millennium, taking up space on her iPod. “What can I say?” she laughs, hanging her head in defeat. “It’s a guilty pleasure!”

Among twentysomethings – and music lovers in general – this is becoming an all-too-common phenomenon. Peruse any music fan’s iPod and it’s likely you’ll find a few songs that might make the owner cringe or blush, stammering about how they “don’t know how that got there” or how “my [girlfriend/boyfriend/friend] put that on there!” It’s possible you’ve experienced some variation of the experience above with your own friends, finding out their ‘dirty little secrets’ while browsing through CD collections and iTunes libraries, chiding him or her for poor choice in pop songs. Perhaps you’ve even been on the receiving end of such criticism, angry being forced to defend your love of some cheese-tastic ‘80s hit.

Yet what’s the difference between a simply amazing song and a so-called ‘guilty pleasure’? What is a guilty pleasure anyway? According to that great vessel of online knowledge, Wikipedia, a guilty pleasure is “something one considers pleasurable despite it being mainly received negatively or looked down on by a majority of society”, but that definition is incredibly vague. Is it the latest top 40 hit that you secretly download when no one’s looking? The classic rock hits (Journey, anyone?) you sing along with at ear-splitting volumes while driving? The teen pop favorites of yesteryear that get dug out every so often? Does the word even have any meaning in this age of free downloads and short attention spans? Music fans seem to have trouble deciding what meaning – if any – the term has in this changing musical landscape.

“When I think of a guilty pleasure song it’s usually something that I don’t normally listen to, whether it be a top 40 pop song or a novelty song,” says Kelly Kietur, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit and a part-time DJ. “It’s more than likely something I’d be embarrassed about having other people know that I listen to, but half the time I don’t even care about that because why should I care what other people think about my musical tastes?”

“I think the term ‘guilty pleasure’ is misleading,” says Hilary Hatton, a sales assistant at a national radio representation agency in Chicago. “Everyone loves ice cream, but it’s associated with feelings of guilt and shame because it’s fattening and bad for you, but is pop music bad for you? Are you really the worse off for listening to a pop song for five minutes the way you would be if you ate a whole pint of ice cream?”

Vanina Röling, a longtime music fan from the Netherlands, argues that calling songs guilty pleasures isn’t necessarily a bad thing: “Calling [songs] guilty pleasures makes them more pleasurable,” she explains. “It makes them better, because otherwise they would just be songs/films/things-I-like-but-wouldn’t-want-other-people-to-know-I-liked, and they would always be one behind the cool songs that you’re not embarrassed to like.”

She goes one step further, saying that guilty pleasures can even be comforting in times of stress: “You know those Chicken Soup for the Soul books?” she asks. “I’ve never read them, but guilty pleasures are like the lounge pants for the soul.”

The great debate among music fans is really whether guilty pleasures should really be considered ‘guilty’ in the first place. Music is an incredibly personal experience – especially with the growth of iPods, as more people listen to music alone on headphones than ever before – and there’s no secret music police out there inspecting the iPods of unsuspecting music fans for taste violations. Most of the people who write about their secret musical pleasures are what the casual fan would call ‘hipsters’ or ‘obsessed’, those who surround themselves with music of all sorts. It’s rare to hear a casual fan of pop music feel guilty over liking the latest hit, so why are music obsessives forced to repent for their musical sins?

“The idea of a guilty pleasure is definitely a personal concept and not really inherent in the music,” argues Lauren Roccia, a production assistant at WXPN, an independent Philadelphia radio station. “I don’t think a musician or singer goes into the recording studio thinking ‘I need to record the greatest guilty pleasure hit of all time!’”

Roccia, a self-described “sort of music snob” herself, argues that the entire concept of guilty pleasures is flawed in the first place, that it leads to too much unnecessary musical snobbery.

“Usually there’s a connotation of a guilty pleasure being something really pop-oriented, and I think this goes along with the fact that there is a definite element of music snobbery when discussing guilty pleasures”, she says. “Someone who has their car radio programmed to all top 40 or pop stations probably wouldn’t think twice about saying they like a song by Ashlee Simpson or Justin Timberlake.”

“The people who are listening to the type of music you would never hear on commercial radio are the ones that would more than likely find it embarrassing to admit to such things,” she continues. “My qualm with the whole guilty pleasure thing is not so much with general music snobbery, since I’m a bit of a music snob myself, but it’s that people feel they need to be embarrassed about something they listen to and enjoy!”

The general consensus among these music-loving girls is that songs only become guilty pleasures if you let someone else define your tastes.

“Guilty pleasures seem to be just another way to create and enforce societal divides - there are certain types of music you should be listening to, and your guilty pleasures are those songs / genres to which you listen but must call a guilty pleasure to show society that you still know where the societal boundaries stand,” says Stephanie Ferrone, a student at the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus. “You’re stepping out of your box with one foot, but the other foot remains firmly planted in the box you ’should’ stay in, as a reassurance that you’ll be back. You’re saying, ‘Don’t worry, I have guilty pleasures, but I won’t be breaking any molds any time soon.’”

“When rock and roll first started, there was no ‘guilty’ vs ‘proper’ sort of thing because they both come from the same root,” says Hilary Hatton. “There’s no point in feeling guilty about a song that’s usually called a guilty pleasure… [a song] has a rhythm and is catchy can come in any shape or form or genre and to say otherwise is elitist and pretentious.”

Pixie, a New York writer for the online music portal Shoutmouth, agrees. “I hate the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’, as it’s absolutely about snobbery, because someone has decided there is some reason or another it is unacceptable to listen to something they like/want to listen to,” she says. “I refuse to feel guilty about what I like; my karaoke song is ‘Girlfriend’ by Avril Lavigne!”

On the opposing side though, what if something’s a guilty pleasure only because you feel foolish listening to such a song? Is there not only societal norms you’re supposed to conform to, but personal ones as well?

“I think the shame-connotation tacked to these songs is more internal and personal rather than based on external standards of coolness”, argues Teresa Nesbitt, a student at Notre Dame University. “In such a framework, Guns n’ Roses’ ‘November Rain’ would be a guilty pleasure of mine because it compels me to jump on chairs and play impassioned air guitar. Guilty pleasures are embarrassing because you love them so much they make you act like a fool.”

Though the definition and philosophy behind the term continues to be questioned, guilty pleasure countdowns (such as VH1’s “100 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever!”) and blog posts seem to hit a nerve with the population, perhaps because they allow people to let loose, to forget about the pressures of the daily grind and just enthusiastically rock out. These pop cultural touchstones, without meaning to sound sappy, have the power to unite people from different backgrounds, people who simply love a great song when they hear it.

It’s unlikely that the ‘guilty pleasure’ concept in pop music will ever fade away, as it seems some listeners are more than happy to hide their love of these so-called ‘foolish’ songs. On the plus side though, more music fans seem willing to share their music tastes – warts and all – with fellow fans worldwide. “I don’t have any guilty pleasures, because I like what I like, I am who I am, and that’s that,” says Christie North, a university student from Toronto, Canada. “I don’t care if the whole world knows that I love Rick Astley!”