Opinion: Guilty pleasures don't exist

One time or another, we've all heard of the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ when it comes to discussing our music taste. Whether it's Westlife or The Cheeky Girls, there's something in pop music and cheesy classics that make us inherently squirm. Here's why you should turn the volume up to 100.

So what exactly is a guilty pleasure? The term is generally used to describe songs that we feel a sense of embarrassment around listening to, think Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go or What Makes You Beautiful – secretly most of us will gain some level of a dopamine hit from listening to these tracks but the stigma claws away our enjoyment. 

What if we lived in a world where guilty pleasures didn't exist? What if we were just allowed to enjoy the Sugababes on a Saturday night or find comfort in so-called indie landfill like The Pigeon Detectives? Music is wildly subjective, in an age where any song is available to us in mere seconds, we take the parts we need such as the lyrical meaning or joyous beat, and throw away the rest, so what's so wrong with finding comfort in the once-popular?

Music is one of the most powerful healing tools known to man, whatever you're going through or however you feel, I can guarantee you'll find a track that will help you make sense of it all. Who cares if it happens to be something that isn't considered ‘cool’. There's a reason why these artists became popular, they manage to hit the nail on the head at the right time, capturing a sentiment and emotion that lives well beyond its years. In my humble opinion, there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Music gives us the freedom to choose how we connect with the world. If you find solace in 90s boy band songs, or want to dig out your flares from the 70s and attempt karaoke to ABBA, who am I to judge? 

The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ is just further proof of society's obsession with labeling people to make us easier to understand, despite humans being inherently complex. You’re a ‘fangirl’ if a teenage girl even thinks about putting a picture of Harry Styles on her wall, or a ‘goth’ if someone feels more comfortable wearing black clothes or listening to music with a darker theme. These labels provide nothing to society other than a mild form of comfortability but life is too short to just stay comfortable. Guilty pleasures are whatever you want them to be for you, for some they simply don't exist at all.

In a study in 2016 by De Montfort University, questioning why people listen to guilty pleasures some responded with said: “while they did not like these songs, they listened to them because they had valuable memories associated with them, or that they felt nostalgic for a time when they enjoyed the music guilt-free and un-ironically”. This shows that many miss the feeling of guilt-free listening, but it would be so easy to claim it back if nobody cared what others found enjoyment in. 

The world is severely lacking warmth and enjoyment, so I implore you to go and play your favourite cheesy tracks without fear or shame. If there really is such a thing as a guilty pleasure, God knows the world needs more of them.