Guilty Pleasures....

First of all:  Merry Christmas! 

I started this blog post about ten days ago.  Things got a bit busy and so it goes that I'm finishing typing this up in Canada...after I had started working on this in Japan.

                                                                                    -*-

Sometime during the past year a friend sent out an e-mail to all those he usually spams suggesting people send in the titles of songs which they'd call guilty pleasures.  Now my friend's tastes in music can be summed up along the lines of eclectic and widely varied.  He does have an ear for music and he can play an instrument competently.  So what he listens to has to meet a reasonably high personal standard.  He sent out one e-mail afterwards with a link to his guilty pleasure.  I took one look and, as I smiled to myself, thought "Oh...that was a bit predictable".  In short, it was a piece by a semi-obscure musician who could be summed up in one word: brilliant.  My follow-up thought was "Where's the fun in that?".

The fun in the situation from my friend's perspective probably lay in an expected reaction of "Oh, you still listen to him?".  Over indulging can certainly equate to guilty pleasure.  But my initial reaction had more to do with my personal feeling that a guilty pleasure should also arouse a sense of public embarrassment for the one holding it.  For me, that's the element of fun in having a guilty pleasure.


I was going to ramble on further but I'm going to cut this short by mentioning that my latest (yes, there are plenty of others) musical guilty pleasures come from the field of Kpop girl idol groups.  Not the statuesque and stunningly pretty variety though.  No.  I've gotten hooked on a couple of units (lets face it: no matter what the country, idol pop stars are more product than just talent) who I'd label as "quirky" or "odd".  The "odd" label applies to a quality which I've noticed: they remind me of mid-80s to mid-90s Japanese idols...which of course serves as a signpost in the direction of my past musical guilty pleasures....