10.1.16
Recently I’ve come across a few interviews in which an artist is asked to open up about their musical guilty pleasures and they give an answer such as “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If it gives you pleasure, then why should you feel guilty about it?” Well apparently these artists had the good fortune of not being raised Catholic, because just about everything I do comes with some semblance of guilt. And as far as music goes, yeah, I’ve got a few. In fact…I’ve got a bunch.
A few months back I was at my favorite record store, Vintage Vinyl, in Fords NJ. I’ve been going there since well before I could drive. The first time I went I must’ve been in the seventh grade as I had just found out that Green Day had released two albums prior to Dookie. A friend of mine told me about this record store called Vintage Vinyl that carried them and was about 45 minutes away which may have well been in a different country to a kid whose entire existence was lived within a distance of being able to hear his dad whistle so he knew when to come home for dinner. I asked my mom to drive me and because she’s a huge music lover and because those were her old stomping grounds (she grew up around the corner in Edison), she jumped at the chance. So I’ve been frequenting this store for more than 20 years and I still feel awkward in there. It’s a record store thing. You feel judged for your choices and that’s the way it is. A record store isn’t alone in instilling instant, unavoidable awkwardness in its’ customers. Other places include tattoo shops, guitar stores, vegan restaurants and a bar that has no business having a dress code but feels entitled to blindly enforce a no jeans policy or no sneakers policy without any signs or warning (not that I have a specific example in mind for the last one or anything).
So there I was in Vintage Vinyl a few months back with a gift card in hand and there wasn’t much I needed but I had free money to spend. So this is what power feels like?!? There was an album that I’ve loved since it’s come out but I usually admitted to loving it only to my closest friends. I didn’t yet own it on vinyl and there it was staring me in the face: My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Fuck what a catchy record that is!! My wife likes the album and it’s also an album I can play when in the presence of my two year old son which is now a factor in buying albums. It ups the albums’ worth, in a sense, if I can play it at times when everyone’s home. I pulled it from the slot, put in underneath the Bonnie Prince Billy album I was also purchasing and headed up to the counter. The clerk behind the counter had rung me up quite a few times before and was always quite nice, never coming off as judgy so I felt it was as good a time as any to walk up with an album that I felt needed an explanation with my purchase of it (“yes I’m buying this album but i went to my first hardcore show in 1995, I own “X” amount of Ebullition Records releases, etc.) and with this particular employee I could get away with not feeling the burning desire to spit this out as I handed it to him. As he scanned the Bonnie Prince Billy album he looked at the cover and asked “When did this one come out?” to which I wittily replied “Man, he puts out like 3 albums a year so I’ve lost track,” and we both shared a pretentious record collector chuckle. His chuckle ended before mine as the cover of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge entered his line of vision. This ended our kindred banter and he got right back to the nuts and bolts of the transaction. If we were Spanish this is the point in which he would’ve switched to the usted form. $34.98 please. Here you go.
I walked to my car, ran over my punk credentials in my head, made sure my windows were rolled up (and were air fucking tight) and queued up Helena on Spotify (I’m losing punk points left and right here) and had the time of my life singing at the top of my lungs for the entire 25 minute journey home. So yeah…sometimes pleasure feels guilty. And that’s part of the fun.
Here’s a playlist of some other guilty pleasures of mine. I’ve loved these albums since they came out. For the most part I kept my love of them secret until I’d meet someone else “in the know.” And they always felt guilty about loving them too so having this unspoken bond with someone was cathartic. But really, all four of these albums are excellent. Third Eye Blind has, hands down one of the douchiest lead singers around who writes some of the lamest lyrics I’ve ever read. But the dude writes a hell of a catchy song and has some incredible melodies. Their first two albums rip. I feel as guilty about loving them as I do about my use of the word “rip,” but I’m sticking with both. As for The Goo Goo Dolls (or would it be simply Goo Goo Dolls, with no “the?” Who the hell knows?)…anytime I think of them I think of working at Skechers my senior year of high school. I was a hardcore kid who ran the stock room and my assistant manager let me set up a cd player and play whatever music I wanted as long as it was low enough that they couldn’t hear it out front. It was 1999 so I was listening to Torn Apart, Kid Dynamite, Samiam, etc. One day I was stocking the shit out of some Skechers and my soundtrack was Dizzy Up the Girl by The (?) Goo Goo Dolls. Denise, my assistant manager, comes in the back looking for shoes, hears the music, looks at me like I had just slaughtered my own family and says “YOU are listening to THIS?!?” Hell, I even remember the song that was playing when this occurred. It was Black Balloon. Of course a goddamned ballad was playing. Why couldn’t she have walked in when a rocker was playing?!? Yes, the Goo Goo Dolls has some rockers goddammit!! I tried justifying my choice but I had clearly lost some street cred in her eyes and was just another stock-schmuck. Oh well…those people out front never understood me anyway. I was better off being left alone in my cave with my endless crates of Skechers and my 90s mid-tempo girly rock. In a way, if you think about it, that’s as punk as it gets. Perhaps that’s the guilt talking…
Suburban Bourbon 