No Guilt, Only Pleasure! Always!

Sounds Good!

Ain’t nobody got time for guilty pleasures anymore. Right? I mean, the term “guilty pleasure” used to signify something beyond its contradictory feelings and confused meaning; something beyond the confusion put across by being made to feel guilt and pleasure simultaneously. The idea, I think, was that you were dipping out of your usual sonic space – the area of ‘cool’ you believe defined you, or that you in fact had defined as a forcefield, a protection-zone and/or possible area of expertise. The safe space of sound.

What you were saying, when you acknowledged a guilty pleasure, was that you were happy to slum it with the proletariat – you were King Henry IV having a drink with the workers in the secret underground bar. You were the billionaire banker all aflutter at the look and feel of the whore with the heart-of-gold. More than that though, you were ‘friends’ – you just didn’t want anyone to know.

How silly all of that seems when we now get to click through music and discard before the chorus or stack up songs from all sorts of genres at no cost to us beyond our time.

The term guilty pleasure arrives loaded with the disappointment of having spent not only time and energy – but crucially money. You bought something on a whim, got it wrong and then learned to sing along.

I knew Charlotte Grimshaw’s memoir was going to be absurd and a grind – because my one interaction with her was around the concept of Guilty Pleasure as a throwaway idea. I wrote a column for North & South, back in the days of terrestrial journalism. We got Kiwi celebs and artist-types to admit to a musical guilty pleasure. Half a dozen emails from Charlotte – after a simple request for 150 words on a favourite musical guilty pleasure – and we were no further to understanding if she would ever complete the task. She’d gone all Socratic-method lawyer-buzz on me. Do I feel guilt from the pleasure, or does it pleasure me that there’s guilt? Etfuckingcetera.

I’ve been writing about albums that I acknowledge are “crap” but I love anyway. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to nearly 50 examples. In most cases they are albums I bought because I was a fan of the artist and wanted to hear the ‘dud’ they made. Or I didn’t know it was a dud but it was a long time between pocket-money paydays. There were a lot more lawns to mow before a new cassette tape made it home with me. So it was basically the one time you followed Stephen Stills’ advice: You could not be with the one you love. So…

All of this is me setting up a good old-fashioned topic with a question at the end for you to answer – and also wondering what’s left of the guilty pleasure.

Life’s too short to give a shit what anyone else thinks of your taste. Your find your club on the internet and someone will accept you – if the friend you’ve never actually met in real life is suddenly affronted that you actually like Enya or WHAM or big band music from the 1930s and 40s, or the hits of Michael Franks or Gino Vannelli then a new friend is just around the next click and they will have every album by the uncool artist that made one song for you. They will have a scrapbook with locks of hair from that time they queued for three days to get a whiff of real talent; their scrapbook might even have a photo of you from before you ever knew they existed. You want to talk real guilty pleasures, lets talk telescopic lenses…

Okay, that was weird.

I’m purely stalling now but the aim here was tell you that I am in love with the song Walking On The Chinese Wall by Philip Bailey. It’s a multiple-whammy of guilty pleasure moments and I do not care. It has been my call-to-home for weeks now, months even. Something happened when I heard it for the first time in a while several months back. Olfactory senses were enveloping and I ignored the casual racism of the song (“Chinese Wall”, please) I felt no shame, no guilt and only pleasure to hear Phil Collins’ drums, his production, his backing vocals. Philip Bailey’s falsetto curls like smoke around words that barely make sense but are allegedly inspired by the tossing of the I Ching (“watching for the coins to fall”) and paint Yin-Yang images of “Stretching in the rocks/Tiger on the mountain-top” – but might also just pile up obvious images in a lazy stab towards the profound.

The frankly bizarre poetry of the song – Now the sun is rising in the East/Looking for my golden fleece/Iv’ry skin/Scarlet colour deep/Lips that burn but do not speak” – might be one of the most classic examples of disappointment when you read a printed lyric. You get none of the feel of the way the words are made to sound when sung.

Butterfly
Spread your painted wings
For an answer from the Ching
By the stream

Sounds like trust-funded adventure tourism from greedy capitalists to me. But wrap it up in a package that suggests Taoist and Buddhist philosophies weren’t just bumping uglies down at the tourist-trap photo-op spot.

None of this matters by the way. Which is why I don’t even care if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Because I don’t know what the hell Philip Bailey is singing about – despite reading the lyrics in full, despite going old-school and hitting pause/rewind/play to transcribe the lyrics because I’m sure the internet’s transcription must be wrong since I get none of the transcendent feel when I read them but all of the sweeping majesty of Phil Collins’ 80s production, his Linn drum gut-punching me, his spatial awareness for mood-build carrying me deep, the brilliant way that this so deeply feels like the outcome of its elements – a Genesis song and an Earth, Wind & Fire song stacked atop each other to play out as some ‘third’ song that drapes a cucumber-infused moist toilette over my musical third-eye. I don’t need the lyrics man. I just need the song. That and a dirty, great bit, fuck-off repeat button.

Or. You know. Put another way: Walking On The Chinese Wall by Philip Bailey is a big time guilty pleasure! I shouldn’t like it but I do. It smells like home. But not where I live now. Where I used to live. Where I grew up. I hear it and I think of taping songs from the radio. I remember that if the song on the radio was a dud we did nothing about it and tried to understand it. The car trips that were filled with instant new favourite songs because that was the only option.

Walking On The Chinese Wall by Philip Bailey isn’t good. At all. But it is fucking great! (The Great Chinese Wall!)

It doesn’t play well in 2021 – the wall is not Chinese. And pointing at it and calling it so is offensive. But listening to it and hearing the swirl of sounds is like a mini meditation.

Put that in your peace-pipe and smoke back on it hard. I know I have. (And now you know that too).

So, tell me: What’s a song you no longer consider a guilty pleasure? It might not be your proverbial cup of herbal verbiage – but it’s hitting the spot for you like, ah, an easy lover?

(I’ll add that I actually love the entire album Chinese Wall – a doubling down on the casual racism now seeming rather overt. But who can deny the song Easy Lover. It’s a goddamn banger).

And, yeah, I got your back – I made a playlist with no guilty pleasure. No guilt, only pleasure. All sorts of songs for you to start your weekend. Enjoy!