Unknown Pleasures

• Diesel, “Sausalito Summernights"

Diesel was a Dutch band that had one big hit – this exhilarating song – in 1981. I’ve always wondered why the track looms so large in my memory but has seemingly vanished from the rest of the world’s. I mean, I admittedly don’t listen much to the mighty Q (our local classic-rock broadcaster), but I do find it weird that for 20 years or more I’ve only ever heard “Sausalito Summernights” by deliberately seeking it out, and in my adult life I’ve only ever talked to one other person who even remembers it (and reader, I married her).

Here’s a fact that may or may not be relevant: according to the All Music Guide, “Sausalito Summernights” was a #25 hit in the U.S., but here in my home & native land it made it all the way to #1.

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At this year’s Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, one of the big themes is Guilty Pleasures. It’s a fraught subject for people who like pop music & are rightly suspicious about demarcations between art & entertainment, between culture & trash. Admitting that you actually feel guilty about enjoying Song X seems tantamount to reinforcing those phony distinctions, to announcing yourself as a lazy thinker who plods along the path of conventional wisdom. If the limits of what’s acceptably enjoyable, as established by canon & coolness, are inherently political, then the guilty pleasure supports that political structure rather than subverting it (as this here paper promises to point out).

I don’t disagree with any of that, and yet…. I still cling stubbornly to the belief that you really can experience a guilty pleasure without mucking around in the ideological swamp described above.

In my own case, guilty pleasure slithers within me when (a) I realize I’m being coarsely manipulated (look, there’s that moustache-twirling villain you’re supposed to love to hate!) and (b) I find myself responding anyway (I hate him!).

(For some reason, I find it easier to think about this in terms of movies, whose effects are visual & narrative and therefore a little more, um, effable. And I also think film talk is farther along than, say, book talk in being non-discriminatory when it comes to genre. Where music talk fits in there is open to debate, but in any case the general principles surely apply to music too.)

Sure, any movie or piece of art is obviously trying to manipulate you in some way, but that manipulation always exists somewhere along a continuum. At the top end, either the chain-yanking is subtle enough or the work has enough other things going for it (depth, style, urgency) that you don’t notice or don’t mind that you’re being manipulated. At the bottom end, the attempted manipulation is so crass & obvious & insulting that there’s no actual pleasure to be had, & therefore no guilt.

But then there’s that thin strip in the middle. That unnerving dissonance that arises when a work is getting under your skin even though you know you shouldn’t be letting it. When you’re angry because you feel like your intelligence is being underestimated & angry because apparently it’s actually not.

(Both guilty and pleasure are crucial; you’re guilty because you’re pleased. This is not the same as, say, laughing at how kitschy something is – that may be a kind of pleasure, I suppose, but it’s a smug one rather than a guilty one.)

((Granted, in some cases, smugness is actually just a cover for guilt; if you’re ashamed to be enjoying something, you can always pretend you’re not really enjoying it. But on the other hand, sometimes a smirk is just a smirk.))

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Anyway, I like the model above because it focuses mostly on the work in question & at least has the potential to move things away from the realm of “what will the cool kids think,” a question that’s usually assumed to be at the centre of any discussion of guilty pleasures.

(Though I do think that in our information-rich age, one side-effect on our discourse is a terror of being thought gullible. When I wrote about that Diesel song back at the beginning, I had to restrain myself from writing “strangely exhilarating” or “cheesy but exhilarating” instead of just “exhilarating.”)

((This is a pet peeve in a lot of reviewing I read: the sense that the reviewer’s afraid that if he actually expresses enthusiasm, somebody somewhere might think him a rube. So any admiration must be qualified to death, as if to say, Don’t worry, I kind of like it, but I’m not taken in by it or anything.))

(((Another pet peeve is that I notice & fight against this tendency in myself.)))

But who knows if you can ever really escape the poltiical dimension of tastemaking, the anxiety of critical consensus? After all, everyone would have their own thin strip where their guilty pleasures lie. What seems like a subtle & rich work to me might seem thuddingly patronizing to you. And it’s plausible that our notions of what makes for acceptable levels of “manipulation” could also be distorted without our even knowing it by the maps already laid out by established cultural surveyors. Patti Smith’s “Ask the Angels” is just as bombastic & cheesy in its own way as, say, “Radar Love” (to pick an example from Diesel’s Dutch compatriots Golden Earring), & yet I’ll defend the former far more readily than the latter. The selling points of “Radar Love” seem foregrounded & obvious & not sustainable over longterm listening, which for some perhaps ineffable reason is not true (for me) of the Patti Smith song. I can go back to “Ask the Angels” again & again, and when I do it’s not like “this is the work of a rock & roll legend” is clanging away anywhere in my mind. The appeal is purely visceral.

At the same time, I suppose it’s at least possible that I think this way only because I know Patti Smith is cool and Golden Earring is, well, not.

(Well, OK, Golden Earring is a bad example – I think you could almost argue that “Radar Love” is empirically inferior to “Ask the Angels.” But who knows, maybe there’s another kinda-cheesy song that I actually enjoy just as much as “Angels” but subconsciously undervalue because I consider it historically unimportant or lightweight or something. Just can’t think of one right now.)

• Patti Smith, “Ask the Angels” (live)