Guilty Pleasures

I came within about 20 feet of getting killed today. I was walking from South Station down to the World Trade Center area for a job interview, and I was in the middle of the crosswalk at Summer and Atlantic when an F-150 blew through the red light and had to lay on its brakes to avoid hitting me. It stopped about ten feet short of me (and a teacher and about six kindergarten-age children with name tags, which I'm sure would have made for a much more tragic headline). At this moment of truth, when I probably should have been thinking of my family or my unconfessed sins, the thought that flashed through my mind was "God damn it, I'm going to die listening to Return of the Mack by Mark Morrison."

I listen to a surprising amount of what others would call shitty music. This isn't the shitty music that you might hear on the mp3 players of the androgynous, tragically emo seventeen-year-olds who you see on the T at night; it's the kind of early-90s pop music that would make you question my mental faculties. Yes, I'm ashamed, but I can still defend my preferences.

Most of our musical taste is defined by a particular time in our lives. For me, I think that time lasted longer than most people's. My first real exposure to music was the kind of comically bad pop that my friends' older sisters listened to in the car when I was like ten or eleven. Because of that, I associate all those songs with the flawless, tan bodies of seventeen-year-old girls, which are never more attractive than when you're just hitting puberty and your testicles are just starting to figure out their purpose. I think the appeal goes even beyond that, though; it's like when something is so retarded it goes all the way around the scale past "suck" and becomes good again. I'd be lying to you, though, if I told you my appreciation for awful, awful songs like "My Lovin' (Never Gonna Get It)" by En Vogue and "Girl You Know It's True" by Milli Vanilli is solely ironic. The best part about this is listening to it on the T. There are few more pleasurable feelings than the knowledge that other people are seeing a 6'2" 21-year-old white guy dressed in the Junior Attorney shirt-and-tie uniform and that underneath it I'm listening to girly pop songs. It's practically like masturbating through my pocket.

Look, I consider my primary musical influences to be Metallica, Nirvana, and Sublime - two bands whose frontmen were tragically cut down in their primes after long and torturous battles with addiction, and one whose frontman should have been. There is no doubting the manliness of my musical tastes. Consider the fact that the #1-4 most-played songs on my iTunes are the following:
1) Metallica - It's Electric
2) Pantera - Cat Scratch Fever
3) Snoop Dogg - The Shiznit
4) Pharoahe Monch - Agent Orange

However, #5 is "Do You Know (What It Takes)" by Robyn, a song that I think came out in like 1997 and could not more completely fit the definition of "bubblegum pop." I will fight to the death to support my claim that this track is the single greatest pop song of the last ten years. I don't even know why I like it so much; maybe it's because it recalls the kind of lost innocence from my youth I just mentioned. It's like the aural version of eating Fun Dip and feeling up someone's younger sister at my 8th grade formal. And every once in a while I still like to do both of those things. Don't hate.