By Drew Adamek
When I was single, I had a surefire conversation starter for first dates.
At the first awkward pause, I’d spring my winner: Say you are alone in your car and a shitty song comes on the radio. You turn it up, sing along and completely jam out but you’d be totally embarrassed if your friends saw you enjoying it. You’d just die if anyone knew how much you loved this song. Which song is it?
I could usually tell which direction the date was going to go – and if there were any relationship possibilities – by her answer.
I got through a lot of first dates with this little gem. Now that I am married*, I still like to use it as an icebreaker with people I don’t know very well. It never fails because everyone has at least one guilty pleasure song.
My list of guilty pleasure songs is really long because I have to adhere to my own, made up metalhead rules. Music must meet the ridiculous standards I arbitrarily created as an angry, know-it-all, 14-year-old boy.
That means no poser bullshit, no genres outside of metal, blues or early ’90s hip-hop and nothing with any meaningful emotional content. I don’t truck in musical ironies or diversity; it’s all blazing guitars, testosterone and aggressive posturing for me. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy a couple of jams that fall outside my limited musical tastes. I am going to share these today at the risk of ruining my imaginary metal reputation.
These are the rules for this list: 1) I can’t own the song; I can only catch it on the radio. 2) My brother, or my inner teenaged boy, would laugh at me if they caught me listening to and liking any of this crap. 3) I generally only listen to these while alone in the car. 4) I am not a poser because I like a couple of crappy songs.
Here, then, are my guilty pleasure songs:
Posted on November 10, 2010