Name Your Guilty Pleasure

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This post was originally appeared on my music column ‘The Crossroads’ over at Dad-Blogs.com on June 2, 2009.

You know you have one. Somewhere, deep down it haunts you, invades your soul. You don’t want anyone to know your dirty little secret. Suppressing it only works for so long until you can’t help but let it out. Giving in to it is the only way to feel free.

yanni So, what is your musical guilty pleasure?

What song or artist do you crank up, but only when no one else is around? Is it some corporate pop drivel that one of your kids plays ad nauseum? You pretend to hate it when they are around, but now it has grown on you like a fungus so much so that you long for a little alone time in the car.

Or could it be that Celine Dion song your wife, husband or partner loves and you publicly loathe? Did her endless droning about her heart going on finally break down your walls? Maybe you’ve downloaded it on your itunes and hid it in secret folder, or you’ve burned it on a CD and labeled it “classical” so no one would know what you are really listening to.

You hear the song in your sleep. You take long showers so you can be free to sing your personal anthem to your hearts content. It’s everywhere, but out in the open for the world to see.

Well, if you won’t start, I guess I’ll have to. Towards the end of my college days I lived with two of my friends in a small three bedroom apartment not to far from where I went to school. During this time Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill was tearing up the charts. I don’t know what it was about the song ‘You Oughta Know’ that drew me in, but I was hooked. I bought the CD and played it at full blast in my car at every opportunity. Then, my world came crashing down. I came home from work one day and heard the song blaring through the house.

“Who found my CD, dammit?!?!” I wondered silently.

Well, turns out it wasn’t mine, it was my roommate, who had become addicted to the song too. Apparently he felt it necessary to play it at full volume for all the world to hear in our apartment while playing Sega golf in our third roommates bedroom. After about a week of this my guilty pleasure was no more, its sanctity violated. In the midst of my despair, I scanned the radio stations on my daily commute into Boston hoping to find something new to call my own. Suddenly, three days after I reached my breaking point, it sounded over the airwaves. Its call was familiar, like an old friend. Then it dawned on me, what I needed wasn’t something new, but rather something I had connected with long ago.

It was at that moment with its driving drum line and powerful vocals ‘Shadows of the Night’ by Pat Benatar became my guilty pleasure, and has been to this day. Originally released in 1989 it even had a cool video, you know back when MTV still showed music videos. And, for you trivia buffs out there, the video even featured a young Bill Paxton and Judge Reinhold.

So now that my dirty secret is out, what about yours? Don’t be shy, you’re amongst friends.

No one will laugh, I promise.

Do you have a music question for me? Is there something, or someone, you’d like me to cover? Leave a comment or drop me an email atpj@realmendriveminivans.com so I can work on it for a future article. Also, if you’re new here, consider joining Dad-Blogs and grab the RSS feedso you can get this and all of the other awesome columns delivered fresh directly to you. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed the ride!