Liberate the skeletons in your iTunes

If there were a police force made entirely of indie rock elitists, I would be in jail right… If there were a police force made entirely of indie rock elitists, I would be in jail right now. My arrest would go something like this:

“I didn’t want to do it, officer, I swear!”

“Doesn’t matter, kid. You’ve committed the gravest of offenses. You listened to — and enjoyed! — the latest New Found Glory album. The jig is up.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of you that people like this do exist, but luckily, they don’t have the power to put musical criminals like me behind bars. And while we may not all actually have a conversation like the one above, we all have a voice inside us that says what music is cool and what is, well, downright embarrassing.

Still, because some music can be construed as shameful to listen to, all of us have at least one band that falls head-on into this category that we continue to (secretly) rock out to. These bands, my friends, are called guilty pleasures.

They don’t call themselves guilty pleasures, of course; the vast majority of rock acts today, with the exception of idiots trying to be cool, as in “Weird Al” Yankovic, or cool kids trying to be idiots, as in Hellogoodbye, take themselves pretty seriously.

And today, I am here to say that I have more than my share of guilty pleasure bands and, although it has taken years of counseling, I am ready to come clean. I hope that my honesty here can inspire all of you to do the same; there’s nothing worse than a friend in need of a musical intervention because he won’t admit his guilty pleasures (“Alright, Bruce, we’re here to help you admit that you have a problem. And that problem is Linkin Park”).

Now before you call me a hypocrite, citing the column in which I urged you never to shape your musical taste to fit in a clique, keep in mind this is a different issue. Guilty pleasure bands are bands that we know in our heart of hearts are bad, cheesy and embarrassing, but somehow, we still love them. To explain, let me give you a personal example.

New Found Glory is a dumb band … musically, that is. Their shtick is cookie-cutter pop-punk, with similar melodies on nearly every album and lyrics that could have been written by an illiterate 8-year-old in love with his sandbox playmate. I recently procured the band’s new album, Coming Home, interested after I’d read it was NFG’s mature album — the type of album that every pop-punk band releases after singing about high school dances gets old.

And, although it physically pains me to say this, I love it. Naturally a skeptic, I asked myself why. Is it the lyrics? No way — one song contains possibly the least romantic line about sex ever written: “Soon I’ll be back from all this work/And I’ll make love to you/We’ll reconnect it!” And I certainly didn’t admire the unique musical style — NFG has been a watered-down version of Blink 182 since 1997.

So, and I will now apply this to all guilty pleasure bands, I must be a sucker for the melodies. With Coming Home, this is completely logical — each song on this album is catchier than the one before it. I can’t stop humming these tunes and singing the words; I feel like I’m a 14-year-old girl updating her MySpace page during homeroom.

A second type of guilty pleasure band is what I call the Fall Out Boy category — that is, a band that has more fans than the population of Africa, but very few who will openly admit it. Other acts that fall into this category of distinction include Dashboard Confessional, The Fray and Coldplay. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say, “Hey, did you hear this new, cutting-edge band called The Fray?”

We all have bands that are guilty pleasures — acts that we don’t necessarily respect or particularly like, but listen to simply because their music is so damn catchy. Guilty pleasure bands are those that we feel, however pretentious this may sound, too cool to listen to. And so, logically, we try to listen secretly: When the roommate’s away, the Christina Aguilera will play.

I believe, however, that it is our right as fans, nay, as human beings, to listen to whatever music we choose. Embrace all the terribleness of your musical guilty pleasure. Sure, Ashlee Simpson is bad, but what’s worse is lying about your secret iTunes collection to your friends. For all you know, they secretly love her too! Now there are the building blocks of a healthy friendship.

In conclusion, and it has taken me a long time to admit this, even to myself, it’s finally time to tell the truth: I’m into Sum 41, and I listen to it. A lot.