Guilt-edged

I mentioned this blog to a friend the other day, and tried to explain the "angle". You've got to have an angle, right? Not just a bunch of unrelated MP3s (though some of my favourite MP3 blogs have content where the author's (good) taste is the only unifying theme...see Spoilt Victorian Child for example). "So, your angle is rehabilitating unfairly maligned artists?" says he. "Like Guilty Pleasures, then?" Well, no, not really.

The problem I have with Guilty Pleasures is that it seems to only want to rehabilitate a certain type of music, as Alexis Petridis recently noted. It's all about Alessi Brothers, Gallagher and Lyle, Pilot, that sort of thing. Soft rock. Which is fine, but it's only the sort of music to feel guilty about liking if you're an insecure Nathan Barley type. What about Sean Rowley compiling an album of music you really should feel guilty about liking? Like, say, Skrewdriver? But that wouldn't get 1500 punters into a club, thinking how wonderfully ironic it all is.

So, rather than reinforcing the orthodoxy (you can admit to liking The Fall or LCD Soundsystem, but you can only like the Starlight Vocal Band if you feel guilty about it), in this blog, Sun Ra and Simply Red will get equal billing. There won't be any ironic tracks from Hall and Oates, alongside the supposedly hep stuff. If I do include a Hall and Oates track, it'll be a good one, not an excuse to have a laugh and a dance around a handbag.