Those saccharine pop tunes and schmaltzy ballads cloaked from friends? There’s no excuse anymore. No blaming it on a CD that had just one song you liked. No claiming it belonged to your wife, ex-boyfriend or friend.
You selected each and every tune. Like it or not, these are your greatest hits.
The advent of the iPod and similar storage-rich MP3 players is a boon for convenience and portability. But these devices, which are passed around, shared and showcased among friends and co-workers, make exposure of one’s previously private tastes an unintended side effect.
“I have all of Shakira’s CDs on my iPod,” said Matt Barnett, 23. “Everything else is standard rock ‘n’ roll-type music. People just usually laugh at me.”
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“You’d be surprised how many people have Britney Spears on their iPod when they swore they’d never listen to that idiot,” said Brian Cooley, editor at large for technology news and reviews Web site cnet.com based in San Francisco. “Abba music. The Starland Vocal Band. Artists that people make fun of institutionally because we’re really all a bunch of pop music fans.”
Cooley almost winces when he reveals the chords he’s concealing. “It’s primarily Burt Bacharach and the Carpenters, which is very uncool.”
Personal music selection, it seems, is an unintended sliver of one’s psyche, tickling emotions and arousing sentiments we’d rather keep secret. If people knew the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple” made your feet tap, it could seriously damage one’s cool and credibility.
Still, if we love this music, why the shame?
“Guilty pleasure is like an oxymoron,” said Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, a child and adolescent psychologist in New York City. “If it’s a pleasure, it shouldn’t be guilty.”
The New York subways, Hartstein said, are elbow to elbow with iPod users, all eyeballing the selections of fellow passengers.
Music, she said, is such a personal form of self-expression that opening up these choices can almost be too revealing.
“I have all of Ace of Base,” said Robert Miller, 23, of Atlanta, who counts 2,000 songs on his iPod. “I also have New Kids on the Block on there. I keep it hidden. It’s part of my childhood. It doesn’t get worse than the New Kids on the Block.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])