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Arts
Wednesday, March 31, 2021 — 5

When I first sought out to

understand
the
University
of

Michigan’s students’ experiences with
guilty pleasures, I expected to find an
underbelly of U-M students dumping
their parents’ credit cards into VTuber
donations or OnlyFans subscriptions.

After seeing my post looking

for interviews about the topic on
Facebook, a close friend messaged
me, “I do feel like I need to turn on a
private Spotify listening session when
I listen to Drake LOL.”

I responded back, “c’mon, DRAKE,

who’s gonna bully you for that?”

Drake is one of the most popular

artists of all time, I thought. What could
be guilty about that? But as I began to
ask more friends about guilty pleasures,
I got more and more seemingly
mundane answers. “The Bachelor,”
a powerhouse media franchise with
enormous cultural impact, was a
common response. So was country
music, an extremely popular genre.
Not that obscurity makes something
guilty — but if it’s something that
makes you feel embarrassed, it couldn’t
be mainstream, right?

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I should

not be enjoying this right now.’”

Engineering
freshman
Tom

Sherman is talking about Taylor Swift.
Swift just won her third Album of the
Year for folklore at the Grammys and
ranks in the top 10 best-selling artists
of all time.

“I’m sure when you looked at me,

you weren’t thinking, ‘oh my gosh, he’s
like, (a) Taylor Swift fan right here,’”
he said.

Sherman was right — I wasn’t

expecting his guilty pleasure to be
Taylor Swift. But that was because
I was expecting something more
… unexpected, like a shoujo manga
obsession or a Bella Thorne OnlyFans
subscription. If he were a writer for
Daily Arts, liking Taylor Swift would
practically be a prerequisite. As we
began to talk about it a little more,
though, I started to better understand
why it might be a guilty pleasure for
him.

“When I was rushing fraternities,

I wasn’t advertising it there …
Judgment is part of school. I rushed,
and I applied to all these clubs this
past semester,” Sherman said. “The
reality is, there’s a lot of times when
there’s a certain number of spots,
and not enough room. And if you say

something that is a little off-putting to
one person, it could cost you.”

Listening to Sherman’s experience,

I began to recall my own time as a
freshman at the University doing
my best to get involved on campus.
In my first semester, I applied to
five consulting clubs, all of which
denied me after stressful interviews.
I also attended the mass meeting for
a business fraternity that I walked out
of halfway through, in tears on my
way home from the League.

The pressure to impress people

was so terrifying for me that I couldn’t
share a shred of my personality. At the
root of it? A gnawing fear that my (very
mainstream) interests were lame.

That I wasn’t what people were

looking for. And in that context, I
understand how Sherman’s Taylor
Swift addiction is one that he preferred
to keep on the down-low during rush.

To Sherman, it was his male

identity that made him feel guilty for
liking Taylor Swift so much. I could
see how in the judgmental context of
rush and club recruiting, Swift could
suddenly feel like too feminine of an
interest to celebrate.

“I think the only reason it is a

guilty pleasure is because of my
demographic,” he said. “If I was

different, it wouldn’t be a guilty
pleasure. It would just be a pleasure.”

Sherman’s experience felt tied to

the pressure of fitting a masculine
image or narrative. When he felt
comfortable with his own enjoyment
of Taylor Swift, he happily shared it
with some friends. It was in certain
campus contexts that he felt hesitant
to open up about it.

But what about the guilty pleasures

that genuinely feel like a moral
compromise to enjoy?

LSA senior Isabel Saville described

her first guilty pleasure, fantasy novels
and worldbuilding, similarly to how
Sherman spoke about Taylor Swift —
just something you enjoy that you feel
hesitant to tell some of your friends
about. Her other guilty pleasure is
more complicated.

“I think that one (guilty pleasure)

that I would feel shame for no matter
what is music that’s derogatory
towards women,” Saville said. “When
you’re working out or you’re in a group
setting and you’re listening to music
that’s like, ‘fuck bitches,’ you know, it
just feels bad.” Saville cited Tyler, the
Creator’s early music (full of violent
and abusive lyrics, often directed
toward women) as an example of
music that felt guilty to enjoy: “That is

a guilty pleasure, because I don’t like
what it perpetuates about me.”

Saville’s experience can’t be

uncommon. Sexism in music is so
pervasive, and often swept under
the rug — it’s not as if men are
privately enjoying lines like, “If she’s
sucking on the barrel, you can’t hear
her scream,” from Ameer Vann on
“HEAT” by BROCKHAMPTON.
Frankly, I have the song on all my
party-hosting playlists and never
thought twice about who I play it
around, or what it means that I enjoy
it so much. I didn’t even notice the
line until Saville quoted it in our
conversation.

“It’s emotionally draining to hear

things like that and notice them,
recognize them and have to work
through them,” she explained.

For myself and other men,

listening to music tinged with
sexism rarely requires turning your
brain off to enjoy. The casual “fuck
bitches” lines are still practically
invisible for me, although in the
last couple of years, I’ve begun to
feel shame for some songs I used
to enjoy. I’d find myself listening to
tracks like “Xxplosive” by Dr. Dre
and doing a double-take at sexist
lyrics that are so heinous they make

Ameer Vann’s edgiest lines sound
PG-rated.

There are two sides of shame

that come with both enjoying and
recognizing
problematic
music.

Internally there is shame for
enjoying it, but there can also be
external shame for voicing that
discomfort. Despite Ann Arbor’s
self-proclaimed wokeness, trying
to open a dialogue isn’t always
welcomed with open arms in
Saville’s experience.

“It’s always really annoying when

I try to enter conversations with
friends who are like, ‘you’re just
being the progressive feminist all
the time,’” Saville said. “It’s just like,
‘you all say you’re feminists too! And
I know you support equality.’”

Paraphrasing
one
of
her

professors, Saville explained, “The
music we listen to perpetuates
cultural norms and ideas, so it’s
important to listen to things that
echo how you feel.” I share that
sentiment — it’s the dissonance
between the music we listen to and
how it makes us feel that can make
for a guilty pleasure.

When I was 11, I walked out of

the mall with the complete box set
of the first season of “Glee” on DVD.
I had begged my mom to buy it for
me for months. She was reluctant,
not only because of the price (you
can get them now for less than $10 at
Walmart, but back then it cost closer
to $50) but because she’d heard about
the show and thought it might not be
appropriate for an 11-year-old. It took
some cajoling, and I think I remember
something about a promise that I
would stop watching if anything
inappropriate happened, but as I
walked back to the car with the DVD
case tucked under my arm, I was
already half in love with “Glee” solely
because of the anticipation I’d built up
for it in my head.

As it turns out, I didn’t so much

love “Glee” as I did attach a piece
of my soul to its first three seasons.
Aside from being the source of my
love for musical theatre, the source
of my gay awakening and the only
reason I know all the words to Black
Kids’s “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your
Boyfriend How to Dance with You,”

it was also my gateway into fandom,
something which has taken up more
space in my brain than I’ll ever be
comfortable admitting.

When you’re young and you think

you might be gay and the internet
is still fun and not totally awful,
wanting to engage with other fans
online is inevitable. In 2010, it was
almost impossible to be young, gay,
online and not on Tumblr, the nucleus
of all fandom activity at the time.
I was impressionable and excited
and overwhelmed by the amount of
content that was already there when
I joined. Especially when “Glee”
started to go off the rails, it was a place
where people could yell with — or
at — each other about it, where users
wrote fanfiction that changed painful
canonical endings, where fans took to
Photoshop to create hyper-realistic
edits of their favorite couples.

The longer “Glee” dragged on, the

more entrenched in the fandom I
became. It’s hard to describe exactly
how in it I was, but it was probably to an
unhealthy degree. I wholeheartedly
engaged in the online discourse. My
love of reading became applicable
almost exclusively to fanfiction. The
way that a storyline played out for my
favorite character Santana (played by

the late Naya Rivera) in an episode
could drastically alter my mood for
better or for worse.

But as much as I loved the show, as

much as I sometimes felt like I could
burst from my love for it, nearly all
of my feelings were contained to the
internet. Fandom was taboo and liking
“Glee” had certain social implications.
There was an overlap there as well.

The queerness of “Glee” is obvious,

but the inherent queerness of fandom
shouldn’t be understated. The online
spaces that I occupied were almost
entirely queer, loving and working
off of the gay relationships “Glee”
depicted
(primarily
Klaine
and

Brittana), but also pairing straight
characters together in romantic gay
relationships and creating hoards of
content about them.

Thousands
of
queer
people

have used fandom, in part, as wish
fulfillment. When I first got involved,
the state of gay issues in the United
States was in a strange, in-between
place. Acceptance was growing, but
gay marriage hadn’t been legalized yet.

Everyone was starved for validation,

and we projected our identities onto
characters we loved. This was not only
applicable to “Glee” or other shows
with explicitly queer characters but

also to intensely heterosexual shows
like “Supernatural,” “Teen Wolf” and
“Sherlock.” The gay pairings Destiel,
Sterek and Johnlock were completely
fanmade,
the
results
of
rather

egregious instances of queerbaiting,
but that didn’t keep them from
becoming some of the most popular
relationships across fandoms.

For me, fandom, queerness, secrecy

and shame were intertwined. I never
felt guilty for loving “Glee,” but I felt
incredibly guilty about how much
I loved it and the ways in which I
expressed that love. How could I
possibly explain how much of my
personal happiness was contingent
upon how certain characters were
treated on a TV show? I didn’t want to
answer all of the questions that could
come with any offer of an explanation,
because I knew it could reveal a part
of myself that I wasn’t ready for other
people to see.

My friends knew that I really liked

“Glee,” but I never told them how
Finn outing Santana had sent me
reeling for days. I put an innocuous
slushie sticker on my binder and saved
a lot of the music to my playlists, but I
never let anyone in my real life know
the true extent of my deep emotional
investment in the show. I loved the

fandom, the creativity that it inspired
in people and the space it gave me
to express that creativity freely, but
I still read all fanfiction in a private
tab, never saved any bookmarks and
was careful to log out of my Tumblr
account after I was done scrolling
through my dashboard.

Things are sort of different

now. Fandom no longer resides
in a shadowy place that the light
doesn’t touch. We’ve entered a
time in which “Euphoria” directly
references not just fanfiction, but
the cultural phenomenon that was
Larry Stylinson. Celebrities and
YouTubers make videos reading and
recreating fanfiction written about
them. Hollywood makes successful
franchises out of “Twilight” smut.
The ubiquity of big franchises and
the way that they not only allow but
encourage fans to speculate about and
create around them has done a lot to
normalize letting entertainment take
up more brain space than it should.
What’s more, us once content-starved
girls and gays have grown up, become
self-aware and moved onto different
social media platforms. We love to
make fun of ourselves, the media we
used to consume and the way we used
to consume it.

Admittedly, I’ve never totally

fallen out of fandom. After half of the
characters (all the good ones, really)
graduated at the end of season three,
I fell out of love with “Glee,” but my
dependence on the comfort of an
online community and the content it
created remained. For a while, I felt
like I had been cut adrift; I floated
from fandom to fandom, trying to
figure out where I might feel the
same intense love and care for a single
thing again. I still haven’t loved a TV
show, movie or character in the same
way (and that’s probably for the best),
but that three-year obsession is the
reason Tumblr is still downloaded on
my phone and the reason I still read
fanfiction when I’m bored.

With those old tendencies, some of

the old shame still lingers. There’s a
recognition that fandom exists, but it’s
still sort of tucked away in the corner
of pop culture.

The fact that people care about

fictional characters and worlds so
much that they write novel-length
fanfiction about them or create
museum-worthy art is still thought of
as strange.

There’s only one way to describe

The Hunger Games series: explosive.
Never, in my 19 years, have I read
books so thrilling, fast-paced and
addictive. There are bone-chilling
horrors, swoon-worthy love interests
and immersive action. To this day, I
have yet to read a sequel better than
“Catching Fire” (some might argue
that “The Hunger Games” was simply
the set-up for the second book, and I
would agree). It’s genuinely ridiculous
how enthralling the series is. The
Hunger Games books are my guilty
pleasure … but the more I read them,
the more I realize they critique the very
idea of a “guilty pleasure.”

I can talk about The Hunger

Games for hours. In fact, I did over
winter break. Embarrassingly, I fell
back into my middle-school passion
— I reread the books and bothered my
older brother and a good friend into
rewatching the movies with me. They
nodded along awkwardly, trying to
pay attention to the screen while I gave
them a steady stream of commentary
filled with movie trivia and Reddit fan

theories. (I’m sorry, Ashvin and Julia.)

All of this is to say, I (and many

others) find the series binge-worthy.
The sheer brutality of the story alone
makes it impossible to stop reading.
The extremely popular yet skeptically
viewed series details the duration and
aftermath of the 74th annual televised
Hunger Games, where children from
the 12 impoverished Districts are
forced to murder each other for the
Capitol’s entertainment.

When the series first gained

popularity, I remember quizzes titled
“What Hunger Games District Are
You From?” would pop up online, with
questions like “Do you like to swim?”
or “Are you popular?” that, when
answered, placed readers in districts
based on their supposed personalities.
While fun at the time, these quizzes are
the antithesis of The Hunger Games.
The characters in the series don’t get
to choose their education, career or life
— they don’t get the luxury of deciding
their fate. Most readers of The Hunger
Games, despite identifying emotionally
with Katniss Everdeen’s story, cannot
relate to the struggles of the Districts.

It’s easy to hate the Capitol, the

prosperous governing city that puts
on the Games. Within the story, it’s

clear the Capitol is the enemy. The
Capitol (including the Gamemakers
and government) watches the brutal
Games indifferently while choosing
tributes to support, viewing them as no
more human than a beloved TV show
character or player in a video game.
They binge-watch the Hunger Games
like it’s lowbrow entertainment — their
“connections” to the tributes are trivial.

Upon rereading the series, it’s

apparent that we, the readers, are the
Capitol. We can’t look away from the
story because its descriptions of love
and suffering entrance us. We watch
with nervousness and anticipation,
rooting for our favorite characters to
win, mesmerized by the danger and
action. We marvel at the descriptions
of rich districts while bristling with
discomfort and surface-level sympathy
when reading about the abject poverty
Katniss, our protagonist, experiences.
We romanticize their stories, ignoring
the barely included details of genuine
hardship. Our guilty pleasure is
consuming their pain.

The Capitol’s adoration of Katniss’s

romantic relationships can easily be
compared to our society’s obsession
with the love triangle between Katniss
Everdeen, Peeta Mellark and Gale
Hawthorne (Peeta forever!). The
author, Suzanne Collins, has stated
in interviews that the romance is
supposed to be indicative of Katniss’s
worldview: Peeta symbolizes hope and
diplomacy, and Gale represents violent
and efficient solutions.

However, the often quoted “The

Death of the Author” piece by Roland
Barthes comes to mind — truly, it is
the critic’s job to interpret a work of
art. Therefore, if someone views The
Hunger Games as a tale of romance,
that is their right as a critic, and it’s a
valid interpretation.

One of the most unexpectedly

delightful moments of my high school
career occurred in my senior year
Advanced Placement Biology class.
The class was a collection of friendly
acquaintances who inevitably bonded
while staring at paramecium, cutting
sheep brains into slices and not
understanding what the Calvin Cycle
was. It was during one of our grueling
weekly one-and-a-half-hour block
periods when it happened. I don’t
remember the context well, much like
I don’t remember most of the material
from that class. What I do remember
is someone (or maybe multiple people)
quietly and inexplicably breaking out
into the opening lyrics of Usher’s 2004
hit “Yeah!”: “Yeah, yeah, yeah … yeah,
yeah … ”

And in a completely unplanned

moment, a large percentage of our
20-person class quietly chimed in with
the last and most emphasized word of
the phrase: “Yeah.” Incredible stuff.

As we broke out into peals of

laughter, I couldn’t help but think that
there was some level of significance to
that moment. Despite the years that
had passed since “Yeah!” had last been
relevant, this group of very different
people were able to recall the (albeit
very simple) lyrics. It made me think
of all of the other songs, terrible or
otherwise, that have stuck with me
from when I was growing up. Thus,
my “Bops for 12-year-old Me” playlist
was born.

I’ll admit, the playlist’s title is a bit of

a misnomer — the songs are from many
different points in my adolescence,
from the songs I passively heard on the
radio that embedded themselves into
my head to the Top 100 hits that the
DJ played at my middle school dances.
Even if I was a toddler when they came
out, they’re songs that I remember
from some context or another growing
up. This collection of nearly 300 songs,
for better or for worse, is part of my

childhood landscape — everything
from Rihanna to Sean Kingston to
Katy Perry to, say, the High School
Musical soundtracks. So why do I feel
so embarrassed listening to it?

When I first made the playlist, I

was oddly gleeful about it. Maybe it’s
because songs like Iyaz’s “Replay” or
Fergie’s “Fergalicious” make me laugh
even as I find myself singing along
to every word. But after the initial
playlist-creation rush wore off, I found
myself in an awkward situation: How
do I justify listening to these songs?

In a world where art seems to

always be focused on “what’s next,”
it seems harder to justify consuming
music that is a decade past its prime.
Maybe it’s the sensory associations,
or maybe it’s just the distinctive 2000s
music production, but there is a special
slice of music that people my age link
to that kind of nostalgia.

In all honesty, some of the titular

“bops” are songs that I didn’t like
much when they came out, but they
still managed to form such an indelible
impression on me that I had to include
them. Others I legitimately love to the
point that if they came out in 2021, I
would unironically listen to them all

the time, guilt-free.

But listening to music associated

with the big names of 2000s pop and
R&B comes with an odd sort of risk.
Clearly, this playlist is not universal
— “Bops for 12-year-old Me” is based
around my childhood, tailored to
my memories of the 2000s and early
2010s. There may be overlaps, but
not every song will slot perfectly into
someone else’s experience the way it
does into mine.

Because of this, there are moments

when I am painfully aware that the
songs from my childhood might not
elicit the same reactions from others —
there’s something uniquely awkward
about putting a playlist on shuffle and
having someone say, “I hate this song.”
Every time I offer to take the aux cord
and play “Bops” I find myself making
the same caveat: “If you ever want me
to skip a song, just let me know, and
I’ll skip it.” It’s easily my most popular
playlist: I have 13 followers, some of
whom are probably strangers, and one
of my friends told me once that she
listens to it while she codes.

Guilty pleasures at the University of Michigan

‘Glee,’ fandom and loving something so much it’s embarrassing

The Hunger Games critiques celebrity

culture, America’s guilty pleasure

Dissecting the guilty pleasure of 2000s music nostalgia

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

KATRINA STEBBINS

Daily Arts Writer

KARI ANDERSON

Senior Arts Editor

MEERA KUMAR

Daily Arts Writer

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