Because Klosterman Says It Better Than I

I love pop music. Not all of it, but a good deal of it. I don't necessarily buy a good deal of pop albums, but I love pop singles. Over the past several years, the bar for pop production has been raised, and whether it's just the catchy pleasure of Mariah Carey's "Shake it Off" or the subtle avant garde touches of Justin Timberlake's "My Love," such productions have raised the bar for all music. Yet despite a certain level of critical acceptance, such compositions are consistently defined (in classist terms, frankly) as "guilty pleasures."

In "Guilty Pleasures: The curious etymology of a phrase gone wrong," published in Esquire in November 2004, Chuck Klosterman writes, "Labeling things like Patrick Swayze movies a guilty pleasure implies that a) people should feel bad for liking things they sincerely enjoy, and b) if these same people were not somehow coerced into watching Road House every time it's on TBS, they'd probably be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both of these assumptions are wrong." He later adds that those who use the term "fail to realize is that the only people who believe in some kind of universal taste—a consensual demarcation between what's artistically good and what's artistically bad—are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else's art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

The lines between high art and low art have been permanently blurred and while predominant media should always be looked at through a critical lens, a pre-disposition to what what should be considered good and what should be considered bad is simply the antithesis of artistic progress.

That is simply my long-winded introduction for Justin Timberlake's new video, "LoveStoned/I Think She Knows" ...