The Honesty of Pop: Let Yourself Like What You Like

I skip the song quickly when my wife walks into the room, embarrassed to be caught enjoying a Bollywood pop track that my curated musical identity considers beneath me. My carefully constructed persona prefers sophisticated music—Rabindrasangeet, jazz, thoughtful folk songs—but here I am, alone in my headphones, genuinely moved by a melody that sounds like it was designed for teenage emotions.

We police our own joy in service of an image that exists mostly in our own minds.

Musical guilty pleasure is shame about experiencing uncomplicated happiness.

The song makes me feel sixteen again, when emotions were larger and more honest, before I learned to be embarrassed by sincerity. But admitting this feels like confessing to intellectual failure, emotional immaturity, aesthetic poverty.

We’ve confused sophistication with the suppression of simple pleasure.

My wife likes a particular English pop song that she hides from me because she knows I’ll raise my eyebrows, make gentle jokes about her taste. But I’ve caught her singing along when she thinks I’m not listening, and the pure joy on her face is more beautiful than any critically acclaimed album I’ve ever seen someone appreciate.

We perform our musical identity for audiences who are mostly performing theirs back at us.

Guilty pleasure songs are usually the ones that access emotions we’ve decided we shouldn’t have.

The Bollywood track doesn’t just sound good—it makes me feel optimistic about life in ways that more serious music doesn’t. It suggests that maybe problems are solvable, love is possible, the future might contain more joy than suffering. These aren’t sophisticated emotions, but they’re necessary ones.

We’re embarrassed by music that makes us feel better than we think we deserve to feel.

My son has no musical guilt yet. He likes what he likes without apology, switches between classical pieces and cartoon theme songs with equal enthusiasm. He hasn’t learned to be ashamed of responses that don’t match some imaginary standard of cultural refinement.

Children are naturally honest about what moves them before we teach them to be dishonest about pleasure.

Musical identity becomes another form of social signaling, another way we try to control how others perceive us.

I want people to know I appreciate complexity, depth, artistry. I want my music taste to communicate intelligence, sensitivity, cultural awareness. The guilty pleasure songs threaten this carefully constructed image by revealing that sometimes I just want to feel happy, moved, energized in ways that sophisticated music doesn’t provide.

We treat musical taste like moral character, as if enjoying simple melodies were evidence of simple minds.

What if musical guilty pleasure is actually musical honesty?

Maybe the songs we’re embarrassed to love are the ones that access our most authentic emotional responses, before we learned to filter joy through cultural acceptability.

What songs do you love in private that you wouldn’t admit in public? What music accesses joy you’ve been taught to hide? And what would change if you stopped being embarrassed by the sounds that genuinely move you?