There are guilty pleasures…and, then, there are guilty pleasures.
It’s one thing to like an album that you know you really shouldn’t like when you can perform a lengthy rant about why it’s actually not so bad; for instance, I could write a lovely treatise on the pop goodness of former Spice Girl Melanie C’s solo debut, which you’d be prone to write off simply because she used to be a Spice Girl.
It’s quite another, however, to love an album and find yourself totally and utterly unable to defend it. You want to, of course…but when you sit down and listen to the record, you suddenly realize, “There is nothing I can say that will convince anyone that this disc is actually any good.”
I hereby open my closet of horrors, then, and submit to you my guiltiest pleasure:
Night Ranger, “Big Life.”
It was their last gasp as a viable commercial entity, but they were wheezing all the way, with only one semi-hit to be found among the record’s nine tracks, that being “The Secret of My Success,” the theme song to the Michael J. Fox movie of the same name. But I had seen the band in concert as part of an ostensibly-awesome double bill with Starship, I had all their albums – yes, I actually had them on vinyl – and, when I read in People that they had a new album out, I knew I needed to buy it right away. So I did. And I loved it. It was catchy pop-rock, albeit with more of an emphasis on a glossy sheen than a hard edge, but that didn’t matter one bit to me; if anything, it made it more accessible for me. By the time I realized that no-one cared about Night Ranger and that I was probably doing my reputation more harm than good by proclaiming the album to be “awesome,” it was too late; I knew the words to almost every song…and, to this day, still own it on CD.
Wow, that feels good. Anyone else got a guilty pleasure they’re willing to divulge…?
