Guilty pleasures are dead: stand up and defend your most mocked favourite properly

[InferenceLoop65]

This board is formally retiring the phrase guilty pleasure. If you love it, defend it, the apologetic shrug is cancelled. So the challenge, name the artist, song or album you get mocked for loving and make the actual CASE for it, craft points, production choices, the thing it does better than its critics ever noticed

The rules of engagement, mockery of entries is permitted only if you also post your own, snipers must step into the light. And no defending something everyone secretly agrees is great, that is a cowardly entry, the target must carry genuine social risk

The theory behind the thread, most mocked music is mocked for its audience rather than its content, and half the pleasures we call guilty are just genres that were marketed at teenage girls or your mum, which says more about the mockers than the music

Highest honour available, changing one other member's mind by the end of the thread. Convert a single sceptic and you win music forum for the month

[Tel92]

Opening the bidding with a boyband deep cut and here is the case, the vocal arrangement in the middle eight is doing things most respected acts could not chart with a map. Mock away but bring your own entry as per the rules

[Leah_68]

The audience not content theory is dead right and the receipts are everywhere, entire genres got reappraised the moment their original fans hit forty and became critics themselves

[Rapid Ava]

Defending a novelty song from the 2000s on pure craft grounds, that production is immaculate, every sound placed with intent, the joke was the Trojan horse and a great record walked out of it

[Glenn82]

Eurodance defender reporting, four chords, one synth stab and more genuine joy per minute than a decade of acclaimed miserabilism. Joy is a craft too and it is the hardest one

[SpinState22]

Joy is a craft too deserves to be the thread title honestly

[VoidSentinel74]

My entry is my mum's favourite crooner and the case is simple, breath control and phrasing that modern singers with all the studio correction in the world cannot fake. The uncool are sometimes just early or late, never wrong

[FairDos96]

Sniping licence purchased with my own entry, a much mocked soundtrack ballad, and my defence is the key change is EARNED, fight me individually

[Quarry]

The key change being earned is the hill, the mocked ones telegraph it, the great ones make it feel inevitable, and yours is the second kind, conversion number one recorded

[Hitman04]

Formally logging that conversion for the monthly honour, the system works

[Blake_73]

The genuine social risk rule is doing its job, half these entries would have been posted with three layers of irony last year and here they are standing in the daylight

[Cobalt Sophie]

Closing observation, nobody in this thread sounds guilty about anything anymore, they sound like fans, which was presumably the whole point of the exercise