One man’s guilty pleasure is another’s palpable greatness

The film critic Anne Billson wrote a typically pugnacious piece recently about the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’, which has spread like Japanese knotweed beyond its origins in pop music and taken root throughout popular culture. In film a guilty pleasure would be something like Four Weddings and a Funeral, which we’re not ‘supposed’ to like because it’s not La Règle du Jeu, but which we do like very much because it’s fab. My nomination in this category, and a possible reason my career as a film critic never quite reached the heights, would be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You might think that Citizen Kane or Vertigo is the greatest film ever made, but which of them has Ricardo Montalbán quoting Moby-Dick or Mr Scott playing the bagpipes? One man’s guilty pleasure is another’s palpable greatness.

Pop is overrun by the guilty pleasures infestation. Critical consensus decided decades ago that the music of the Velvet Underground was more substantial and important than that of Abba, say, and the fact that no jukebox musical has yet been compiled from the toe-tapping tunes of Lou Reed is a travesty and an outrage.