"The moment you say: 'This is really my guilty pleasure'...it is no longer a guilty pleasure"

Abstract

The definition of guilty pleasures is researched, with the theory of taste by Bourdieu, and the omnivorous thesis by Peterson. The goal is to find out how indie rock musicians classify certain music and certain tastes. The research question is: “To what extent do young indie rock musicians feel they can or cannot freely talk about their (self-classified) ‘bad taste’ among their peers and why?”. Indie rock musicians define good taste by defining what it is not. It is a guilty pleasure when it is one song that is outside of one’s normal taste, and it is ‘bad taste’ when it is a whole genre or a whole artist. Guilty pleasures are an exception to one’s ‘normal’ taste. The ‘guilty’ in ‘guilty pleasure’ no longer stands for being ashamed about your taste. The ‘guilty’ is now more about ‘betraying’ one’s own genre or taste, the taste that someone identifies with.