What’s Your Musical Sin?
Apr 4th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: General 
NPR’s John Schaeffer takes on the skeletons in your musical closet on the latest WNYC Soundcheck:
Everybody has a dirty little secret from his or her pop-music past.
They go far beyond guilty pleasures. Everybody has songs, albums, concerts, and other fan moments too embarrassing to remember and/or too shameful to acknowledge.
Host John Schaefer — who owns up to his initial attraction to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” — talks to culture writer Cintra Wilson, of Salon.com and The New York Times, and music journalist Anne Midgette, acting classical-music critic for the Washington Post, about their dirty musical secrets.
For Wilson, it’s “Love Me in a Special Way” by the ’80s R&B band DeBarge. “I mean, it really goes beyond just a guilty pleasure into a mortifying skeleton in my closet,” she says. “Or actually, I was thinking of it more about — like, sort of admitting that I have an inflatable sheep in my bedroom.”
It’s a funny show, and will also have you thinking about the influence that the music industry and radio have had on controlling what you listen to.
I have to confess to having a quite a skeletons in my musical closet, ranging from Mannheim Steamroller, ELP and Moody Blues albums to Britney Spears’ Toxic.
What’s the skeleton in your music closet? ABBA? Air Supply? Barry Manilow?
My music confession is that I have Bay City Rollers, ABBA, Yoko Ono, Pet Shop Boys, ELO, Bee Gees, Willie Nelson, Giorgio Moroder, Cyndi Lauper, Patsy Cline & Haysi Fantayzee on my ipod.
Some may not seem that strange but I am an industrial/ punk rock kind of guy.– It is all mixed in with my Sex Pistols,Buzzcocks, Front Line Assembly and Skinny Puppy.
Sex Pistols & punk don’t seem to go together – but they did come out at the same time.
My musical sin would be early Wham. Wake me up before you Go-go!
That and I used to sing along to “Everybody Wang Chung tonight!”
Ron, all of those bands (from Bay City Rollers to Skinny Puppy) have/had at least one really good song. I shudder to think of someone judging me solely by the content of my record collection. Would the Bee Gees and Partridge Family albums skew their perceptions? Probably yes, even though there are hundreds of other more “respectable” titles on the shelves by the stereo. I prefer to look at it less as a musical sin, and more as having broad tastes and interests 🙂
The Outfield, one hit wonders, with the song “Your Love” from the albums Play Deep circa 1985. I was a DJ at a high school radio station and loved to introduce that song by asking, “Has anyone seen Josie? Where the is Josie?” … “Josie’s on a vacation far away…”
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