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Common: trying his best to stay out of a good beat's way

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Rap only exists in extremes. Don't let the polite reviews of Lil Wayne's Carter IV fool you, for instance. It got lots of polite 6 out of 10s, but people hated that thing. History will invalidate it. There are three ways rap fans remember periods of an artist's career:

1. On the ascent
2. At the top
3. After his or her prime

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[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

I had a ghetto friend once, who was like Keyshia Cole in some ways. My friend had gelled baby hair, gold rings, crochet braids, and lived around the rules instead of within them. My conservative mother was not a fan, but I found it inspiring, just like I find Keyshia Cole inspiring. Sometimes, however, it feels like I'm the only one.

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James Minchin

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Ahead of West Coast Sound's 20 Worst Albums of the '90s poll next week, let's talk about the Barenaked Ladies. When I tell people I love Barenaked Ladies, the first thing they usually say is, "I'm sorry." This is because I typically only bring it up after one of my friends has launched into a mini-rant about how much Barenaked Ladies suck. I mention my love for the band to stop the rant before it spirals into ugly territory, the way a formerly overweight person might interrupt a fat joke to say, "You know, I used to weight 300 pounds."

Generally, however, I keep my love of BNL to myself, because most of my friends are bigger music snobs than I am and Barenaked Ladies are one of those '90s bands that, like Spin Doctors and Hootie & the Blowfish, inspire a kind of overzealous hatred that seems totally out of proportion to whatever musical crimes they may have committed. Here, for example, is something Britain's New Music Express wrote about them in 1999:

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Credit: Greg Nissen

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

The recently-crowned number one song in the country, as you probably know, is a Seattle-based white independent hip-hop artist's ode to shopping at thrift stores. I'm not sure exactly how the stars aligned and/or what Illuminati clerical error caused it to happen, but "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis has found a wide audience. This has subsequently resulted in their album The Heist debuting at number two on Billboard, which has subsequently made a lot of critics and rap purists sick (and not in like, the good way).

See also:Macklemore on thrift shopping post-"Thrift Shop"

From Spin's Brandon Soderberg's "Stop Saying Nice Things About Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop'" to critic Chris Weingarten getting all Joseph McCarthy on critics who included it in their Pazzes and Jops ("in case you were looking for a short list of people not to trust with having opinions..."), the rapper has become a musical punching bag.

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Katie Bain

They're having way too much fun to care what you think of this situation

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

On a warm August night in 2011, roughly 18,000 Angelenos converged on the Hollywood Bowl, to partake in the swirl of cosmic hedonism and guitar noodling that is a Phish show.

See also: My Brother Got Married. The Theme of the Wedding Was Widespread Panic

L.A. concert culture can be unusual -- sometimes clique-ish and often rife with a general unwillingness or inability to break the cool barrier and really get down. On that night though, there were no pretensions or hang-ups. There were no eastsiders or westsiders, no execs or assistants, no well-dressed or dumpy. No one who wondered aloud: "Can an intelligent person like Phish?"

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Timothy Norris

In 1975, Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant stood on a balcony at the Continental Hyatt House above the Sunset Strip and screamed "I am a golden god!" Allegedly. From similar balconies at the same hotel, Keith Richards and Keith Moon both hucked TVs to the street below in fits of excess and Jim Morrison hung by his fingers. Also allegedly. Bonzo rode its halls on a motorcycle -- flashing devil horns like a lunatic, for sure. Rock and roll. Holy fuck, dude, those were the fucking days, am I right, bro?

See also: Why the San Fernando Valley Hate Needs to End Once and For All

Indeed. Now, cased in glass, hoovered clean of errant blow, groupie tears and Lemmy's sweat, the rebranded hotel -- now known as Hyatt's Andaz West Hollywood -- stands as a monument to everything that's changed about West Hollywood's Sunset Strip, the golden end of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams where rock excess became L.A. mythology. That squeaky clean veneer is one of the reasons the Sunset Strip has come back and exactly why we're defending it.

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RCA Records

Kings of Leon

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

I have several friends who should ostensibly like everything about Kings of Leon, but they strongly dislike the Nashville-formed outfit. If you searched for most of their favorite bands on Spotify or iTunes, Kings of Leon would surely come up as a recommended artist, but it doesn't make a bit of difference. It's something that's perplexed me over the past couple years, as I've discussed it with fans of My Morning Jacket and the Alabama Shakes, two similarly inspired southern rock bands who've risen to fame without a hint of a backlash.

When I ask them what they think of Kings of Leon, the response tends be a variation of either "They just seem like douchebags" or "That "Sex On Fire" song is terrible." But there isn't really much substance behind either of those arguments. Purists tend to hate most Top 40 at any given moment, and as much as we heard "Sex On Fire" on the radio in the grocery, laundromat, department store and porn shop, we were all bound to hate it eventually, just as much as "Firework" or "Call Me, Maybe."

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[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Mitch Miller, musician, record producer, and twinkly-eyed choir master of '60s TV, rules. (Or, ruled. May he rest in peace.) I hold dear and consider one of the greatest Christmas albums ever to be Mitch Miller and The Gang's 1961 Holiday Singalong With Mitch, which my family owns on cassette tape and which gets at least two full play-throughs whenever I'm home for Christmas.

It's fair to say, however, that my loved ones do not share my fondness for it. They probably wouldn't mind if it found its way into the fireplace along with a yule log and some lighter fluid. Why?

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[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

In 1998 N Sync, of Orlando, Florida, became overnight phenoms. Seemingly every girl old enough to get her ears pierced but not old enough to rent a car had a copy or two of their self-titled debut album.

See also: What The Hell Is Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" About? UPDATE: Mind-blowing Shit Has Come To Light

So what was the problem?

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Garth Brooks, four-sided polygon

[Editor's Note: Fuck Guilty Pleasures celebrates the over-produced, commercial, artless, lowbrow music that we believe is genuinely worthwhile. Like, among the best music ever.]

Huey Lewis is a dick. It's not hip to be square -- it's square to be square, the thing that the hip will always fight against. Garth Brooks could never be hip, because he's a master of the square. And since as a music-loving society we're ready to admit in 2012 that hip does not necessarily equate to good, that means we're open to square, which is good because Garth Brooks is good.

Of course, we weren't always so open. In fact, Brooks has been savaged -- even by country fans. There's the studio-hack productions and his hiccuppy voice. His has often seemed to be arena rock that didn't scream it at all. At its wildest it covered Billy Joel and Aerosmith, and loved reverb and the soft-loud dynamics that permeated every single genre of the '90s. In these days where Taylor Swift has a record that flirts with dubstep, and Cowboy Troy has challenged genre barriers as well as racial ones, it's amazing to think that Brooks radicalized country at one point.

But he did.

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