Rest in Peace, the Guilty Pleasure: What We Lost When Liking Pop Stopped Requiring an Explanation

I have a very specific memory of being seventeen and making a CD-R for a boy I liked. I spent forty-five minutes constructing a tracklist that would communicate that I was interesting and slightly mysterious. Then I removed “Toxic” and replaced it with something by Interpol. Not because I didn’t love “Toxic.” Because I loved “Toxic” and that was embarrassing, and I wasn’t ready to be embarrassing in front of someone I wanted to impress.

That logic was never really about music. It was about who I was allowed to be.

You Needed a Disclaimer, and Everyone Knew It

There was a whole grammar to pop fandom in the early 2010s. You didn’t just like Britney Spears. You liked Britney Spears, but. You followed the but with something that reframed your taste as ironic, academic, or otherwise protected from the charge of sincerity. “She’s a guilty pleasure.” “I know it’s trashy, but.” “Okay, don’t judge me.” The disclaimer was load-bearing. Without it, you were just someone who liked pop, which meant something about your intelligence, your gender, your seriousness as a person.

Sampling pop coverage from outlets including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian across roughly 2010 to 2015 shows the phrase appearing as standard critical vocabulary: a way to acknowledge that a song was enjoyable without conceding that it was good. The grammatical structure is worth sitting with. Guilty pleasure. The guilt is doing work. It’s not “a pleasure I feel slightly ambivalent about.” It’s a pleasure that carries moral weight.

The institutional logic behind this is well-documented. Radio format segregation kept pop physically separate from rock and indie: different stations, different contexts, different cultural signals. Pop was for teenage girls and the people who weren’t embarrassed to admit it. As Ann Powers and others writing in the music criticism tradition have analyzed across their bodies of work, pop’s association with feminine consumption and commercial production made it a site of class-coded and gendered judgment. To like it unguardedly was to align yourself with those qualities.

Queer fan communities figured this out early. Britney fandom, and before it Madonna fandom, became sites of deliberate reclamation in LGBTQ+ spaces throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, as writers at The Advocate and Slate documented: the insistence that these artists were culturally serious, that the fandom itself was meaningful rather than shameful.

This was not just a vibe shift. It was a counter-argument, made in full awareness of the dominant critical hierarchy and in active opposition to it. The guilt was still there. The reclamation worked precisely because the guilt was real.

What the reclamation also had, and this matters: an antagonist. The critics, the publications, the institutional logic that had decided pop didn’t count. You couldn’t reclaim something from nothing. The hierarchy had to be real and named to push back against it.

Then the Infrastructure Disappeared

When Spotify launched in the US in 2011, per The Verge’s coverage of the launch, and Apple Music followed in 2015, they did not set out to rehabilitate pop’s reputation. They set out to maximize listening time. The business model, as Spotify’s own newsroom and subsequent industry analysis from Billboard documented extensively through 2015 and 2016, required keeping users engaged across genres, not serving them a hierarchy. Playlists like “Today’s Top Hits” and the mood-based categories that followed placed pop next to everything else without comment.

By 2016 and 2017, as Twitter and then TikTok became the primary spaces for music fandom discourse, a new vocabulary had arrived. “Stan culture,” a term tracked by music journalists from around 2017 onward, did not include a shame register. You didn’t stan Ariana Grande but. You just stanned. The intensity was the point. The defensiveness was gone because the premise of defensiveness, that the thing required defense, had quietly been removed.

Spotify’s annual Wrapped data, published every year since 2016, made pop consumption visible and quantifiable in a way that stripped it of stigma through sheer volume. When hundreds of millions of people are listening to the same three artists, the framing of those artists as guilty pleasures becomes logistically absurd. You cannot feel guilty about something that everyone is doing in public.

What We Actually Gave Up

Here is the thing no one seems to want to say: the disclaimer did something.

Not the guilt. The guilt was bad. It was gendered, it was a mechanism for maintaining a critical hierarchy that mostly served to protect the taste preferences of a specific kind of listener, and the publications and critics who wielded it most casually, the Pitchfork of 2008, the legacy rock press treating pop as a footnote, were doing institutional work that had real costs for real people. Good riddance to all of it.

But I’d argue the work of the disclaimer created something that we haven’t found a replacement for. The active justification, the building of an argument for why a piece of pop music deserved your attention and emotional investment, made a specific kind of relationship to the music possible.

The queer fan communities who reclaimed Britney and Madonna before streaming made reclamation unnecessary were not just expressing a preference. They were making an argument about cultural value that required them to understand why they were making it. That argument created community. It created a language. It created a way of knowing the music that was inseparable from the act of insisting on it.

What I suspect is this: the friction was doing some of the work of meaning-making. The teenager who could explain exactly why “Toxic” was a formally perfect pop song understood “Toxic” differently from the person who receives it today on a “Y2K Throwback Vibes” playlist, lets it wash over them, and moves on. Both of them are listening. One of them has had to know why.

What a Playlist Can’t Give You

The critical conversation around Beyoncé shifted visibly in the streaming era. NPR Music and The New Yorker ran pieces across 2013 to 2018 treating her work as artistically complex and culturally serious in ways that earlier coverage, with its persistent “but is she an artist?” hedging, hadn’t. That shift is correct. The old hedge was embarrassing in retrospect.

But the playlist called “Something to Wind Down With After Work” that has Carly Rae Jepsen and ambient drone on it, back to back, has also done something to the relationship between listener and music. It has made taste frictionless. You don’t choose it exactly. It arrives. It is correct for the mood. You keep it on.

The open question, and I don’t think anyone has answered it cleanly, is whether identity can form the same way in a frictionless system. The old way was painful and exclusionary and wrong. The new way is genuinely more democratic. I am not here to tell you the trade was a mistake.

The Record Store Aisle Had One Good Quality

The aisle is gone. The disclaimer is gone. The whole apparatus of institutional permission-granting that made pop fandom an act of transgression is gone, and the critics who wielded “guilty pleasure” as a verdict have largely stopped, because the cultural conditions that made it land simply don’t exist anymore.

What’s left is the music, and the listening, without the argument around it.

Go put on “Toxic” without explaining yourself to anyone. You have earned that, completely, in a way no generation of pop listeners quite had before you.

Just notice, while you’re listening, whether you know it the same way. Because I think knowing it required a little of what we got rid of. And I’m not sure what we built in its place.

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