I’ve always struggled with the idea of a “guilty pleasure.” Truly innocent pleasure shouldn’t come with a side of shame. Most guilty pleasures are purposely private, indulged alone or among the friends who are safe enough to confide in. There are adults who skip social obligations to play video games in their underwear all day. People devote weeks of their lives to hilariously deranged dating shows—The Ultimatum, Love Is Blind, Married at First Sight, and Love Island—but engage in cultural discourse only when it’s around something more acceptably “meaningful,” like books or politics. There are those who obsess over their frenemies’ social media, but love to declare at parties, “I don’t really use Instagram anymore.”
A guilty pleasure is something you genuinely enjoy but might die before admitting to, simply because it doesn’t align with the image of “good taste” you’ve imagined—or spent time curating—for yourself. The guilt isn’t moral—it’s not wrong to enjoy the thing—but it’s socially contextual. It’s not that you shouldn’t enjoy it; it’s that someone you’ve deemed cooler, wiser, or more informed might judge you for doing so.
When the phrase “guilty pleasure” is applied to music, it takes on a slightly different shape: the implication that you should be embarrassed by your taste. (Maybe you should! We’ll talk later.) But as someone who has worked at music publications for nearly two decades—assigning and even defining taste for a certain kind of audience—I have learned that passion for a piece of music can easily beat whatever vague canonized idea of “good taste” that leagues of critics, music industry machinations, and algorithms have agreed upon. If you can explain why something is actually good to you, for whatever reason and by whatever metric—lyrics, composition, pure emotion, historical context, or even just because it hits in a very specific way—I’ll do my absolute best to try to believe you. Sure, I might not want to listen to it. I might even think your taste is bad. (Mine? It’s good.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t think your love for it has real value.
I have enormous respect for anyone bold enough to say that a universally beloved song is bad. Or better yet, that a universally reviled track is, against all odds, pretty incredible. There’s a reason that we often keep the horrible songs we love to ourselves: Self-proclaimed music nerds (and, by nature, music critics) are some of the most fun, charming, and smart people you’ll ever meet … and also some of the most irritating, pedantic, and insufferable. Depending on the day, their personal approach to music may be deeply obsessive and cataloged, or entirely feelings-first, open-minded, and giddy. If you care what they think—or worse, if you’re in love with one—you might find yourself muting some of your own taste as a matter of self-protection.
But not here. Here, we support everyone—especially Luis and Barry—despite their taste in music. In the spirit of shameless self-love and radical acceptance, I posed the following to the Defector staff: What’s the worst song you love so much that you’d defend it with your life—or, at the very least, willing to get roasted in the comments for admitting? I’ll start.
Incubus – “Drive”
This was really a matter of timing. Had I seen the music video for D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” before I saw Brandon Boyd shirtless—his boxers and jeans barely clinging to the lowest point of his hips, revealing angles most teenage girls had yet to even imagine—I might not have paid attention to this song at all. Both songs, and their videos, were released right around the turn of the century, just as I was finishing middle school. One of them, performed by one of the most gifted artists of his generation, was an immediate critical triumph: the epitome of sex, a cultural moment, and a launchpad for discourse about the female gaze. The other—this nasally sung introspection that I also love—topped the alternative charts, convincing millions of teenage girls that skater boys could be deep, and thereby convincing millions of teenage boys that picking up a guitar was proof that they were.
Incubus isn’t solely responsible, of course. They came from the angsty Californian lineage of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple Pilots, and lived in a world where bands like Goo Goo Dolls, Gin Blossoms, and Matchbox Twenty defined a particular kind of alt-radio male brooding. But “Drive” hit a little differently. The overwrought twang matched the tilt of Boyd’s guitar, signaling—to me, at least—that feeling his feelings required extracting them with such painful precision that the only possible way of voicing them was to warble. That kind of intensity could only be about love, right? In interviews, Boyd said the song was about the fear—the fear that drives how you show up in the world—and imagining a life without it. But it turns out teenage girls can make anything about themselves. – Puja Patel
Luke Bryan – “Country Girl (Shake It For Me)”
When I first moved to the East Coast, people were always asking me about stereotypes tied to my home state of Texas. Did I own cowboy boots? Yes. Can I ride a horse? Yes. Do I know how to line dance? Of course. But when they asked if I liked country music, I always felt the need to qualify my taste. I liked old country music, I’d say Dolly, Loretta, Willie and the like. I’d make sure to clarify that I didn’t like “bro” country like Florida Georgia Line, Blake Shelton, and—god forbid—Chase Rice. The kind of music about your truck, and your girl and your Friday night drinking.
But this was a lie. I will always love Luke Bryan’s “Country Girl (Shake It For Me).” The kick drum from the very start is enticing. The concept of shaking your ass for the “crickets and the critters and the squirrels” is hilarious. Sometimes, when I’m at a bar with a digital jukebox, I’ll queue it up from my phone, only for my friends to groan as it starts. But after the first chorus, when the song returns to that kick drum, the song picks up. It will easily “rope you in from a country mile,” as Luke Bryan sings, even if you have no idea what that means. – Kelsey McKinney
Limp Bizkit – “Re-Arranged”
The reasons I listen to Limp Bizkit in the year 2025 are not interesting, or at least not complicated. Their music lives in the same mp3 library I have been compiling since high school, and I have never taken the time to sort or prune it. When I’m out, I usually just put my whole shit on shuffle. Naturally, this leads to various situations where someone observes what I’m listening to and says, rudely, accurately, and somewhat rhetorically: “You’re listening to Limp Bizkit?” Rather than recount the technological inertia that led to this moment, I like to point them to “Re-Arranged,” which I tell them is actually a good song, thank you very much. Is “Re-Arranged” objectively an actually good song? I do not know. It has clean guitars and is relatively restrained, at least until a building outro that earns its angst rather than starting from it. If nothing else, it is the least Limp Bizkitty song in Limp Bizkit’s entire catalog.
(One might think “Behind Blue Eyes” is the least Bizkitian song because it’s a cover of a Who song. One would be wrong. Limp Bizkit’s version of “Behind Blue Eyes” is so shitty that it is in fact the single most Limp Bizkit song.) – Barry Petchesky
Lady A – “Need You Now”
Sometimes, a song sneaks up on you unexpectedly and changes your life. Other times, you’re waiting for a dose of the COVID vaccine at a pharmacy in StuyTown and Lady A’s desperation anthem “Need You Now” plays over the store speakers three times in the span of an hour. Lady A has stirred up controversy somewhat recently, and while I don’t claim that they made a perfect song, I do know that they made a perfectly adequate earworm. It slaps, and I have not been able to quit the damn song since.
There’s barely anything even here! The verses are made up of a couple of arty, abstract lines—”picture-perfect memories, scattered all around the floor”—but as the music wakes up from its sleepy pace, the song’s chorus explodes. By the third time it hits, the band’s vocalists Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley are practically dueling in a “Don’t You Want Me” kind of way, trading lines and heartbreak. Scott washes Kelley vocally throughout, but Kelley’s verse gets better every time I listen, if only because he sounds increasingly pathetic, and also so immediately relatable. “Another shot of whiskey, can’t stop lookin’ at the door” is an example of pitiful yearning well-known to any sadsack boy who looks to find redemption at the bottom of a glass. I may not want to listen to the song often, but whenever I do, it makes me want to pour up a shot of whiskey and reminisce on past love, too. – Luis Paez-Pumar
Oliver Anthony – “Rich Men North of Richmond”
The indefensible tune I love is “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony. The Virginia-reared crooner was hailed by awful people as a guy who’d put the pop in populism when he released the three-chords-and-his-truth ditty in August 2023. Anthony’s voice cracked in all the right places while he raged about taxes, welfare cheats, inflation, The Man and Big Brother. YouTube’s counter says “Rich Men North of Richmond” now has over 215 million views, and a whole lot of those clicks are mine. I chuckled and felt bad, the way mean ‘80s stand-up comics made me chuckle and feel bad, when he cited “fudge rounds” as the go-to treat of America’s obese. And I guiltlessly guffawed when he got to the line: “I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere.” And I got honest-to-goodness glee at the end of the pre-choruses when he warbled the line, “But it is! Oh, it is!” That there’s phrasing, folks! I’d be OK if Anthony ends up a one-shit wonder, and I never hear another song he’s written. But please wake me when the covers album comes out. – Dave McKenna
Phish – “The Lizards” (12/31/95)
When I was a young teen, I read about Phish in Rolling Stone and downloaded their legendary 1995 New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden as a result. I was in the prime of my “rock opera” phase, seeking out the kind of epic, convoluted albums that I would mostly roll my eyes at today. Phish is a jam band, of course, but they do have a quasi-unreleased rock opera of sorts in their catalog: Trey Anastasio’s senior thesis The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday. The songs from that tape continue to be played live by the band today, and a few are fan favorites that bang on their own without requiring any knowledge of their origins.
But “The Lizards” is different. It was also the first Phish song I ever loved. Not much of a jam, it’s more like a chapter of a story set to music, with a pretty coda—it would be more or less fine if it weren’t for the lyrics, which are goofy even by Phish standards. “The Lizards” covers the protagonist’s encounter with Rutherford the Brave in the Oz-like dimension of Gamehendge. Rutherford is a knight who came from the land of Lizards, who are practically extinct but could be saved by enlightenment from the Helping Friendly Book, which has been outlawed by the king, Wilson. Rutherford quickly dies because he jumps in a river while wearing a heavy suit of armor.
All of this is laid out in the song as explicitly as possible, with lyrics that rhyme “doom” with “baboon” and “sunk” with “thunk.” As a kid, I appreciated Trey’s imagination. (Kids love lore.) And I still have a soft spot for out-there Phish compositions like “Harpua” and “Fluffhead.” But I have spent the entirety of my phandom trying to get other people into the band, and again and again I have been stymied by the group’s perceived loopiness. “The Lizards” is as loopy as it gets, and as such it’s symbolic of the gap between me and every other music fan I know. Really, it’s your fault that this song is on this list. – Lauren Theisen
Nicki Minaj – “I’m the Best”
Pink Friday came out my freshman year of college, and for better and worse it was the soundtrack to the development of my frontal lobe. You’ve got to understand: This was the era of Beyoncé standing in front of the word “FEMINIST.” It was The Defining Decade, when women were in their Lean In moment. I was a gender studies major in a red state, high on my recent discovery of riot grrrl, and Nicki’s bluster was intoxicating to me. I loved the whole album but the first track—”I’m the Best”—imprinted on me. I power posed and listened to it before every internship and job interview I had between 2012 and 2014. The second verse, in particular, hit hard for me: “I just walk up out the door, all the girls will applaud / All the girls will commend as long as they understand / That I’m fighting for the girls that never thought they could win.” Am I embarrassed that I could recite every line to this song under any circumstance? Even if I hadn’t slept for two days and was drunk? Maybe. But this is who I am, and when I’m 100 and senile, I’ll still be muttering the wisdoms of the song to myself: “Micaiah and Jelani why I grind like I do,” indeed. – Alex Sujong Laughlin
Drake – “Marvin’s Room”
This is Drake’s magnum opus: his ultimate sadsack, incel anthem about lost love and drunken voicemails. It’s the song that created a persona that Drake’s still trying to escape—the reality in which his abs are scrutinized and he hangs out with online streamer weirdos like Adin Ross. The song is a vomit-inducing cryfest set to muddy drums and reverb that we should all be embarrassed to have let become so successful. And yet … I just can’t quit it. It came out in 2011 when I was going through my own bout of feeling sorry for myself after a major heartbreak, in which a woman had just left me to get back with her ex-boyfriend (and I’m just saying… she could have done better).
That’s what Drake’s music was once for: a soundtrack for wallowing in self-pity and trying to project that we were “sensitive artistic boys” to the women we wanted to date. The song is earnest and embarrassing in a way that might be expected when you’re young and dating, as opposed to current-day Drake, who makes songs that are embarrassing and dishonest in the way rich artists past their prime can get to be. I miss it and it makes me sick at the same time, especially when Drake sings about a girl’s white friend who drops the N-word. This part alone should make this song a non-starter, but when he croons “because if they did, we gonna be in some trouble” with all the sincerity in the world, it makes me laugh to the point of crying. It’s so pathetic and deeply emblematic of the power of the track. It also sets a perfect precedent for why Kendrick would character-assassinate him a decade later. – Israel Daramola
Falco – “Rock Me Amadeus”
I was a little kid in the backseat of a cramped car on the way to Hersheypark the first time I heard Falco’s 1986 No. 1 hit. My friend and I thought it was so stupid. We could not understand it; our best guess at the song’s name from a cursory listen was that it was called “Ruffy Amadeus.” It was years before I learned this song’s real name, or anything about it. It was years after The Simpsons’ “Dr. Zaius” parody. Eventually it came to my attention that “Rock Me Amadeus”—the only German-language single to hit No. 1 in the U.S., since “99 Luftballons” peaked at No. 2—was actually about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and if you listened to anything but the “Ruffy Amadeus” chorus, you would hear Falco delivering a brief history of the man’s life. It’s Prince’s “Batdance,” but about Mozart. It’s that scene in Xanadu where Gene Kelly and the guy from The Warriors combine The Tubes with the Andrews sisters, but about Mozart. It’s fucking terrible. 10/10, Falco. – Dan McQuade
The Beat – “Hit It”
The Beat—or, as it was bastardized in America because some significantly less talented American band already had the name, The English Beat—put out a spate of magnificent songs during the second ska wave that included The Specials and Madness. So looking for the worst of their songs was a difficult task. Fortunately, many of the worst songs by excellent bands find the same theme: tough creative days in the studio. On what we can only presume was one of those days, they fired off “Hit It,” which is essentially—no, fully and completely—a song about masturbation. It’s a good song, a fine song, a danceable tune like all their others. But let’s not be clever about it: Songs about interrogating the suspect are almost always the idea artists have when the Idea Fairy takes the day off.
The song, listed in some places as “Hit It (Auto Erotic),” is a measure of the band’s quality that they were able to make it as good as it is, with a properly driven Everett Morton backbeat and Saxa’s standard riffologies. As a danceable tune, it stands up well even outside its tale of recreational wankage. Still, it was the band’s lowest-charting single. And while popularity is never a good measure of anything, given that consumers largely know little about what they ingest, the market got it right here. The band broke up relatively soon thereafter, though we would not dare to suggest that “Hit It” was the reason, or even a contributing factor. When it comes on, I listen to it front to back without exception, but the whole time wishing it was “Two Swords,” “Hands Off She’s Mine,” or “Too Nice To Talk To” instead. – Ray Ratto
Pitbull – “El Taxi” (ft. Sensato and Osmani García)
I have always, inexplicably, loved high-concept songs about cars, in part because they can include car sounds like honking or beeping. On one end, Charli XCX’s “Vroom Vroom,” whose chosen refrain is “beep beep,” beeps that Charli herself sings. On the other end, there is Pitbull’s “El Taxi,” which features real beeps from, presumably, a real car, adding a veneer of authenticity to the song.
I first listened to “El Taxi” on spring break in Puerto Rico, and it became my friends’ and my anthem when we returned to frigid New England. “El Taxi” is about seeing a woman so hot that it almost makes you crash your taxi, and also it has a beat that makes you want to shake your ass. It is an adaptation of a much better, genuinely good song “Murder She Wrote” by the reggae duo Chaka Demus & Pliers (crucially swapping the name “Maxine” in the original with “Taxi” in the interpolation). We would hijack strangers’ aux cords to play it at parties and scream along to the words we knew, which were just snippets of the chorus and the few, perfectly to the point English lines: “Can I get a kissy? Can I get a hickey?” This is all we wanted, after all, to get a kissy, to get a hickey. We were in our senior spring and we burned with the knowledge that maybe, just maybe, our true love was somewhere lurking in the class of 20[redacted]. Alas, this hope did not come to pass, but we will always be joined by the yellow thread of “El Taxi,” and the overwhelming desire to shout “beep beep” in the club. – Sabrina Imbler
The Doobie Brothers – “What a Fool Believes”
I think it would be dishonest of me to make the case that “What a Fool Believes,” the Doobie Brothers version, is a bad song. It was a No. 1 hit and won a pair of Grammy Awards, and was apparently later inducted into something called the “Grammy Hall of Fame.” It’s right there on the alphabetized list, sandwiched pretty appallingly between Dinah Washington and Louis Armstrong. I’m fine saying that Avatar and Titanic are shit movies, in the face of critical acclaim and box-office dominance, but for complicated reasons I can’t issue the same sort of contrarian take about music. If a song hits and lots of people like it and it makes you groove for three or six minutes, shit, man—it’s good. By that criteria, ”What a Fool Believes” is a certified banger.
Still, I feel comfortable saying that “What a Fool Believes” is one of the very most embarrassing songs to be caught listening to. You don’t want to find yourself with your windows down at the stoplight with this song blaring from your speakers. Between its jaunty, relentlessly earnest funk backing and Michael McDonald’s outrageous soul timbre, it works out as a strong contender for the least edgy piece of music of the entire 20th century. Next to this number, the soundtrack for Mary Poppins is basically Cannibal Corpse. I am mildly embarrassed to listen to this song in front of my daughter, who is four; several times in my life, I have used the existence of “What a Fool Believes” to prank my siblings, simply by playing it near them in public. There was a time where I could make my older sister stand up and physically run away by ambushing her with the first few bars of that damn intro. Deet deet deet deet-deet deet-deet deet-deet-deet!
It’s also impossible to fit “What a Fool Believes” into a playlist, and man, have I tried. It bounced right out of a 1970s pop list (too earnest), spoiled a summer list (too disruptive), and caused my life to flash before my eyes when on the cusp of entry to an otherwise perfectly credible R&B list. The only playlist I could conceivably get it into would be one for blue-eyed soul, and that’s a playlist that I would dissolve with extreme prejudice within the first nine minutes of listening. If you pull up next to me at the stoplight on a sunny Friday and I am screeching the high notes—No wise man has the power to reason away—you can be sure that “What a Fool Believes” isn’t playing by accident. To arrive at this mortifying moment, I had to hunt this song down in my music library, and press play. What’s troubling is that I do it all the time. – Chris Thompson
Nick Jonas – “Levels”
Contemplating the many benzenes and forever chemicals sloughed off by the processes by which Disney manufactures teen stars gives me the vapors. Setting aside those objections, I have only good things to say about Nick Jonas’s “Levels.”
Back in 2015, Jonas was a few years into running the Justin Timberlake playbook, looking to graduate from boy-band component to freestanding pop star. For those looking to make a similar move, the pillars of this strategy seem to be lifting weights, debuting a buzzcut, and doling out self-serious quotes about craft, like, “I’ve been hard at work on the new music trying to push myself lyrically to say some deeper things.” If you take that clunker at face value, it’s unintentional but for the best that “Levels” winds up in the “Espresso” zone, nonsensical enough to stay out of its own way. Jonas is doing a lot here, but it adds an indulgent texture to top-shelf production from Ian Kirkpatrick and The Monsters & Strangerz.
The real mystery here is how those goofs, whose discographies contain felonious levels of Derulo, Trainor, and Grammer, got “Levels” so right. Its churning, chromatic bassline and its irresistibly late disco-claps sound beamed in from an alternate universe in which Johnny Jewel parlayed his work on the Drive score into doing hitmaker shit. Here’s one way to put it: With its beat built around a stuttering vocoder, funk guitar accents, and style-over-substance approach to lyrics, “Levels” is the rightful successor to Big Boi’s “Shutterbugg.” Take ‘em to the rooftop! – Sean Kuhn
Audioslave – “Like a Stone”
I overthought this one for long enough that my initial joke—“Sorry, I only enjoy things that are cool and good”—started to echo as a taunt. The more I thought, the louder that jeering got, and the harder the way forward seemed. I thought back to when I was most exposed to uncool things, before I remade my personality by spending my time around things that seemed cool in the desperate hope of generating some kind of halo effect. For instance, “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers is dumb and definitely overwrought, but isn’t it also kind of good for all that? Is that embarrassing or disreputable enough? Is it embarrassing or disreputable at all? I don’t really love it, do I? Oh shit, do I?
I remembered, in the days after Chris Cornell’s death, letting the algorithm guide me from Soundgarden songs that I’d liked as a teen to the Audioslave record that I never really bothered listening to because … well, not entirely because Pitchfork ran a double-bylined review giving it a 1.7, but because I heard enough of the record to know that it had a lot of stuff I didn’t like in it. Back in 2002, I would have flagged empty virtuosity as my least favorite attribute for a song, book, or film to have—I wanted connection, I wanted to feel something real. Mostly I wanted to drink five drinks every night and write the three most overstated paragraphs of fiction that the language had yet produced, but those standards seemed very important at the time. Chris Cornell had one of the most powerful voices I’d heard—that’s a value-neutral thing, like being able to throw 101 mph; Rage Against the Machine’s rhythm section made me want to flip over a couch at a party in my teens. But the two of them together held little appeal at the time.
Audioslave is still not really it for me, but I feel more tolerant of empty virtuosity now. This song is facile and kind of dumb, with lots of silly stuff about highways. But it is virtuosic, the production gloss is applied evenly and generously, the skribbildy-wee-wee-weeew Tom Morello guitar bullshit works better than expected, and Cornell, whatever he is singing about, really seems to mean it. Virtuosity is virtuosity, and connection is connection. You can feel real things about stuff that isn’t actually there, and that feeling can be worth something in itself. And so here we are, wailing about whatever, and meaning it. – David Roth
Blippi – “The Boat Song”
I hate Blippi, the children’s entertainment creator. I find him talentless and weird, and his TV and musical content totally devoid of educational or even entertainment value. I am joined in this opinion by every other person who has had the misfortune of being exposed to him, with the exception being the zillions of toddlers obsessed with him.
I also happen to be the father of one of those Blippi-loving toddlers. This is mostly fine, since my son’s only interaction with Blippi is his music—in this house, we believe Ms. Rachel is not Hamas, but Blippi videos are haram—and thankfully my guy is generally happy to jam along with whatever music I put on in the car. The one exception is when he’s in a cranky mood and yells at me from the backseat to play his stuff, and “his stuff” is almost always Blippi’s “The Fire Truck Song.”
Listening to Blippi in the car gives me the feeling that I’m a subject in some kind of perverse behavioral psychology experiment. On one hand, I hate the music, which is at its best lazy and insipid. On the other, Blippi’s dull tones have a nearly 100-percent success rate at chilling out my toddler. You can see the contradiction. As much as the music bothers me in its own right, I’m buoyed by its vibe-lifting effects on my son. When I first switch over to the requested “Fire Truck Song,” I’m usually kind of deflated about having my own musical choice rejected, though I quickly will pivot to a begrudging sing-along to try to boost the vibe-lifting effects. But by the time the “The Boat Song” comes on, you’ll find me belting out the deliriously stupid lyrics with as much gusto as I would’ve had if he hadn’t made me cut off a Sade album. My son’s improved mood, my parental perma-exhaustion, and Blippi’s mind-numbing music and lyrics combine to bring me to a state of addled peace that I can only liken to a re-educated Winston beholding the face of his beloved Big Brother. I hate “The Boat Song.” I love “The Boat Song.” Please, somebody help me. – Billy Haisley
Billy Joel – “The Longest Time”
I have no interest in defending the larger catalog of Billy Joel. Does he deserve as much scorn as he tends to get? My colleagues recently debated this question, and I opted not to participate because I do not really know, nor frankly do I care. What I do know is that nobody in recorded history has managed to describe my approach to love as perfectly and succinctly as Billy Joel when he sings “I don’t care what consequence it brings / I have been a fool for lesser things.” What more is there to say? – Brandy Jensen
Ratt – “Body Talk”
When Nevermind broke big, it not only killed off hair metal for the rest of the ’90s, but seemingly forever. Even now, in 2025, no one will take you seriously if you tell them that Def Leppard was one of the greatest rock bands to ever exist (which is true). If it’s been marked with the “hair metal” tag, it’s not artistically valid. Well, I’m here to say fuck that shit. Hair metal is just pop metal. And when pop metal is good, it’s as good as anything else, no matter how much hairspray is involved.
This brings us to “Body Talk” by Ratt. Ratt is known best for two things. The first is “Round and Round,” a song so big that it crossed over to the pop charts. The second is that lead singer Stephen Pearcy is, by all accounts, one of the biggest assholes ever to emerge from the Sunset Strip rock scene of the 1980s, which is an incredibly high bar to clear.
Ratt is NOT remembered for “Body Talk,” a song I first heard when it popped up in the middle of Eddie Murphy’s The Golden Child. I liked that movie more than everyone else did. Ditto “Body Talk.” If you like pop, the Commodore-processed hook on the front end has you covered. If you like metal, the chugging riffs that kick in afterward are legit. Then Pearcy comes in and ties it all together with his unmistakably sleazy vocals. It all worked then, and still does. I listen to this song, and I want to live in a penthouse for the rest of my life. Hair metal is probably never making a comeback. Luckily, thanks to songs like “Body Talk,” I don’t need it to. – Drew Magary
Bright Eyes – “Method Acting”
In late 2009, when I was 11, my dad was putting the finishing touches on a several-year building project amid his profession’s version of the apocalypse. My mom was coping by jamming David Rawlings and Gillian Welch’s A Friend of a Friend, a record made up mostly of the type of dirge that can be expected from those two. The middle of the record includes a pair of covers—“Method Acting” by Bright Eyes, and “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young—tied together in a 10-minute medley. My mom and I both absolutely loved “Method Acting,” neither of us realizing it was a cover. Unfortunately and to my endless embarrassment, when I eventually heard the original, I found it spellbinding.
The song is, appropriately, about belonging and impostor syndrome. Gillian and David’s version is glacial, mournful, and really quite beautiful—a recording that wouldn’t be out of place at a wake. I might like theirs better, but it sadly doesn’t hit quite the same as Conor Oberst’s whiny, insipid angst. Admitting that Oberst wrote and sang one of my favorite songs ever feels like getting real with my dentist about how often I floss—the associated humiliation no less deserved. – Lucy Bloom