Guilty Pleasures

As a college deejay in the latter half of the '80s, I had a canon of music that I was supposed to adhere to. And for the most part, I liked that canon. The Clash, Bad Brains, Beastie Boys, Camper Van Beethoven, New Order, The Cure, De La Soul, The Dead Milkmen, Fishbone, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Joy Division, Minutemen, Pixies, The Replacements, The Smiths, X. Those are just a select few of the canon.

I wasn't supposed to like or play this.


Or this.


Or this.


I never played these artists when I was deejaying. But underneath the secrecy of my stereo headphones, they were in my listening rotation, and I enjoyed them greatly. I even loved them.

Something enjoyed that is not supposed to be enjoyed is commonly called a "guilty pleasure," whether that something is music or beer. Yet calling something a "guilty" pleasure implies that the thing enjoyed possesses no merit, or that it shouldn't be judged to possess merit. In the '80s, Duran Duran was judged by the music cognoscenti to be a shit band because they were pretty boys and MTV poster children. But even the most jaded music snobs had difficulty denying that the band's songs were complexly layered and backed by John Taylor, who eventually came to be regarded as one of the most accomplished bassists of the era. So perhaps there was some merit to the band after all.

When it comes to beer, some of us have what might be regarded as guilty pleasures, particularly when we talk about macrobrewed lagers. When I drink a macro (which is a pretty rare occasion), I prefer Rolling Rock, which I found a taste for in the '90s when it suddenly surged into prominence for reasons I'm not quite sure of. One of my favorite Hoosier Beer Geek memories from the first year of the blog is the Retro Beer Challenge, a tournament-style blind tasting of American macro lagers. Budweiser eventually prevailed in the tournament, but Rolling Rock was one of the runners-up, which made me feel vindicated in my sometime affinity for the beer.

So, two questions:

- Is it accurate to call one's liking for a macro a "guilty" pleasure? I suppose that this question relates to what Matt wrote about last month after InBev's acquisition of Goose Island. Further, I know that this question has undoubtedly been debated elsewhere. But I'd be interested to hear more thoughts on the subject. I don't necessarily think there's a wrong or right answer to the question.

- If you have a macro that you enjoy, what is it, and why do you enjoy it?

I Will Dare | The Beer and Music Connection

Over the last several days, the Knights of the Beer Roundtable have been trading a lot of e-mails about music (if you're coming to the Second Anniversary party at Brugge Brasserie on Thursday evening, you'll find out why). This e-mail exchange, Chris's most recent post about drinking beer at the Radiohead show, and Mike's name-checking of the Pixies threw me into some thinking this evening about my mutual loves of beer and music (which I tossed together briefly in our Mikkeller review).

As I mentioned in that post, I was a DJ in college (circa 1985-1990), doing most of my spinning at parties. Because I was busy manning the DJ booth at these parties--I had two turntables, a cassette deck and, eventually, a CD player, so I was always cuing something up--I didn't drink a lot of beer. At most, I'd drink two beers, which didn't give me much of a buzz. Instead, I got my kicks from telling crestfallen song requesters (usually sorority girls) that I'd lost my copy of Modern English's "I Melt With You" (I hadn't lost it; I was just really sick of the song after playing it 500 times) and from scaring the crap out of partygoers by suddenly spinning the Dead Milkmen's "Bitchin' Camero" or Dead Kennedys' "Let's Lynch the Landlord." These latter two songs were quintessential dance floor clearers, which were very handy when it was 3:30 a.m. and I wanted to get rid of the handful of beer-goggled dudes and chicks who were making one last attempt to take someone back to the dorm for a little drunken fun. At that time of the morning, I simply wanted to head home and get some sleep.

My lack of serious beer consumption was probably for the best since the most common beer offerings at these parties were Busch and Little Kings, which even in the mid to late '80s were not ranked among the American beer elite. This might explain why I never blacked out or puked from drinking until age 24, at my bachelor party before my first marriage. Yup--I just wasn't one of those college binge drinkers.

Sometimes, however, the music I played made me want to drink more that my standard one or two beers--y'know, it stoked my thirst. During party prep, when I was trying to cue up as many songs as possible before the party began, I would usually throw on an album, which was normally something that wasn't very dance friendly. A lot of this pre-party music was the standard '80s college radio/alternative stuff--R.E.M., Husker Du, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cure, Cocteau Twins, New Order, the Smiths, the Clash, and Bad Brains to name a few. But none of these bands were pure beer-drinking fuel like one I haven't mentioned: the Replacements. Indeed, as soon as the 'Mats' classic Let It Be went on the turntable and the first few chords of "I Will Dare" jangled out of the speakers, I'd be primed to start pounding any macro swill, even Michelob Dark. Perhaps I was influenced by the aura that surrounded Minneapolis's favorite sons; they were notorious for their sloppy, drunken shows and were known to get so trashed that they left the A&R types who came to scout them scratching their heads over the hype surrounding the band. It's sort of funny--my impulse to drink due to the 'Mats' music always reminded me of a Three Stooges episode, the one in which Curly goes into a fighting frenzy whenever he hears "Pop Goes the Weasel." Yes, that was me--the '80s version of Curly Howard.

So, readers, as you ready yourselves for Thursday night, do you have any interesting beer/music connections to tell us about? Drop us a comment.