The Perverse Joy of Listening to Bad Music

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I have a confession to make: I love listening to bad music.This realization came to me a few months ago, while I was working on an obituary for the guitarist Steve Cropper and relistened to his 1980 record, Playin’ My Thang. Cropper’s work as a member of Booker T. & the M.G.’s is unimpeachable; this album, however, deserves impeachment, conviction, and removal. If for some reason you make it past the double red flags of the cover art and title, well, here are a few comments posted on the music-collecting website Discogs: “I already know after one play that this will never spin again on my player.” “Easily in my all time worst.” “Always put off buying this as the cover is so awful but sadly the cover is the best thing about the record.”I can’t disagree. And yet, once I put my used copy on the turntable—Playin’ My Thang mercifully never got a major-label CD release—I couldn’t stop listening. It’s so bad, and so good. There are many such records that I love and listen to frequently, although I cannot defend their quality.Let’s lay out a few rules for the category, which I’ll call “bad-good.” First, the selection cannot be made for reasons of pure snobbery. I’m not here to pick on bands that just aren’t very good in general. Many people adore the Shaggs, the legendarily atonal outsider group, but it doesn’t belong here; we’re looking for bad music made by good musicians. Nor is this about looking down on any genre. These are bands working in genres that take themselves seriously (sometimes too seriously). I also differentiate between bad-good albums and guilty pleasures. A guilty pleasure is generally something that makes us feel good, even if it might be looked down upon by the self-appointed arbiters of good taste. My hipper music friends sometimes make fun of me for liking