Guiltily Pleasured

Of course there are people who will tell you there are no such things as guilty pleasures. There's just good and bad records (they rather loftily assert), and real music critics don't beat their meat to kitsch. And those that do really ought to stop pretending since they're clearly too old to get a job as an intern for The Face now anyway.

This is actually quite a persuasive argument. And yet along comes a record like Madonna's American Life and all my Appollonian and Dionysian impulses get all confused. There's really quite a lot not to like about this record - who can treat Madge seriously as a style icon now she's married to Grumpy Guy Ritchie?; her attempts at rapping are genuinely gauche and dreadful; the music doesn't seem to have kicked on since her last record; the sound is a little samey and let's be honest 'Die Another Day' just isn't very good, is it?

But the thing is I find 'American Life' a fantastically enjoyable record to listen to. It's a kind of Madge-ic, clearly.