Confessing Pop Music's Sins

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Soundcheck host John Schaefer admits to liking Vanilla Ice's rap hit "Ice Ice Baby" when it first came out in 1990. Dave Hogan/Getty Images hide caption

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Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Soundcheck host John Schaefer admits to liking Vanilla Ice's rap hit "Ice Ice Baby" when it first came out in 1990.

Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Everybody has a dirty little secret from his or her pop-music past.

They go far beyond guilty pleasures. Everybody has songs, albums, concerts, and other fan moments too embarrassing to remember and/or too shameful to acknowledge.

Host John Schaefer — who owns up to his initial attraction to Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" — talks to culture writer Cintra Wilson, of Salon.com and The New York Times, and music journalist Anne Midgette, acting classical-music critic for the Washington Post, about their dirty musical secrets.

For Wilson, it's "Love Me in a Special Way" by the '80s R&B band DeBarge. "I mean, it really goes beyond just a guilty pleasure into a mortifying skeleton in my closet," she says. "Or actually, I was thinking of it more about — like, sort of admitting that I have an inflatable sheep in my bedroom."

Midgette admits to her own flirtations with questionable taste, long before she started writing about classical music. "Well, I suppose my dirty music secret begins when I moved to New Mexico at the age of 15, when all the music I owned was completely strange to everybody, and I tried to assimilate quickly by buying all of the music everybody else was listening to," she says. "Which meant that I amassed an enormous collection of ABBA, Air Supply, Barry Manilow to such a degree that my best friend from high school, when she visited me this summer 20 years later, said, 'It's amazing that somebody with such lousy taste in music became a music critic.'"

They field phone calls and listener comments — and hear from WNYC hosts Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate about their more ignoble musical admissions.