Remember Cyndi Lauper? Not now, when she’s a little bit freakish but back in the 1980’s when she was weird but still perky? Girls just want to have fun, and so on. Her breakout album was called She’s So Unusual, and it went platinum in France, Germany, and Italy, triple platinum in the UK, six times platinum in the United States and seven times platinum in Australia and Canada.
And nobody will admit to buying the album!
This is a phenomenon we see time and again in popular North American Culture. Things are huge successes by all monetary standards, and nobody will admit to liking it. And it’s not just music. It’s television shows, movies, anything that someone can plausibly deny having ever liked but secretly enjoyed.
The television show J.A.G. for example. It’s in it’s tenth season. Seriously! And yet nobody watches it, if you believe it when they say they don’t. Nobody watches it, but the network makes enough money to continue to produce it for ten years?
You just have to love the guilty pleasures.
Only tangentially related, there is a Mr. Big tape (yes, cassette tape!) that I never bought. It was in my BMW 320i when the car was broken into and everything single thing stolen out of it. Except that Mr. Big tape.
It was in an Olds Cutlass Calais International when the car was stolen and everything in the car was spread out along the 401 for 100s of kilometers. Nothing was left in the car.
Except that damned tape. That I never EVER bought.
Eventually, when I had an accident in my 1987 Jetta and the car was written off, I left the tape on the floor of the passenger foot well, in hopes that the demon tape would finally be gone, it’s evilness and the evilness of the insurance company that now owned the car canceling each other out and making the world, in some small way, a better place.
Of course 9 years later, I found it in a box in the basement. Sometimes we cannot hide our guilt, no matter how hard we try.