A guilty pleasure is when you consume something truly without merit -- like eating Twinkies for dinner. If you're gratified by a piece of music -- even if it's Phil Collins -- it has merit. The most basic function of music is to decorate time. If it does that -- no matter if it's Stockhausen or Brittney Spears -- it's doing a big part of its job. If it's not doing that -- even if it's Beethoven or Coltrane (and there are less brilliant examples of both) -- then its merits are probably only technical and of use only to people who study the mechanics of music. If that. Ever since there's been coffeehouse intellectualism, there's been some chucklehead deciding what it is permissable to like, and anything that doesn;t fit into that system theory is a "guilty pleasure". So it is alright to like John Cage but not Brittney Spears. And anyone who admits to liking both probably has some explaining to do. (One member of this list admitted -- apologetically -- a teenage fondness for the Bay City Rollers. I remarked that I don;t understand why anyone would apologize for liking "Saturday Night" or "Dedication", two really well-made pop records.) The idea that someone like Tarantino -- whose movies I've not seen -- somehow "made it cool" to enjoy blaxploitation films or whatever is a little offensive to me. To some of use growing up in the city during a certain period of American life, those movies were our Saturday afternoon. Were the cultural norms my youth a guilty pleasure until some hipster movie director accredited the cultural aspects of it? Was Mickey Spillane a guilty pleasure for me until John Zorn "sponsored" him? skip h