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# No Guilt, All Pleasure.
- URL: https://www.marsorganic.com/no-guilt-all-pleasure/
- Published: 2026-10-20T16:52:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T01:42:54.000Z
- Author: Mike Tierney

Life’s too short for guilty pleasures.

Especially in times like these, let’s resist the temptation to yuck our own yum, swerve the guilt trips, and empower ourselves to leave the windows down at red lights *with* a questionable song blasting and *without* fear of judgment. 

And I say this as someone who identifies as culturally Catholic (see appendix: “Shame”). The creation of great music is nothing short of miraculous when it happens, our world’s supply of it isn’t bottomless, and it must have something going for it if we liked it in the first place. How’s about we kindly just dig it?

If it feels off brand for our carefully cultivated public-facing personae, let's embrace our offline selves that feel alive in the world when we hear it again. Maybe it's outré or passé, corny or cheesy, novelty or just plain dumb, played out or burnt out or in a beer commercial, Hot AC crossover or MOR, problematic or un-PC (I’m Gen X, all our artists are problematic). If we loved it once but outgrew it or never wanted to hear it again, it’s possible we just need to hear it in the mix with a shit ton of other songs we didn’t know we needed to hear again. Context is everything.

I'll always own my biases. They say we stay the most attached to music we loved between ages sixteen and nineteen, and you can count the rings around this playlist mos def. But I also try to mix it up: genres and eras, the familiar and the surprising, the expected and the unexpected, fluency and dysfluency, Talking Heads *and* .38 Special (the Venn intersection of winning curation per MTV founding father Les Garland, which is good enough for me).

I started this playlist thinking it’d be like thirty choons—my absolute slam dunk picks that I’ll never let anyone make me feel bad about loving. I thought it’d kick off with “Midnight Blue” by Lou Gramm into “Hold On Loosely” by the aforementioned southern rockers. But while I love both beyond reasonable explanation, they felt a bit niche as lid-lifters even to me. So I pivoted to some consensus '00s and '80s canon to start. No shame though: expect those mid-chart '80s Butt Rock classics slotted right there in the teens between Lit and The Tubes.

Now it’s 400+ tracks and counting, and still somehow not so comprehensive as to stop me adding songs as I type. At the end of the day, it’s just a high-concept bunch of super fun songs that I still love, with a heavier than anticipated emphasis on what pleases me, leaning into the kind of choices other humans and machines would be unlikely to make.

Hits and misses. Britpop, Bubblegum Pop, and Big Dumb Rock. “Ah! Leah!” and Aaliyah. “Choosin’ Texas” into “All My Ex’s.” “I’m Not Okay” into “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay” (any excuse to enjoy My Chem and Whitney in the same sitting amiright). Radiohead’s “Creep” or TLC’s “Creep”? (Answer: both! It’s a trick question.) Beyoncé *and* Rihanna. Paris Hilton and Ashlee Simpson (though, sadly, not on the same track). “Gypsy” and “Gypsy Woman” and Gipsy Kings. At least a dozen songs that even the artists have disavowed or stopped playing live—over which I also refuse to beat myself up.

Put it on shuffle or trust my sequence (it's really good, if I do say so myself). It's 29+ hours, more songs than most radio libraries, so maybe it's a new Jack-style station ("Mike: I Play What I Want"). Let me know what’s missing. Or make your own list and share it: loud, proud, and windows down.