Nothing Guilty About These Pleasures Dept. - Rodgers n' Hammerstein

Dames, yesterday. There ain't nuthin' like them.

The term "guilty pleasure" is usually invoked when that pleasure doesn't coincide with accepted norms of hipness. A guilty pleasure tactically reveals your sentimental side, adding warmth and likability to your persona. Musical pleasure (and that's what we're talking about - restrict your confessions to this area please as th' IoF© is monitored by various government agencies for your own security) is just that; we add the guilt or hipness as a cultural complication. Pleasure is mostly instinctive, untutored, and we like what we like. And I like this.

Your mom, yesterday, with your real father

Rodgers & Hammerstein famously met at a yard sale in Poughkeepsie, where they wrassled goodnaturedly over an unused electrical spat whitener in its original box. They were soon writing the most successful stage and motion picture musicals of all time, and that success carried over into album sales. South Pacific was not only the first stereo long-playing LP, years before domestic players were available, but in the album charts for thirty-one years [can this be right? - Ed.]. It was estimated that every household in the Western hemisphere owned at least two copies, one kept for display purposes draped in a lei [mystic straight line connecting holy sites in UK - Ed.]. You might have been conceived at a South Pacific-themed party, or more likely in a stage door alley during the record-breaking theatrical run of Oklahoma, but that's not something you want to think deeply about. Enough facts.

Horse's ass just out of shot

These are tunes. Songs that seem like old friends welcoming you home. Sentimental without being camp. Smart lyrics, lush arrangements that never sink into easy listening cheese. Superior in every way to opera, which were just shows for the rich to talk through. The true Golden Age of the musical, art for the masses, before the form fell to the brittle cleverness of Stephen Sondheim, who couldn't find a tune if it was up his ass on a fork, or the Happy Meal leftovers of Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who was smart enough to use tunes written for him by a bunch of dead guys.

'Fess up in the comments. It's not like anyone cares.

This post funded in part by Sven Olaf Smörgasbörd MD, author of "How To Not Visualise Your Parents In The Act Of Conceiving You"