The BotB confessionals booth is open.

Please share with the community a song, artist, or album that you love...that you feel at least a little shy, sheepish or embarrassed to admit that you love! It can be something you currently enjoy or something you enjoyed more when you were younger. More than likely there will be another fan out there somewhere. Please share (and we won't make fun of you!)

Here's a few of mine, maybe I'll share a few more later.

I freaking love this Boyz II Men

song and the cheesy goodness of a few others on the II album

I'll Remember

by Madonna still makes me feel emotional sometimes and I have tried to recreate the sort of tremolo synthy guitar backing in a botb track or two

Country and bluegrass was a part of my childhood. Guitar+ mandolin + banjo is a potent combo and once in a while I still enjoy pop country

, please don't sue. I always make fun of country drawl but I gotta admit this dude's voice is kinda awesome.

Bette Davis Eyes

by Kim Carnes has dumb lyrics and I love it. Fantastic guitar sound.

Also in the realm of dumb lyrics...Raspberry Beret

is by no means Prince's best song but it is my favorite

i like to think i'm past the point of feeling shame about any of the stuff that i like, but one of the first things that comes to mind is how it was Very Uncool to like the Backstreet Boys or N*Sync when they were super popular (you know, in like, 2001), and i loved both. honestly? I Want It That Way still slaps. great song

another one that's just ubiquitous that i think is truly a great and enjoyable song is Gangnam Style. i loved it then and i love it now - the EP it's from? also amazing. i probably listened to it 50 times the year it came out, and it got me more into kpop at the time

hmmm, Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" is also a great song. i wonder what it says about me that the stuff that's coming to mind is all the mega popular stuff. i guess i felt weirder about that when i was younger

yeah ideally we shouldn't feel any embarrassment about what we like, and I [mostly] don't either but I imagine that in a creative, niche place like this we're at least less prone to share stuff like super poppy music we like, as you pointed out. So it's cool if people don't at all feel awkward about their tastes but want to share just mainstream poppy stuff they're into or whatever.

My ulterior motive is to know which botbrs enjoy some the same pop as I do...exhibit A, Backstreet boys could've easily been on my list as well lol

i played my spotify on the work speaker and my coworker just went "whoever tf on the aux has the taste of a teenage girl. shoot him"


...as a result, i am now ashamed to admit that i enjoy listening to:

lorde
kris kross
static-p
daft punk
hikaru utada
diva (the k-pop group)
epica
kid cudi
psychedelic furs
2 live crew
m1dy
astrud gilberto
yukika
yoko kanno
queen
bôa
t+pazolite
kendrick lamar
daniel caesar
la oreja de van gogh
pegboard nerds
hatsune miku, to a degree


oh, and also, banned botbrs whose music i srsly fucking love:
ida deerz (wvl/svl/ida)
kfaraday

I love Bring Me To Life

by Evanescence! I first heard it when I was in high school, I found out a few years later a lot of people make fun of it when a friend in college showed me this

hiatus kaiyote. their music is great but 1. it feels grossly appropriative (everyone in the band is white, afaik) 2. the front woman named herself after a weapon of horrific indiscriminate mutilation & murder

grew up on stupid vaporwave albums

(still love them)

……i genuinely think that ed sheeran has a *lot* of bangers under his belt…….

willow smith is someone i don’t find embarassing in the slightest but i feel like a solid number of people out there assume her music is slop cuz she’s a nepo baby. listen to empathogen if you haven’t, i can almost guarentee that it won’t be what you’re expecting

and then 100 gecs. what can i say, i like getting blasted by sound.

I share jangler's appreciation of hiatus kaiyote, and I hope they don't later have a milkshake duck moment. lmao

as for stuff I'd consider a guilty pleasure or an embarrassment to say... beyond that phase in my teenage years when I almost exclusively listened to anime OPs and EDs with only small detours of Gorillaz, I'm not sure what'd qualify. My only guesses are that people might see the following artists in my music folder and raise their eyebrows because they think:

- Kadhja Bonet is too twee
- Lemon Demon is too dorky / overplayed by Tumblr
- Big Big Train and related projects are too Bri'ish (if you hear their stuff you'll know what I mean lmfao)
- Periphery and Haken are "cringe"
- Natalia Lafourcade is, similarly, too twee (and also pop)
- Any boomer-era Spanish singer-songwriter is too boring
- The Pineapple Thief is "Porcupine Tree-lite" (I have my reasons to listen to one but not the other (anymore))
- any microtonal music is a waste of time (I've had people say it to me! for reals!)

I usually don't play my playlist around others since it's a mess of different things... some of them I'm less hesitant to show, but there's a good couple I seek to spare them from. Primarily among those are:

-A lot of mid-late 2000's rock/pop that my older sisters listened to when I was young, chief among which are Linkin Park, Skillet, and Owl City. A weird mix, I know, but they all go together in my head (and even though Fireflies was the first song whose lyrics I memorized I still prefer most of the other songs on the Ocean Eyes album, especially Cave In, On the Wing, and Tip of the Iceberg).

-A ton of J-Pop that I only discovered due to them being anime opening/ending theme songs. I do try a tiny bit to branch outside of just songs from shows if I like the artist more. It wouldn't make sense to list all the different series, but I'll say artists that I've especially enjoyed amongst that crowd are THE CHARM PARK, Vickeblanka, Masayuki Suzuki, SID, Yuzu, King Gnu, Funkist, Yusuke Saeki, and more.

Most of the other stuff isn't so much embarrassing or any similar emotion, but I do like classical music like Bach, which doesn't fit into the average person's daily music consumption, and a lot of music I played in band in high school as well.

there are terrible songs we enjoy listening for pure nostalgy... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCXzLzUJ1G0

Bizarro World thread in which listening to heavy-airplay singers is more difficult to explain than listening to chiptune

haha yeah, for sure! This is part of where my thought came from - it's interesting to me that I feel a bit sheepish about my own tastes in this particular community more than I would elsewhere (this says more about me than anything), but I thought I'd explore the thought in my own way.

Share what ya want, hopefully this doesn't come across as something to take too seriously for people

It's refreshing. I wouldn't say I'm ashamed of loving Ill Mitch, but I definitely screen who gets to hear about that: Fast and Danger

As a bonus. I told my girlfriend I thought the big moment in Gangsta by Plug

around 3:35 was one of my favorites in music. She sed, "all of music? Or just DNB?" All of music of course. She laughed for a long time... not in a mean way, but she was bowled over. Still not sure what to make of that

In terms of "pop music that I surprisingly enjoy", I like The Corrs - Only When I Sleep

, a late '90s hit that I only discovered recently.

I particularly like the main chord progression (Bm D7 E Em A), nothing super fancy but it's quite catchy -- might have to borrow it for a future song ;)

nanahira, ariana grande, vylet pony, deadmau5, olivia rodrigo. for various reasons

i listen to the "what's new scooby doo" theme song all the time

sorry i love this specific "x pop" song and bopped to it at work for like 3 hours on loop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiYOkmrI1jg

I unironically kinda like mm2wood.mid, I know it's terrible but I like it anyways

i listen to eurobeat. i know it's awful, the songs are honestly not very poetic or well-written at all. the melodies themselves and the beats are great though.

none of my entries are produced by me, i hire a team of estonian lawyers to press random keys on the keyboard until something reasonable comes out

as a very cold take, michael jackson

I generally don't like too many cliches in any genres as I find them obnoxious... but I think everyone has their own obnoxious cliche that they enjoy. For me, 2010s epic brostep and hardstyle / uptempo hardstyle. Hardstyle in particular is practically all cliche but it's so enjoyable to me--there's a certain boldness you have to have to just make the kick so loud it's the only thing that you can hear and the only thing that even matters. And it's funny

WTF I thought this was the confessional booth

Edit: that aside, https://youtu.be/fvJzB7zGTNM
I love this CD a lot. Had a road trip with a coupla friends in Argentina, we drove 10000km with just 2 CD's. One of them was a CD of great chacarera (northern Argentinian traditional music), and this compilation of malìsima cumbia argentina which we got to love all the same.

#200028
t+pazolite is awesome, don't let anyone tell you different
i'm also fond of pegboard nerds, and it's hard to go wrong with queen
i must admit that the only daft punk song i'm familiar with is derezzed but that one is really good

honestly i'm having a hard time thinking of songs/genres i would be particularly embarrassed to admit to liking, though i suppose there is one: gothic hardcore

at first it didn't sound at all like something i'd be into but damn, some of those songs are good

most of the songs from gmtn. fit in that genre, most notably furioso melodia

I like how nobody said chiptune

I'll never forget one of my friends from back home showing me this Nickelback song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kibgXqJuKCM

They're not really my speed usually but this song's got some addicting energy, perfect bar fight music.

well, I love chiptune.
_{btw it's like 4am for me, i just wanted to point that out.}

Eminem (mainly from childhood nostalgia)

Creed - Higher is a great song, they have other good stuff too
Nickelback - Photograph and Leader of Men

I enjoyed these bands although my friends made fun of me lol

the best confessions are the ones that get no lieks or even haeits

The True Neutrals

goluigi: "the best confessions are the ones that get no lieks or even haeits"

...so does that mean i cant liek that comment???
the paradox is real

this isn't music but shout out to pumpkin spice lattes

I tried a pumpkin spice latte for the first time the other day and ngl it was pretty great