What’s Your Musical Sin?

NPR’s John Schaeffer takes on the skeletons in your musical closet on the latest WNYC Soundcheck:

Everybody has a dirty little secret from his or her pop-music past.

They go far beyond guilty pleasures. Everybody has songs, albums, concerts, and other fan moments too embarrassing to remember and/or too shameful to acknowledge.

Host John Schaefer — who owns up to his initial attraction to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” — talks to culture writer Cintra Wilson, of Salon.com and The New York Times, and music journalist Anne Midgette, acting classical-music critic for the Washington Post, about their dirty musical secrets.

For Wilson, it’s “Love Me in a Special Way” by the ’80s R&B band DeBarge. “I mean, it really goes beyond just a guilty pleasure into a mortifying skeleton in my closet,” she says. “Or actually, I was thinking of it more about — like, sort of admitting that I have an inflatable sheep in my bedroom.”

It’s a funny show, and will also have you thinking about the influence that the music industry and radio have had on controlling what you listen to.

I have to confess to having a quite a skeletons in my musical closet, ranging from Mannheim Steamroller, ELP and Moody Blues albums to Britney Spears’ Toxic.

What’s the skeleton in your music closet? ABBA? Air Supply? Barry Manilow?