Such Pleasure, So Guilty ...

My column for next month's Times involves "true confession time" at Chez Leibowitz. The subject: Guilty pleasures. More specifically, my sudden affinity for a certain group of falsetto-singing Australian brothers.

Yep. The Bee Gees.

I know. How horrible is that to admit?

If you feel like this bizarre love requires an explanation, let me just go ahead and let you read the column:

We begin this month with a confession. Trusted friends have advised me to keep this information to myself, to guard it with the sort of vigilance usually reserved for grand jury testimony, the final episode of "The Sopranos," and the Arizona Cardinals' five-year rebuilding plan. I just can't do that.

Why not, you ask? Mainly it's the shame, is what it is. I've been carrying an enormous burden around for weeks, and lately the weight has been stone-heavy, a gravity so thick it's immobilizing. Confession seems like the only the option. Just tell all and pray that Pascal, the 17th century French mathematical genius, was correct.

"The only shame," he wrote, "is to have none."

Of course, Pascal died in 1662 at age 39 and spent most of his life studying geometry and physics, so he might not be the best guide on the subject of guilt.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. Okay, here goes.

I love the Bee Gees.

Wow, that's gonna leave a mark. Seriously, did I just type that out loud? Ah … you know what I mean.

Having now emasculated myself both in terms of gender and intellect, let me clarify. One, I didn't know I loved the Bee Gees until a few weeks ago. And, two, I only love really, really old Bee Gees, before the whole unfortunate "Saturday Night Fever" thing happened.

Trust me, I'm as shocked as you are by this revelation. It started when I caught a snippet of a song on the radio, a tune full of high harmonies and Australian accents that immediately took me back 40 years to growing up in Queens, to my parents' old Kenwood turntable and to the click of an LP dropping into the play position. The lyrics bored their way through me:

In the event of something happening to me,
there is something I would like you all to see.
It's just a photograph of someone that I knew.

That song from 1967 – "New York Mining Disaster 1941," by the way – stayed in my head for a week, until I tracked it down using a combination of Google and iTunes. Thirty-odd bucks later, me and the Brothers Gibb have reunited. "Massachusetts," "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart," "Lonely Days" – suddenly my iPod looks like the soundtrack to a bad acid trip circa 1972.

If it makes you feel any better about me, I swear I also love Radiohead, the White Stripes, improvisational jazz, and Beethoven's "Pathetique" sonata. Think of the Bee Gees as a guilty pleasure. That's what I've started to do and it's made me realize something (besides the fact that I don't have a heckuva lot of taste):

Guilty pleasures just might be the best pleasures of all.

I mean, how else do you explain the fact that a truly crappy TV show like "America's Got Talent" hauls in 13 million viewers on an average night, or about nine times what the average PBS prime-time show draws? Or check out the hourly sales rankings on Amazon.com. Four of the first nine spots belong to the vampire novels of Arizona's own Stephenie Meyer. That whirring sound you hear? That's Bram Stoker, the guy who wrote "Dracula," spinning in his grave. Meanwhile, how are sales going for 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing?

She's in spot 5,725 for her most recent work, "Alfred & Emily."

If it's in good taste or it's good for you, it seems we in America pretty much want no part of it. This explains why there's a "Hotel Erotica Cabo 34: Skin Deep" on Cinemax tonight, but no Francis Ford Coppola-directed sequel called "Apocalypse Now 2: Apocalypse After." A great chef like Chris Bianco, he's got two restaurants. Olive Garden has 643 locations and nearly $3 billion in sales around the world.

Who would have imagined mankind had that much love for an $8.95 "Never Ending Pasta Bowl™," huh?

As for me, Big Chief Little Taste here is working hard to get more comfortable and purge all that guilt I've been toting around. Clearly I'm not the only one who's ever invested $16.99 in "The Essential Neil Diamond." And I'm going to stop apologizing right now for the night a few weeks ago when I clicked past "Citizen Kane" on AMC to watch "Sunset Tan" on E!

For a long time, I've lived in mortal fear that some provost from back East would show up and rescind my Master's degree in English upon discovering that I religiously read the detective novels of Michael Connelly. No more fear; no more apologizing; no more living in the cultural closet.

Laugh if you want, but I like US Weekly more than U.S. News and World Report. I fall asleep whenever I read anything that involves the words "thou" or "methinks" – sorry Shakespeare – and given the choice, I'd choose a Quarter Pounder with cheese over some French epicurean's blanquette de veau.

And yes, lately I've become more than a little obsessed with the falsetto-voiced soundtrack from my childhood. I'm not beating myself up any more for this stuff. Laugh if you want; give me hell if we meet on the street. There will be no weeping here. Instead, I choose to believe in the genius and wisdom of the Brothers Gibb, who famously wrote in their 1968 Top 10 smash, "I Started A Joke."

I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing, Oh, if I'd only seen that the joke was on me.

Truer words, people. Truer words have never, ever been written.

"New York Mining Disaster 1941" really is a pretty good song, I swear. Listen for yourself here.