I can’t understand this – both the misogyny and the “guilty pleasure” concept.

The Shame Cluster artists include Lana Del Rey, Blue Swede, Miley Cyrus, The Bangles, Madonna, Kesha, Blondie, Lorde, Pat Benatar, Robin Thicke, Andrew W.K., The Cure, Soft Cell and Billy Joel. At left are the five genres (as determined by Spotify) in this cluster with the strongest weights.

This means that 44 percent of the artists in the cluster were tagged as “pop,” and so on. In other words, pop accounts for less than half the music within the cluster. It’s a diffuse group of artists. “It’s sort of pop through the ages. A lot of female, a lot of pop, but not exclusively any of those,” Kalia said.

“A lot of female?” What the fuck is that?

The misogyny actually bothers me more than the “guilty pleasure” bullshit. The latter is just hurting yourself; misogyny hurts everyone.

While disagreeing with the entire idea of The Shame Cluster, why those artists? It seems to be mostly that they are women. Lorde’s album was easily the best of last year, no contest there. Nothing was even close. It will stand the test of time, too. When you turn on whatever passes for radio in 2050, I guarantee you’ll hear “Royals” on the “oldie” stream.

And “The Cure?” Even if you do make distinctions between innovative artists and “pop” artists, The Cure changed music immensely in the 80s and have influenced literally thousands of artists. There’s hardly a band outside of the the Big Three who have done more to shape music.

All of this looks like another instance of bro culture, except in music snob form – nearly all of the artists in The Shame Cluster are either women or seen as feminine/soft in some way. Seems pretty obvious when you look at this dumbass’s list that way.