We all know, intellectually, that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Pleasure is pleasure! But, emotionally, we still harbor some form of guilt when we indulge in the irrepressible desire to bust a move every time we hear the latest cheesy pop song. On their podcast Switched on Pop, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding have been absolving us of all that guilt by popping the hood on popular songs and explaining how they work, adding intellectual and philosophical heft to our cotton-candy corporate trash music. Now they’re out with a book that offers close reads of 16 “modern classics,” including Beyoncé’s “Love on Top,” Britney Spears’s “Oops!… I Did It Again,” and Toby Keith’s “Made in America.” Like all good pieces of analysis, their accessible and well-written readings of songs make the world a much more interesting place and strengthen our connections to one another. by Rich Smith