An otherwise quiet, controlled Republican town hall event on CNN took a cringeworthy turn Wednesday when host Anderson Cooper prompted Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to reveal more than anyone wanted to know about their musical tastes and, in Cruz’s case, singing ability.

Following a series of softball questions, Cooper threw Rubio a curveball: “You like E.D.M.—electronic dance music,” he clarified for the South Carolinian audience.

“Yes,” Rubio said, looking flustered for the first time. “Maybe people thought it was something else.”

“You ever been to a rave?” Cooper pressed. “You like E.D.M., that’s what they do.”

Rubio quickly distanced himself from the twenty-somethings rolling at Electric Daisy Carnival by praising how “clean” the lyrics were, as opposed to the “90s hip hop stuff” he liked when he was growing up. “In the last years what's happened with E.D.M., you have these disc jockeys, these DJs, that are taking electronic music overlaying it with country music and all sorts of things,” he reassured voters of the predominantly Christian state, adding that he let his children listen to it. “The words are clean. Sometimes they have no words at all. It’s electronic dance music. I don’t have to worry about the lyrics.”

Listening to Rubio attempt to justify enjoying E.D.M. was painful, but Cruz, who took the stage for the third and final hour of the town hall event, managed to make things worse. Asked by Cooper about a report that he liked to serenade his wife with songs from musicals, Cruz, the new Republican front-runner, according to a new poll Wednesday, unleashed some Stevie Wonder on the unsuspecting South Carolina crowd:

Ben Carson, whose own town hall appearance was notable primarily for an extended argument about the evils of the welfare state that recalled a halcyon era when bear attacks were a community affair, may have been the only candidate to exit the broadcast with clean hands.