If young people build trust, it is through shared rites of passage. Some of these activities have existed for ages, although new ones seem to get introduced during the apocalyptic second half of a violence wave, when you really need to count on others. The last such time was the mid-1970s through the early '90s. Of that period's cultural inventions, my bet for which will prove to be an enduring trust-building rite is the game Truth or Dare.
Games involving skill exaggerate some pecking order, which isn't bad because preserving social stability sometimes requires us to be reminded of our place. But occasionally, and especially during rites of passage, we must experience a leveling of ranks. Otherwise, group members won't develop strong bounds. Truth or Dare is ideal, involving no skill, no teams, and no score.
If you didn't trust the others enough to not take advantage of you, you'd never play in the first place. Joining in signals that you trust them enough not to ask a relationship-shattering question, or subject you to a degrading stunt.
Each time a person's question or dare to another is provocative enough to keep the game fun, but doesn't go so far as to humiliate, you grow more assured of their trustworthiness. They held the reputational fate of another in their hands and chose not to abuse it. This is an even stronger signal given that they're not fully socialized, and can find the temptation to royally embarrass someone overpowering.
Sometimes, however, you do meet a selfish or fair-weather friend who crosses the line. Even so, it's better to discover who to keep at arm's length from playing some silly kid's game, rather than from getting stabbed in the back for real.
Then there's the cross-sex appeal. Girls like the gossipy Truth side, while boys are drawn to the show-off-iness of Dare. Peer pressure prevents them from always choosing one or the other, though. This negative feedback loop is typical of healthy boy-girl interactions -- girls are kept from spiraling out of control in the gossiping direction, and boys in the Jackass direction.
And if while growing up boys and girls don't play these trust-building games, they'll get the shallow and retarded relationships of Millennials -- mostly avoidant or non-existent, though also transient hook-ups and relationships of convenience where they're only sexless acquaintances, rather than two people who complete each other.
August 29, 2011
August 25, 2011
The 1980s pinnacle of independent cinema
I remember being taken aback by this fact when reading Arthur De Vany's Hollywood Economics:
And here we had always associated the hey-day of "indie films" with the '90s. (The quote is from the article on major film studios -- it's skipped over in the one on independent studios.) But it shouldn't be too surprising if we think of music from independent record labels, which also were at their peak influence from the later 1970s through the very early '90s, with I.R.S. and Chrysalis Records being the counterparts to Orion Pictures.
It's really the last 20 years that have seen massive consolidation within the entertainment industry, although we've heard the "Greed is good" line so many times that we've forgotten that the go-go '80s saw The Little Guy at his most powerful in popular culture, even if he was losing ground in wealth equality.
There really are too many to list, but here are just a few iconic movies from the halcyon days of indie film (some are real surprises):
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Halloween
Caddyshack
The Rambo trilogy
Amadeus
The Terminator, and T2
Hannah and Her Sisters
Platoon
RoboCop
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Predator
Silence of the Lambs
Total Recall
L.A. Story
Blue Velvet
Die Hard
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Heathers
Metropolitan
This is Spinal Tap
...plus a lot of guilty pleasures like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Lethal Weapon, Commando, Kickboxer, Cobra, Bloodsport, etc.
Strange as it is to believe, not so long ago indie studios were pumping out instant classics instead of already-forgot-about-'ems.
In 1986, the combined share of the six classic [major movie studios]—at that point Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, Universal, Fox, and MGM/UA—fell to 64%, the lowest since the beginning of the Golden Age. Disney was in third place, behind only Paramount and Warners. Even including it as a seventh major and adding its 10% share, the majors' control of the North American market was at a historic ebb. Orion, now completely independent of Warner Bros., and Tri-Star were well positioned as mini-majors, each with North American market shares of around 6% and regarded by industry observers as "fully competitive with the majors". Smaller independents garnered 13%—more than any studio aside from Paramount. In 1964, by comparison, all of the companies beside the then seven majors and Disney had combined for a grand total of 1%. . . .
Box-office domination was fully restored: in 2006, the six major movie conglomerates combined for 89.8% of the North American market; Lionsgate and Weinstein were almost exactly half as successful as their 1986 mini-major counterparts, sharing 6.1%; MGM came in at 1.8%; and all of the remaining independent companies split a pool totalling 2.3%. [Wikipedia]
And here we had always associated the hey-day of "indie films" with the '90s. (The quote is from the article on major film studios -- it's skipped over in the one on independent studios.) But it shouldn't be too surprising if we think of music from independent record labels, which also were at their peak influence from the later 1970s through the very early '90s, with I.R.S. and Chrysalis Records being the counterparts to Orion Pictures.
It's really the last 20 years that have seen massive consolidation within the entertainment industry, although we've heard the "Greed is good" line so many times that we've forgotten that the go-go '80s saw The Little Guy at his most powerful in popular culture, even if he was losing ground in wealth equality.
There really are too many to list, but here are just a few iconic movies from the halcyon days of indie film (some are real surprises):
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Halloween
Caddyshack
The Rambo trilogy
Amadeus
The Terminator, and T2
Hannah and Her Sisters
Platoon
RoboCop
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Predator
Silence of the Lambs
Total Recall
L.A. Story
Blue Velvet
Die Hard
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Heathers
Metropolitan
This is Spinal Tap
...plus a lot of guilty pleasures like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Lethal Weapon, Commando, Kickboxer, Cobra, Bloodsport, etc.
Strange as it is to believe, not so long ago indie studios were pumping out instant classics instead of already-forgot-about-'ems.
August 20, 2011
Black-white music collaborations worth listening to
Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., and RUN-DMC and Aerosmith, being very far back on the stage -- not letting-themselves-go enough, and too goofy, respectively. Chaka Khan only does back-up vocals with Steve Winwood on "Higher Love". I'm thinking more of a Riggs and Murtaugh, Rocky and Apollo, Foley-Taggart-Rosewood kind of team result.
Heard the one below on the radio today, and it's got to be near the top of the list. (For those born within 5 years of 1980, you have also heard it in instrumental form in this video game music.) It's by Phil Collins (also with Genesis) and Philip Bailey (also with Earth, Wind, & Fire).
Heard the one below on the radio today, and it's got to be near the top of the list. (For those born within 5 years of 1980, you have also heard it in instrumental form in this video game music.) It's by Phil Collins (also with Genesis) and Philip Bailey (also with Earth, Wind, & Fire).
August 15, 2011
Marry your friends from adolescence when you grow up?
Adults chastise adolescents for being too focused on the short term when playing the dating and mating game, but I wonder whether we're really so neglectful of cultivating longer-term prospects for marriage. Perhaps that's what mixed-sex friendships are when you're young -- an investment that only pays off later in life, when you're looking for stability and a soulmate.
Now, it is true that when you look back on all the girlfriends, flings, and crushes you've ever had, the grown-ups were right: they were mostly based on fleeting excitement. Even so-called committed relationships don't last a lifetime, or even close. Here again it's exceptional if they last beyond the endorphin rush of the honeymoon phase. Just as we wouldn't call someone monogamous who was married to one woman at a time but went through 5 wives, a kid who graduates college with 5 "serious" relationships since puberty has not been truly committed.
Kept going by the thrill of novelty rather than cemented by an emotional bond, these relationships are unlikely to leave either person reflecting years later that "that was the one that got away." Instead, you either feel lukewarm or ask yourself "What was I thinking?" That is, unless you already started out as friends before moving up to boyfriend and girlfriend.
I can think of only three girls who I would marry for sure (and a few other maybes), and they were all friends at various points throughout adolescence -- my first good chick friend in fifth grade, my close friend from eighth through twelfth grade, and a floormate from my freshman dorm at college, our first year of living away from our parents.
What they share with each other, and what distinguishes them from other girls then or since, is that we socially transformed close to each other, helping the other through it. That creates a bond of trust and fellow-feeling that does not arise when people get to know each other in more mundane circumstances. I haven't seen or spoken to them for 8, 11, and 19 years, but it's still there.
I'll elaborate on that theory sometime later, and show some vignettes of those three friendships that will hopefully make it clear why they're so different.
To end on for now, I know you don't have to feel this emotionally bound to each other for a marriage to work out. You can always remind yourself consciously that breaking it up would violate this or that norm, would have this or that bad effect on the children, or what have you. Still, relying on conscious reflection upon abstract rules is asking too much of most people. It's just not how our mind works in general. It would be better if we felt so attached that the temptation to cheat, leave, etc., didn't tug at us very hard in the first place.
Now, it is true that when you look back on all the girlfriends, flings, and crushes you've ever had, the grown-ups were right: they were mostly based on fleeting excitement. Even so-called committed relationships don't last a lifetime, or even close. Here again it's exceptional if they last beyond the endorphin rush of the honeymoon phase. Just as we wouldn't call someone monogamous who was married to one woman at a time but went through 5 wives, a kid who graduates college with 5 "serious" relationships since puberty has not been truly committed.
Kept going by the thrill of novelty rather than cemented by an emotional bond, these relationships are unlikely to leave either person reflecting years later that "that was the one that got away." Instead, you either feel lukewarm or ask yourself "What was I thinking?" That is, unless you already started out as friends before moving up to boyfriend and girlfriend.
I can think of only three girls who I would marry for sure (and a few other maybes), and they were all friends at various points throughout adolescence -- my first good chick friend in fifth grade, my close friend from eighth through twelfth grade, and a floormate from my freshman dorm at college, our first year of living away from our parents.
What they share with each other, and what distinguishes them from other girls then or since, is that we socially transformed close to each other, helping the other through it. That creates a bond of trust and fellow-feeling that does not arise when people get to know each other in more mundane circumstances. I haven't seen or spoken to them for 8, 11, and 19 years, but it's still there.
I'll elaborate on that theory sometime later, and show some vignettes of those three friendships that will hopefully make it clear why they're so different.
To end on for now, I know you don't have to feel this emotionally bound to each other for a marriage to work out. You can always remind yourself consciously that breaking it up would violate this or that norm, would have this or that bad effect on the children, or what have you. Still, relying on conscious reflection upon abstract rules is asking too much of most people. It's just not how our mind works in general. It would be better if we felt so attached that the temptation to cheat, leave, etc., didn't tug at us very hard in the first place.
August 10, 2011
The rise and fall of the urban legend culture: Data from movies
Awhile ago I noticed that the telling of urban legends has been in decline since the early or mid-1990s, and that by now it is all but dead. Here I mean in the sense of a modern ghost story or bizarre cautionary tale of what happened to a friend of a friend, not in the vaguer sense of any old off-beat rumor.
Data on the prevalence of urban legends are hard to come by, as oral storytelling generally doesn't leave fossils. Fortunately they are sometimes depicted in movies, and Bennett and Smith's book Urban Legends has an appendix listing every known movie that mentions some specific legend.
I'm not so interested in how prevalent a particular legend was, but rather the telling of any legend at all. There are 142 movies in their list, which begins at 1913 and ends at 2006, the year before the book's release. Here is how they are distributed over time (smoothed using a 5-year moving average):
There's no discernible pattern until about 1960. I think before then, movies were focused more on established ghost stories like vampires, Frankenstein, werewolves, etc. After that, though, their prevalence reflects the crime rate -- up through the early '90s, then falling through today.
This is part of the broader pattern of people believing more in the supernatural, occult, or bizarre when the violence level is rising, and less when it's falling.
In my informal polling, the girl who had heard every single legend I inquired about was born in the mid-'70s (1975 I think). She wasn't biased either, as if I'd asked a class of folklore studies majors. If the peak of urban legend-telling was the early 1990s, she would have been in her later high school years.
Not having asked hundreds of random people, I don't want to stick to the mid-'70s as the prime cohort, though. I do know that the earlier Boomers had heard of very few or none, likewise with the Millennials, while Generation X and the mini-generation just after it (1979-1984) knew the most. I didn't get to ask many later Boomers (1958-1964). So perhaps we are most drawn to cautionary tales about threats to our physical security when we are in our post-pubescent young adult years, and to a lesser but still high degree when we're of elementary school age.
The loss (for now) of the urban legend culture is unfortunate not only because they're fun to tell and listen to. They provide valuable reminders of when you should be on alert. "Yeah, but I'll never get into one of those situations" -- you can run but you can't hide from life's dangers, so you'd better develop a basic sense of what to look out for in the meantime.
Plus this kind of storytelling strengthens trust between friends. By accepting their improbable tale without much resistance, you signal your trust in their regard for your welfare. If someone you don't trust tells you the tale, you may still believe it just in case, but you'll be more likely to dismiss it than if a friend told you. Your reluctance signals your lack of trust in them.
Data on the prevalence of urban legends are hard to come by, as oral storytelling generally doesn't leave fossils. Fortunately they are sometimes depicted in movies, and Bennett and Smith's book Urban Legends has an appendix listing every known movie that mentions some specific legend.
I'm not so interested in how prevalent a particular legend was, but rather the telling of any legend at all. There are 142 movies in their list, which begins at 1913 and ends at 2006, the year before the book's release. Here is how they are distributed over time (smoothed using a 5-year moving average):
There's no discernible pattern until about 1960. I think before then, movies were focused more on established ghost stories like vampires, Frankenstein, werewolves, etc. After that, though, their prevalence reflects the crime rate -- up through the early '90s, then falling through today.
This is part of the broader pattern of people believing more in the supernatural, occult, or bizarre when the violence level is rising, and less when it's falling.
In my informal polling, the girl who had heard every single legend I inquired about was born in the mid-'70s (1975 I think). She wasn't biased either, as if I'd asked a class of folklore studies majors. If the peak of urban legend-telling was the early 1990s, she would have been in her later high school years.
Not having asked hundreds of random people, I don't want to stick to the mid-'70s as the prime cohort, though. I do know that the earlier Boomers had heard of very few or none, likewise with the Millennials, while Generation X and the mini-generation just after it (1979-1984) knew the most. I didn't get to ask many later Boomers (1958-1964). So perhaps we are most drawn to cautionary tales about threats to our physical security when we are in our post-pubescent young adult years, and to a lesser but still high degree when we're of elementary school age.
The loss (for now) of the urban legend culture is unfortunate not only because they're fun to tell and listen to. They provide valuable reminders of when you should be on alert. "Yeah, but I'll never get into one of those situations" -- you can run but you can't hide from life's dangers, so you'd better develop a basic sense of what to look out for in the meantime.
Plus this kind of storytelling strengthens trust between friends. By accepting their improbable tale without much resistance, you signal your trust in their regard for your welfare. If someone you don't trust tells you the tale, you may still believe it just in case, but you'll be more likely to dismiss it than if a friend told you. Your reluctance signals your lack of trust in them.
August 1, 2011
Mad Men now on Netflix streaming
Better catch up fast like me if you haven't seen it on TV yet, you never know when Netflix is going to yank it from their streaming service. I'll hold off on any big-picture comments since I've only gotten through the first season and a half.
It's true what everyone has said about the crisp writing, sympathetic characters, and lack of self-consciousness in the acting. Whatever the TV equivalent of a page-turner is called, this is it.
The emotional range isn't quite as broad as in Twin Peaks, although that's no fault here since part of what they're trying to recreate is a world where feelings were private. Nor does the plot have the same mythological quality, again fittingly given the exploration of the mundane. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the TV classic with the next-most enduring reputation. Definitely the best in the past 15 years, when The Simpsons bit the dust.
Just some random thoughts from what little I've seen so far:
- There's an illuminating contrast between two helpers -- the Freudian psychoanalyst and the Catholic priest. The shrink tries to amplify certain of Betty's anxieties, and he blabs to her husband about what she has said, without her knowing. The priest tries to dampen the sinners' anxieties by reminding them that there's no offense so grave that God won't forgive them, so long as they change their ways, make an act of contrition, and so on. The priest allows himself to be influenced by a confession that he's heard, but he doesn't share it outright with interested parties (at least not so far).
- Twice so far overly ambitious characters have been told to knock off the Machiavellian bullshit, that they will be abandoned if they try to be feared instead of loved and admired. Since a lot of viewers, especially younger ones, won't appreciate the subtlety, it would be nice to hear an occasional reference to mafia-run ghettos as a reminder of where that dog-eat-dog mindset leads.
- Everyone has remarked on how different things are between 1960 and now. But what about how similar they are? There was lots of drinking and smoking, but just like today there was hardly any dancing. The dance culture gets started during the first half of rising-crime times and really kicks into high gear during the second half -- that was the mid-'70s through the early '90s the last time around, and the Jazz Age before that (when the Charleston blew up).
- None of the products push my nostalgia button, although I'm not their target audience in that respect. Still, it is a real treat to see bench seats in the front of the car. Bucket seats weren't so bad at first since they were still placed close together. Over time, though, the console between has bloated and pushed them farther apart. And forget about that Starship Enterprise-looking thing in a Prius. What's next -- a roof-to-floor partition between driver and passenger? The other person pushes a beeper button, and if you feel like talking to them, you can roll down the window between you.
It's true what everyone has said about the crisp writing, sympathetic characters, and lack of self-consciousness in the acting. Whatever the TV equivalent of a page-turner is called, this is it.
The emotional range isn't quite as broad as in Twin Peaks, although that's no fault here since part of what they're trying to recreate is a world where feelings were private. Nor does the plot have the same mythological quality, again fittingly given the exploration of the mundane. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the TV classic with the next-most enduring reputation. Definitely the best in the past 15 years, when The Simpsons bit the dust.
Just some random thoughts from what little I've seen so far:
- There's an illuminating contrast between two helpers -- the Freudian psychoanalyst and the Catholic priest. The shrink tries to amplify certain of Betty's anxieties, and he blabs to her husband about what she has said, without her knowing. The priest tries to dampen the sinners' anxieties by reminding them that there's no offense so grave that God won't forgive them, so long as they change their ways, make an act of contrition, and so on. The priest allows himself to be influenced by a confession that he's heard, but he doesn't share it outright with interested parties (at least not so far).
- Twice so far overly ambitious characters have been told to knock off the Machiavellian bullshit, that they will be abandoned if they try to be feared instead of loved and admired. Since a lot of viewers, especially younger ones, won't appreciate the subtlety, it would be nice to hear an occasional reference to mafia-run ghettos as a reminder of where that dog-eat-dog mindset leads.
- Everyone has remarked on how different things are between 1960 and now. But what about how similar they are? There was lots of drinking and smoking, but just like today there was hardly any dancing. The dance culture gets started during the first half of rising-crime times and really kicks into high gear during the second half -- that was the mid-'70s through the early '90s the last time around, and the Jazz Age before that (when the Charleston blew up).
- None of the products push my nostalgia button, although I'm not their target audience in that respect. Still, it is a real treat to see bench seats in the front of the car. Bucket seats weren't so bad at first since they were still placed close together. Over time, though, the console between has bloated and pushed them farther apart. And forget about that Starship Enterprise-looking thing in a Prius. What's next -- a roof-to-floor partition between driver and passenger? The other person pushes a beeper button, and if you feel like talking to them, you can roll down the window between you.
July 26, 2011
Attitudinal changes in popular songs about drugs
Unfortunately when Amy Winehouse kicked the bucket, no one learned anything about the dangers of drug addiction: they could never put themselves in her place, and so they believe it couldn't happen to them or any other normal person among their friends and family -- only to a complete and total freak like her.
The next time the zeitgeist enters a wild phase, they will be among the first to recklessly experiment with hard drugs, convinced that they're beyond the reach of addiction's hand. They will only find out the hard way that their brains are more frail than they'd thought. So, when there are few reminders that normal people can get sucked into an addiction if they get started, the average person gets complacent and sets themselves up for a rude awakening, either personally or again as it might strike someone they know.
Those reminders thankfully do not have to come from first-hand experience -- believable stories from the broader culture will do as well. So let's have a look at the typical attitude toward drug use a listener of popular music would have heard during the four phases of the zeitgeist cycle, the first and second halves of falling-crime and rising-crime periods. I'm going mostly based on Wikipedia's category of drug-related songs, which looks pretty comprehensive.
During the second half of falling-crime times, roughly the early-mid-2000s through today, the mood is complacency, so songs about drugs will not find much of an audience. "Well yeah we know not to smoke crack, but gosh it's not like we would anyway, so why do we need to hear about it?" Aside from Amy Winehouse's song "Rehab", where she throws a hissy fit about being told she needs to detox, and a reference here and there in a song by Pink, drugs have mostly disappeared from pop songs. This appears to be true for the previous second half of falling-crime times, namely the later 1940s through the '50s.
In the first half of falling-crime times, boredom and nihilism set in, and drugs are permitted, even if not celebrated, as an escapist way to shock some sensation back into the corpse of your social life. From 1992 through the late '90s or early 2000s, this attitude could easily be seen in the gangsta rap trend in black culture -- such as Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 solo hit "Gin and Juice" -- and in the dropout heroin chic trend in white culture -- for example "Ebeneezer Goode" by The Shamen in 1992, "Cigarettes & Alcohol" by Oasis in 1994, and "Beetlebum" by Blur in 1997. The only major song that showed the destruction of getting into drugs was Green Day's 1995 "Geek Stink Breath", about meth addiction. However, as I remember it, no one knew what it was about, unless maybe they bought the album and read the lyrics.
It looks like the same attitude prevailed during the previous first half of falling-crime times, 1933 through the mid-'40s, as shown by Cab Calloway's 1933 song "Reefer Man" and Ella Fitzgerald's song "Wacky Dust" from 1938.
When violence levels start soaring, people see that the old ways have not managed to keep them safe, so they switch to a more experimental mindset in order to figure out through trial-and-error how to adapt to the dangerous new world. In the first half, there has not been enough time to sort out the proven successes from the failures among the experiments. So there is a sort of anything-goes attitude about drug use -- it's just part of the overall expansion of consciousness.
There are too many songs in this vein from the 1960s and early '70s to review, but some of the best known are "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by The Beatles, "Heroin" by Velvet Underground, and "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, all from 1967. There was a major exception -- "Kicks" by Paul Revere and the Raiders, a strongly anti-drug song from 1966. It didn't help the counter-culture that it was a rockin' tune instead of some easily dismissed stuffy propaganda song. Already by 1972, a few are starting to see how high the costs can get, as detailed in "Needle and the Damage Done" by Neil Young.
Once the society moves into the second half of rising-crime times, it's clearly not a passing trouble or two that they have to deal with, and there's been enough time to evaluate which experimental changes have proven better or worse at adapting people to the new world. By now most people begin to push back against libertine drug use. The most permissive it gets is "it's complicated, and probably for the worse," as shown in some songs from the earlier part of this period, such as "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton and "Hotel California" by Eagles, both from 1977.
Throughout the 1980s, drug songs supply their audience with vivid pictures of how free drug use will destroy the user, and perhaps even their larger community if there are enough addicts around in one place.
Strange as it is to believe, rap songs about drugs back then were the most intolerant, especially when compared to the later apathetic and indulgent attitude of gangsta rap. When cocaine and crack are tearing apart your neighborhood, though, it's hard to wave them on by as fun activities for sound-minded adults to take part in. "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash (1983) spares no detail about the short-term effects on the user's own brain, as well as the downstream consequences for being able to live an autonomous life. "Night of the Living Baseheads" by Public Enemy (1987) paints a grim picture of what life looks like when crackheads start taking over the 'hood. Even N.W.A. wrote a song like that -- "Dopeman" from 1987 -- before they took off in separate gangsta rap directions and glorified and glamorized the drug culture. As late as 1988, Ice-T was telling his audience not to touch drugs and to get hooked on his music instead ("I'm Your Pusher").
In white people music, the only popular song of this period that romanticized the drug world was "Dr. Feelgood" by Motley Crue in 1989. Although it is ostensibly a love song, "I Want a New Drug" by Huey Lewis and the News (1983) details all sorts of horrible side-effects of drug use. "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N' Roses (1987) half-glamorizes the street pushers by making their world seem exotic, but the overall message is clear that they're just going to chew you up and spit you out -- "I'm gonna watch you bleed," "Welcome to the jungle baby, you're gonna die."
Also on that album was "Mr. Brownstone," a don't-let-it-happen-to-you-too song about needing more and more to feel the same rush from heroin, as it takes over your life. This image of the drug as a parasite manipulating the behavior of its host was made even clearer in Metallica's 1986 song "Master of Puppets".
It shouldn't be surprising that heavy metal took such an interest in stemming the free flow of drugs, since their fans were like those of the rap genre -- lower on the class ladder, more impulsive, less socially integrated into their communities, and in general having more of a slacker / stoner / dropout / burnout tendency. Maybe the "Just Say No" campaign would work on kids who were pretty well behaved to begin with, and only needed a stern reminder from the First Lady. But the burnouts needed to be warned by their idols who had been to hell and back that it's not all it's cracked up to be.
The last two major songs in the cautionary tale genre were "True Faith" in 1987 by New Order (used in the movie versions of American Psycho and Bright Lights, Big City), and the most well known of all, "Under the Bridge" by Red Hot Chili Peppers from 1991. If the people running the D.A.R.E. program had any brains, they would have made that their theme song and played it in our fifth grade class to drive home what happens to heroin addicts.
Some crimes are the province mostly or only of people with fairly sociopathic personalities -- cold-blooded murder, rape, grand theft, and so on. Normal people aren't going to wander carelessly into this area of human behavior, so they don't need to be reminded that it's wrong. But there are all sorts of lesser crimes and vices that we need vivid reminders about, lest we grow complacent and think we can get away scot-free -- adultery, other forms of betrayal, drug use, etc.
So, there is such a thing as too low of drug use prevalence, and too little focus on it in pop culture. If it's everywhere, society is just about to fall apart. Yet we've never seen that in Western history, so that extreme seems unlikely. But if it's too absent, we forget the dangers, grow complacent, and then the next time a wild phase comes around, instead of being savvy, we wade heedlessly toward the whirlpool because, hey, we've gone strolling along the shoreline before -- what could be so harmful about that vortex out there?
Our drug policy, then, shouldn't have the goal of totally eliminating drug usage. That would look nice and stable for awhile, until the growing hubris would put everyone at risk for a real clobbering once they eventually thought about trying drugs. The same goes for popular culture -- the "family values" movement that wants to keep children and adolescents ignorant of the uglier parts of the real world is only giving them a false sense of protection. Thinking that only Amy Winehouse types could get hooked on drugs, they'll have no self-defense training for when they must confront the decision to start drugs or not, even recreationally. And they'll have the easiest time rationalizing away their indulgence, not having heard those lame and overly confident excuses a million times before.
Remember that the young people who launched the druggie liberation movement of the 1960s had grown up during the naive '40s and '50s under the watch of helicopter parents. It was those who grew up during the later half of the '70s and '80s who developed a sense of caution, whether they were doing drugs or not.
The next time the zeitgeist enters a wild phase, they will be among the first to recklessly experiment with hard drugs, convinced that they're beyond the reach of addiction's hand. They will only find out the hard way that their brains are more frail than they'd thought. So, when there are few reminders that normal people can get sucked into an addiction if they get started, the average person gets complacent and sets themselves up for a rude awakening, either personally or again as it might strike someone they know.
Those reminders thankfully do not have to come from first-hand experience -- believable stories from the broader culture will do as well. So let's have a look at the typical attitude toward drug use a listener of popular music would have heard during the four phases of the zeitgeist cycle, the first and second halves of falling-crime and rising-crime periods. I'm going mostly based on Wikipedia's category of drug-related songs, which looks pretty comprehensive.
During the second half of falling-crime times, roughly the early-mid-2000s through today, the mood is complacency, so songs about drugs will not find much of an audience. "Well yeah we know not to smoke crack, but gosh it's not like we would anyway, so why do we need to hear about it?" Aside from Amy Winehouse's song "Rehab", where she throws a hissy fit about being told she needs to detox, and a reference here and there in a song by Pink, drugs have mostly disappeared from pop songs. This appears to be true for the previous second half of falling-crime times, namely the later 1940s through the '50s.
In the first half of falling-crime times, boredom and nihilism set in, and drugs are permitted, even if not celebrated, as an escapist way to shock some sensation back into the corpse of your social life. From 1992 through the late '90s or early 2000s, this attitude could easily be seen in the gangsta rap trend in black culture -- such as Snoop Doggy Dogg's 1993 solo hit "Gin and Juice" -- and in the dropout heroin chic trend in white culture -- for example "Ebeneezer Goode" by The Shamen in 1992, "Cigarettes & Alcohol" by Oasis in 1994, and "Beetlebum" by Blur in 1997. The only major song that showed the destruction of getting into drugs was Green Day's 1995 "Geek Stink Breath", about meth addiction. However, as I remember it, no one knew what it was about, unless maybe they bought the album and read the lyrics.
It looks like the same attitude prevailed during the previous first half of falling-crime times, 1933 through the mid-'40s, as shown by Cab Calloway's 1933 song "Reefer Man" and Ella Fitzgerald's song "Wacky Dust" from 1938.
When violence levels start soaring, people see that the old ways have not managed to keep them safe, so they switch to a more experimental mindset in order to figure out through trial-and-error how to adapt to the dangerous new world. In the first half, there has not been enough time to sort out the proven successes from the failures among the experiments. So there is a sort of anything-goes attitude about drug use -- it's just part of the overall expansion of consciousness.
There are too many songs in this vein from the 1960s and early '70s to review, but some of the best known are "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by The Beatles, "Heroin" by Velvet Underground, and "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, all from 1967. There was a major exception -- "Kicks" by Paul Revere and the Raiders, a strongly anti-drug song from 1966. It didn't help the counter-culture that it was a rockin' tune instead of some easily dismissed stuffy propaganda song. Already by 1972, a few are starting to see how high the costs can get, as detailed in "Needle and the Damage Done" by Neil Young.
Once the society moves into the second half of rising-crime times, it's clearly not a passing trouble or two that they have to deal with, and there's been enough time to evaluate which experimental changes have proven better or worse at adapting people to the new world. By now most people begin to push back against libertine drug use. The most permissive it gets is "it's complicated, and probably for the worse," as shown in some songs from the earlier part of this period, such as "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton and "Hotel California" by Eagles, both from 1977.
Throughout the 1980s, drug songs supply their audience with vivid pictures of how free drug use will destroy the user, and perhaps even their larger community if there are enough addicts around in one place.
Strange as it is to believe, rap songs about drugs back then were the most intolerant, especially when compared to the later apathetic and indulgent attitude of gangsta rap. When cocaine and crack are tearing apart your neighborhood, though, it's hard to wave them on by as fun activities for sound-minded adults to take part in. "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash (1983) spares no detail about the short-term effects on the user's own brain, as well as the downstream consequences for being able to live an autonomous life. "Night of the Living Baseheads" by Public Enemy (1987) paints a grim picture of what life looks like when crackheads start taking over the 'hood. Even N.W.A. wrote a song like that -- "Dopeman" from 1987 -- before they took off in separate gangsta rap directions and glorified and glamorized the drug culture. As late as 1988, Ice-T was telling his audience not to touch drugs and to get hooked on his music instead ("I'm Your Pusher").
In white people music, the only popular song of this period that romanticized the drug world was "Dr. Feelgood" by Motley Crue in 1989. Although it is ostensibly a love song, "I Want a New Drug" by Huey Lewis and the News (1983) details all sorts of horrible side-effects of drug use. "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N' Roses (1987) half-glamorizes the street pushers by making their world seem exotic, but the overall message is clear that they're just going to chew you up and spit you out -- "I'm gonna watch you bleed," "Welcome to the jungle baby, you're gonna die."
Also on that album was "Mr. Brownstone," a don't-let-it-happen-to-you-too song about needing more and more to feel the same rush from heroin, as it takes over your life. This image of the drug as a parasite manipulating the behavior of its host was made even clearer in Metallica's 1986 song "Master of Puppets".
It shouldn't be surprising that heavy metal took such an interest in stemming the free flow of drugs, since their fans were like those of the rap genre -- lower on the class ladder, more impulsive, less socially integrated into their communities, and in general having more of a slacker / stoner / dropout / burnout tendency. Maybe the "Just Say No" campaign would work on kids who were pretty well behaved to begin with, and only needed a stern reminder from the First Lady. But the burnouts needed to be warned by their idols who had been to hell and back that it's not all it's cracked up to be.
The last two major songs in the cautionary tale genre were "True Faith" in 1987 by New Order (used in the movie versions of American Psycho and Bright Lights, Big City), and the most well known of all, "Under the Bridge" by Red Hot Chili Peppers from 1991. If the people running the D.A.R.E. program had any brains, they would have made that their theme song and played it in our fifth grade class to drive home what happens to heroin addicts.
Some crimes are the province mostly or only of people with fairly sociopathic personalities -- cold-blooded murder, rape, grand theft, and so on. Normal people aren't going to wander carelessly into this area of human behavior, so they don't need to be reminded that it's wrong. But there are all sorts of lesser crimes and vices that we need vivid reminders about, lest we grow complacent and think we can get away scot-free -- adultery, other forms of betrayal, drug use, etc.
So, there is such a thing as too low of drug use prevalence, and too little focus on it in pop culture. If it's everywhere, society is just about to fall apart. Yet we've never seen that in Western history, so that extreme seems unlikely. But if it's too absent, we forget the dangers, grow complacent, and then the next time a wild phase comes around, instead of being savvy, we wade heedlessly toward the whirlpool because, hey, we've gone strolling along the shoreline before -- what could be so harmful about that vortex out there?
Our drug policy, then, shouldn't have the goal of totally eliminating drug usage. That would look nice and stable for awhile, until the growing hubris would put everyone at risk for a real clobbering once they eventually thought about trying drugs. The same goes for popular culture -- the "family values" movement that wants to keep children and adolescents ignorant of the uglier parts of the real world is only giving them a false sense of protection. Thinking that only Amy Winehouse types could get hooked on drugs, they'll have no self-defense training for when they must confront the decision to start drugs or not, even recreationally. And they'll have the easiest time rationalizing away their indulgence, not having heard those lame and overly confident excuses a million times before.
Remember that the young people who launched the druggie liberation movement of the 1960s had grown up during the naive '40s and '50s under the watch of helicopter parents. It was those who grew up during the later half of the '70s and '80s who developed a sense of caution, whether they were doing drugs or not.
July 24, 2011
The search for social shopping in the internet and big-box age
Durkheim thought that one reason why people in modern economies set up such a specialized system of division of labor was to recover a sense of solidarity that had been lost after we left a primitive way of life, where we were compelled to rely on each other more directly. By distributing tasks so broadly across people, even though it's not necessary to subsist, we commit ourselves to a more social existence and don't feel so out-of-touch with our nature.
Whatever you think about that, something like this seems to have been going on since internet shopping has driven some sectors of the brick-and-mortar world out of business. Buying stuff online is asocial, impersonal, dull to the senses, and unable to deliver instant gratification. While they may be fine with losing these joys of shopping for books, music, and other entertainment in real life, they would still like to shop for something in that more fulfilling way.
They didn't find it in the big box stores, which unlike record stores and book stores have only done better over the past 10 to 15 years. Although you can get your fix for the occasional impulse buy, most of what these stores sell is not up to giving shoppers the pleasure they used to get from browsing through books or flipping through albums and listening to music. And forget about a social experience and face-to-face interactions.
You never take notice of, let alone acknowledge, the existence of your fellow shoppers at Best Buy or Target. And to cut costs and pass along savings to the consumer, they've outsourced as much as possible to the consumers themselves, including the one relationship that you never would've thought could be mechanized -- the cashier. As with online shopping, the great majority who go along with these new norms aren't bothered by them, but they would still like some part of their buying activities to feel human, where there's something more than consumers and self-scan machines.
Where have people turned? To food shops. As Webvan discovered during the dot-com bubble, nobody is going to rely on the internet for their groceries. Unlike books that can sit in an Amazon warehouse forever, or mp3 files that will always be available to download from iTunes, most food that people buy is perishable. Along the physical-matter vs. immaterial-information spectrum, food is very far in the physical direction. So it cannot be so easily scaled up and mass-distributed, like mp3 files, ensuring that there will always be many food vendors in every neighborhood, while record stores and book stores vanish into thin air.
Unlike the big box stores, most of the for-fun food shops that people visit are intimate enough in size to feel like everyone there, customers and workers alike, are at least loosely part of a single community. Plus, no matter how trivial it may seem, there is still a more personal relationship between the workers and customers in a food place since they are making you something right then and there. And not just throwing a pizza in the microwave, but something with a more human touch like setting the foamed milk just right on top of a couple shots of espresso.
Certainly for routine food purchases most people go to supermarkets or even the Wal-Mart-esque ones like Costco. I'm talking about the food places that people go to in their leisure time. That's about all you see in shopping centers these days -- one food store next to another.
Before, there wasn't as much snobbery and polarization among the food stores and their patrons. In a shopping center, there used to be the sit-down restaurant, the fast food place, and the junk food place.
Now that food stores are almost all that remain, the shopping center now has four sit-down restaurants, several fast food stops, a deli, three junk food places, and two Fifties diners. (Speaking of which, since the hoverboard looks like a no-go for 2015, we at least better see a chain of Cafe 80's.) They can only compete so much on price; usually it devolves into an annoying battle over, e.g., which of the three Mexican places is the most "authentic".
As tiresome as the foodie culture can get sometimes, we should remember that going crazy about food vendors is an understandable response to the death blow that internet and big-box retailers have dealt to a lot of formerly fun places to socialize.
Whatever you think about that, something like this seems to have been going on since internet shopping has driven some sectors of the brick-and-mortar world out of business. Buying stuff online is asocial, impersonal, dull to the senses, and unable to deliver instant gratification. While they may be fine with losing these joys of shopping for books, music, and other entertainment in real life, they would still like to shop for something in that more fulfilling way.
They didn't find it in the big box stores, which unlike record stores and book stores have only done better over the past 10 to 15 years. Although you can get your fix for the occasional impulse buy, most of what these stores sell is not up to giving shoppers the pleasure they used to get from browsing through books or flipping through albums and listening to music. And forget about a social experience and face-to-face interactions.
You never take notice of, let alone acknowledge, the existence of your fellow shoppers at Best Buy or Target. And to cut costs and pass along savings to the consumer, they've outsourced as much as possible to the consumers themselves, including the one relationship that you never would've thought could be mechanized -- the cashier. As with online shopping, the great majority who go along with these new norms aren't bothered by them, but they would still like some part of their buying activities to feel human, where there's something more than consumers and self-scan machines.
Where have people turned? To food shops. As Webvan discovered during the dot-com bubble, nobody is going to rely on the internet for their groceries. Unlike books that can sit in an Amazon warehouse forever, or mp3 files that will always be available to download from iTunes, most food that people buy is perishable. Along the physical-matter vs. immaterial-information spectrum, food is very far in the physical direction. So it cannot be so easily scaled up and mass-distributed, like mp3 files, ensuring that there will always be many food vendors in every neighborhood, while record stores and book stores vanish into thin air.
Unlike the big box stores, most of the for-fun food shops that people visit are intimate enough in size to feel like everyone there, customers and workers alike, are at least loosely part of a single community. Plus, no matter how trivial it may seem, there is still a more personal relationship between the workers and customers in a food place since they are making you something right then and there. And not just throwing a pizza in the microwave, but something with a more human touch like setting the foamed milk just right on top of a couple shots of espresso.
Certainly for routine food purchases most people go to supermarkets or even the Wal-Mart-esque ones like Costco. I'm talking about the food places that people go to in their leisure time. That's about all you see in shopping centers these days -- one food store next to another.
Before, there wasn't as much snobbery and polarization among the food stores and their patrons. In a shopping center, there used to be the sit-down restaurant, the fast food place, and the junk food place.
Now that food stores are almost all that remain, the shopping center now has four sit-down restaurants, several fast food stops, a deli, three junk food places, and two Fifties diners. (Speaking of which, since the hoverboard looks like a no-go for 2015, we at least better see a chain of Cafe 80's.) They can only compete so much on price; usually it devolves into an annoying battle over, e.g., which of the three Mexican places is the most "authentic".
As tiresome as the foodie culture can get sometimes, we should remember that going crazy about food vendors is an understandable response to the death blow that internet and big-box retailers have dealt to a lot of formerly fun places to socialize.
July 19, 2011
Trust-building, rites of passage, and over-parenting
The glue that holds together a group of developing kids who are roughly the same age is a feeling of trust that they have actively created through shared rites of passage. They separate themselves from the ordinary world and its structures, level the outside distinctions, and cease competing against each other for a small while in order to lose themselves in the revelry of their crowd, returning to the world of more clearly defined ranks and roles only after having thus transformed their sense of who they are and how they fit in with others.
Throwing yourself into the structureless realm of the betwixt-and-between is a sign to the others in your group that you trust them enough to make yourself that vulnerable. If you believed that they'd take advantage of you, you wouldn't go in the first place. And they likewise signal their faith in your goodness by taking the plunge themselves.
Over the past 15 to 20 years, the trust-bond holding groups of young people together has become so thinned-out that they have mostly come apart. Remember those people who used to pray that there would be less of a "wild roaming pack" behavior among children and adolescents? Be careful what you wish for: that was just an indication of how cohesive and trusting they were.
In the real world, trying to dampen their hormone levels and restrict them from engaging in "risky behavior" -- therefore including all meaningful rites of passage -- will be like squeezing a balloon that is inflating to a larger size than you'd like. Cliques -- at least the intimate, face-to-face ones that form within a peer group -- are open, dynamic systems, so if they're getting too puffed-up, they'll sense that and respond by releasing some air. Treating them like inanimate and unresponsive things leads you to try to shrink the balloon yourself. Not being omniscient, you won't know exactly how much pressure to apply over time. And not being omnipotent, even if you did know that, you wouldn't be able to pull it off without error. You will instead clumsily pop the balloon and send dozens of patches all over the room.
"Well it was getting too damn big!" Yeah, well you should've left it alone to heal itself back to a smaller size on its own instead of intervening only to blow it up. If the group is entirely unnatural, like a gigantic modern bank, then we can't rely on it to self-correct. But not a band of age-mates -- the fact that most parents today treat something so perduring and spontaneously developing in our species as a suspect, unwholesome novelty goes to show how truly decrepit the modern mind is growing.
Fortunately for mankind, there are cyclical recurrences of danger that over-ride the wishes of helicopter parent types. Unlike predictable rites of passage, such as turning a certain age, or voluntary ones like going through boot camp to join the military, the rites of passage that young people undergo in times of rising violence rates are not clearly marked out for them ahead of time by the elders who have gone through it themselves, nor are they chosen freely. It's either sink or swim. Grown-ups see that and begin to back off of their over-protective instincts, letting them develop fully and naturally.
This dynamic appears especially powerful during the second half of rising-crime times, when the world starts to look more apocalyptic, and so the need for solidarity even stronger. During the 20th century, this corresponds to the Jazz Age (the later 1910s through the early 1930s), and the Terminator Age (the later 1970s through the early 1990s). For the period in between, and its counterpart since the early '90s, we shouldn't confuse the taking-for-granted of physical security with a bond of trust that was cemented through shared rites of passage.
In surveying the practices and institutions that bring age-mates closer together in a rite-of-passage kind of way, it looks strange to see that the most long-lasting of them were born in times where it looked like the world was going to end soon anyway, and so what would have been the point? Most successful religions, or movements within a given religion, started out that way, too, so perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising.
The easy way out in such an environment is to just abandon yourself to hedonism, so the fact that most people felt like coming together for group preservation is a testament to how much stronger our moral sense builds itself in response to a moderate level of danger in the outside world. Traditionalists may not like the fact that in this atmosphere the rituals that bond members together are newly invented, but then in such a topsy-turvy world, it's perfectly natural to feel ambivalent about the efficacy of older rituals that evidently were not enough to prevent the present disorder. And anyway, this round of trial-and-error experimentation provides the variation needed for successful new traditions to emerge.
Would you believe that an institution as apple-pie as the youth scouting movement arose during the era of bootlegging gangsters, hot jazz music, a wave of new age cults, and an epidemic of sex criminals and serial killers? That wasn't the only rite of passage that the Jazz Age has given us: add to it the joyride, parked-car make-out sessions, and the cocktail party.
Who knows which of the countless ones introduced during the late '70s through the early '90s will prove as successful 50 or 100 years later. I have a good guess, but I'll save that for a separate post.
Throwing yourself into the structureless realm of the betwixt-and-between is a sign to the others in your group that you trust them enough to make yourself that vulnerable. If you believed that they'd take advantage of you, you wouldn't go in the first place. And they likewise signal their faith in your goodness by taking the plunge themselves.
Over the past 15 to 20 years, the trust-bond holding groups of young people together has become so thinned-out that they have mostly come apart. Remember those people who used to pray that there would be less of a "wild roaming pack" behavior among children and adolescents? Be careful what you wish for: that was just an indication of how cohesive and trusting they were.
In the real world, trying to dampen their hormone levels and restrict them from engaging in "risky behavior" -- therefore including all meaningful rites of passage -- will be like squeezing a balloon that is inflating to a larger size than you'd like. Cliques -- at least the intimate, face-to-face ones that form within a peer group -- are open, dynamic systems, so if they're getting too puffed-up, they'll sense that and respond by releasing some air. Treating them like inanimate and unresponsive things leads you to try to shrink the balloon yourself. Not being omniscient, you won't know exactly how much pressure to apply over time. And not being omnipotent, even if you did know that, you wouldn't be able to pull it off without error. You will instead clumsily pop the balloon and send dozens of patches all over the room.
"Well it was getting too damn big!" Yeah, well you should've left it alone to heal itself back to a smaller size on its own instead of intervening only to blow it up. If the group is entirely unnatural, like a gigantic modern bank, then we can't rely on it to self-correct. But not a band of age-mates -- the fact that most parents today treat something so perduring and spontaneously developing in our species as a suspect, unwholesome novelty goes to show how truly decrepit the modern mind is growing.
Fortunately for mankind, there are cyclical recurrences of danger that over-ride the wishes of helicopter parent types. Unlike predictable rites of passage, such as turning a certain age, or voluntary ones like going through boot camp to join the military, the rites of passage that young people undergo in times of rising violence rates are not clearly marked out for them ahead of time by the elders who have gone through it themselves, nor are they chosen freely. It's either sink or swim. Grown-ups see that and begin to back off of their over-protective instincts, letting them develop fully and naturally.
This dynamic appears especially powerful during the second half of rising-crime times, when the world starts to look more apocalyptic, and so the need for solidarity even stronger. During the 20th century, this corresponds to the Jazz Age (the later 1910s through the early 1930s), and the Terminator Age (the later 1970s through the early 1990s). For the period in between, and its counterpart since the early '90s, we shouldn't confuse the taking-for-granted of physical security with a bond of trust that was cemented through shared rites of passage.
In surveying the practices and institutions that bring age-mates closer together in a rite-of-passage kind of way, it looks strange to see that the most long-lasting of them were born in times where it looked like the world was going to end soon anyway, and so what would have been the point? Most successful religions, or movements within a given religion, started out that way, too, so perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising.
The easy way out in such an environment is to just abandon yourself to hedonism, so the fact that most people felt like coming together for group preservation is a testament to how much stronger our moral sense builds itself in response to a moderate level of danger in the outside world. Traditionalists may not like the fact that in this atmosphere the rituals that bond members together are newly invented, but then in such a topsy-turvy world, it's perfectly natural to feel ambivalent about the efficacy of older rituals that evidently were not enough to prevent the present disorder. And anyway, this round of trial-and-error experimentation provides the variation needed for successful new traditions to emerge.
Would you believe that an institution as apple-pie as the youth scouting movement arose during the era of bootlegging gangsters, hot jazz music, a wave of new age cults, and an epidemic of sex criminals and serial killers? That wasn't the only rite of passage that the Jazz Age has given us: add to it the joyride, parked-car make-out sessions, and the cocktail party.
Who knows which of the countless ones introduced during the late '70s through the early '90s will prove as successful 50 or 100 years later. I have a good guess, but I'll save that for a separate post.
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