Dance music is a back East phenomenon in America, unlike most other cultural domains

Let's take a break from looking at how the Western frontier has defined our distinctly American culture, as separate from the Old World nations we came from, and have a look at another exception from back East.

A recent post looked at the naturalistic trend in American narrative or dramatic culture, drawing inspiration from both Russia and Scandinavia -- together with America, the group of outsiders to the Western Euro club of Early Modern empires that defined high culture.

In a series of comments beginning here, I pointed to one exception -- pro wrestling -- that is very much a back East phenomenon. In that way, it's like ballet, opera, and musical theater, which have always been centered back East. But pro wrestling was not inherited from the Old World, unlike those other formats. And sure enough, pro wrestling has a choreographed, theatrical, not naturalistic style. It could never have emerged from Los Angeles, the center of American naturalistic narrative culture -- movies.

Now let's have a look at popular dance music, and the popular dance culture generally. Although every culture has popular, as opposed to artistic, dances, ours is distinctly American -- and yet, not defined by the Western frontier. It is distinct in its drawing on African sources, particularly the heavy use of syncopation and complex rhythms.

These sources were not directly from Africa, as though African groups toured America or Americans visited Africa. They came through African slaves in the New World -- whether living in America proper or the colonies that we later won, like Puerto Rico and Cuba, and the people from there who migrated to America proper.

So it doesn't sound exactly like the European folk or art dance music traditions from the Old World. But it is highly theatrical, choreographed, and not contributing to a grand narrative about who we are as a people -- other than that we, unlike Europeans, live with the descendants of African slaves and have access to some of their source culture. Therefore, it is best suited to the East, like pro wrestling.

That's not to say that there are no major dance bands or showcases out West, but they are mostly jumping on trends that originated back East.

* * *

Empire-defining culture has to wait until after the first of three long-term stages that empires go through, from expansion to consolidation to fragmentation. Between the first and second stage, there is a major civil war between two organized -- *not* anarchic -- factions for control over the *unified* future territory. Crucially, not a "civil war" where everything is breaking down and anarchic, where the winner does not incorporate the loser, and where the territory remains broken into pieces forever after.

Before this point between stages 1 and 2, the empire has not settled on a shared collective identity, and ethnogenesis is still somewhat up in the air. After one side of that civil war wins, and incorporates the losing side, plus anything to come in the future, only then is there a sense of a single united culture spanning the entire empire.

The first stage is the reaction to external pressures, namely along the meta-ethnic frontier with a highly different Other. But there is still an indefinite, up-in-the-air question of "which we are we" or "who among us counts most as we"? Just because a bunch of people on one side of the meta-ethnic frontier share an interest against those on the other side, doesn't mean there still isn't diversity and conflicts of interest within the one side. That culminates in a civil war, where the pressures are internal. The winning side of that war determines what the unified and consolidated "we" will be like into the future.

To take the familiar example of the Roman Empire, the first stage corresponds to the Republic (although it was very much an empire, expanding territorially through conquest), the second to the Augustan through the Severan eras, and the third to the Crisis of the Third Century and after. The three canonical Roman poets -- Virgil, Horace, and Ovid -- are from the Augustan era, and the Silver Age that follows them lasts into the 2nd C. AD, before Roman literature bit the dust during the 3rd C., along with imperial disintegration.

And really, it had already died during the pre-fragmentation crisis represented by the Severan era (coming out of the Year of the Five Emperors). The last major Roman work was the Golden Ass by Apuleius, probably during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (author of the Meditations), circa the 160s or '70s. I highlight this because we are currently in the Year of the Five Emperors, and it's plain to see that American cultural production has more or less stopped. It was clearly over for the Roman empire and its culture by the 190s -- they just hadn't descended into all-out endless anarchy just yet. And it is clearly over for America as of 2020, even if we aren't splitting up formally just yet.

The main point is that the Golden and Silver Ages were not produced by the Republic stage, because the empire had not yet defined itself through internal conflict -- only external, based on the meta-ethnic frontier against the Celtic and later Carthaginian invaders. Only after the Crisis of the Roman Republic was there an internally defined "us vs. them", and the winning side would set the tone for "us" going forward. And so, without wasting any time, the Roman national / imperial founding myth of the Aeneid was written after the civil war had yielded a winner, who was to be glorified and legitimized through a new sacred narrative.

* * *

Distinctly American music, high or low, begins in the 1890s, as with American architecture, and slightly later than that for American drama (stage or movies). This followed the Civil War and Reconstruction eras -- that turning point between stages 1 and 2 of the imperial lifespan. Before then, we had been expanding primarily against the Indian frontier. The nature of future westward expansion was still up in the air, whether its economy would be based on slave agriculture or not, and this finally brought the internal conflict among "us non-Indians" to a head in the 1860s and '70s. The anti-slave agriculture side won, and it defined American identity through the consolidation stage of imperial life.

American dance music and the dances themselves, defined by heavy syncopation, were born with ragtime music in the 1890s. It did begin in Missouri, in the Midwest, but it migrated eastward rather than westward, and became established in the East Coast. New Orleans, also right near the Mississippi River border, gave birth to jazz, which also moved eastward rather than westward. Jazz came to define uniquely American music, especially in its dance-oriented function. It remains an East Coast genre to this day.

From the early Jazz Age forms and the Charleston dance of the 1920s, it evolved into Big Band music and swing dances during the '30s and '40s, lasting into the '50s, including the early stages of rock 'n' roll when rock music didn't have its own style of dance (it never would, evolving in a different direction from jazz, and migrating westward in typical American fashion).

The big dance crazes of the '60s were from back East, too, epitomized by the twist, introduced by Philly musician Chubby Checker.

Dick Clark's American Bandstand TV show, which showed young people dancing to contemporary hit songs and broadcast to a national audience, was filmed in Philly as well. It aired from the late '50s through the late '80s, setting the standard that all Americans looked up to for "what today's dances look like". Later dance shows like Dancin' on Air / Dance Party USA (for the USA Network) were filmed there, too. All-American audiences tuned into Club MTV and then The Grind between '87 and '97, both filmed in New York City. The only similar shows filmed out West were Soul Train, but that was aimed at a black audience, not Americans as a whole, and Solid Gold, which was the also-ran of the genre (both were filmed in L.A.).

After the dance crazes of the '60s, the East Coast continued to define dance music with disco in the '70s, post-disco or electrofunk in the early '80s, and freestyle / hi-NRG in the late '80s, all of which were made from New York to Miami. We still know the names of certain crucial clubs like Studio 54, Danceteria, and the Palladium (all in New York). And far from being a narrow niche for blacks and Puerto Ricans, it was mainstreamed to all of America by the likes of Madonna (from "Holiday" through "Into the Groove") and Debbie Gibson ("Shake Your Love"), both based in New York.

House music and '90s techno in general was still centered in New York (like C+C Music Factory, Robin S., etc.). As the house / techno style of the '90s and early 2000s gave way to electropop in the late 2000s and 2010s, the center remained in New York, primarily Lady Gaga, but also Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Bebe Rexha (fellow Albanian-origin dance diva Ava Max was raised in Virginia, and worked with Canadian mega-producer Cirkut, who's from Nova Scotia and Ontario, not British Columbia). By the late 2000s and 2010s, though, much more of our dance music was imported from Europe.

* * *

A final note on some ethnic angles.

The '80s saw the emergence of "Latin" dance, starting with Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, the Miami-based DJ remix of "Macarena" (originally flamenco-meets-pop from Spain), then Pitbull as well as reggaeton during the 2000s and 2010s. Puerto Ricans from New York took part as well, such as Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Marc Anthony in the '90s and after. I put "Latin" in quotes because it has to be Caribbean, linked to the influence of African sources, rather than Mexican or other Central American, let alone South American, Latin styles. Maybe something like samba from Brazil, as part of the Brazil craze of the 2000s. But not the seemingly obvious choice of Mexican music, given its importance to influencing Western American culture.

The danceable strains of rap have always been centered back East as well, from the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Young MC, Salt-N-Pepa, and many others from the New York metro area in the late '70s and '80s, where breakdancing originated. Then it was Will Smith from Philly during the '80s and '90s, Vanilla Ice from southern Florida in the '90s, and the entire genre of crunk music and twerk dancing from Atlanta and the Southeast during the 2000s and 2010s.

There wasn't quite as much danceable rap in the '90s because that was the heyday of West Coast rap, which was more in the vein of American naturalism -- narrative, depicting daily life, more sober and restrained than the more theatrical and choreo-friendly East Coast rap styles. Naturalism crossed from music and into drama with Ice Cube appearing as a main character in the movie Boyz n the Hood. The only big dance-driven rapper from the West Coast was MC Hammer (from Oakland, CA). Even one-hit wonders from back East still scored major dance hits, like Atlanta's Tag Team -- "Whoomp! (There It Is)" -- and Jacksonville FL's Quad City DJs -- "C'Mon N' Ride It (The Train)".

This is crucial to show that it isn't about African DNA, but historically contingent facts like the eastern founding vs. westward expansion of the American empire. If it were about genes, we would've gotten one danceclub banger after another by Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac, Nate Dogg, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Kendrick Lamar, etc., rather than naturalistic narratives about daily life. Really the only party anthem rump shaker from that entire scene was "California Love". Likewise, LMFAO was an L.A. exception during the 2010s.

Then there's the mostly white dance genre of industrial music, which is centered in the Great Lakes region, mainly among Ellis Islanders rather than founding stock Americans. The two biggest acts here are Chicago's Ministry, and Cleveland's Nine Inch Nails, both of whose early work is very danceclub oriented. This is east of the Mississippi, despite being the Midwest (and Old Northwest). But it is still a bit too far west to be central to dance music and club culture, like New York and Miami are.

Realism in drama as cultural specialty of nations peripheral to Western Euro empires: Scandinavian, Russian, American ethnogenesis

I was trying to think of an analogy to help non-Americans understand how the East Coast of America is the culturally weakest region for American national identity, i.e. in setting the standards for American culture, in contrast to the regions out West (beginning in the Midwest, out to the West Coast).

The Bos-Wash corridor does have lots of institutions that look familiar to the those of Western European empires -- painting galleries, symphonic orchestras, opera, ballet, musical theatre, and so on. But that does not define American culture, and we have never come close to dominating any of those formats. Rather, American culture is defined by innovations from out West -- movies (and later, prestige TV shows), pop music, architecture, fashion, food, etc.

Aside from cultural production, the Western accent defines the standard for American dialects, while everything back East is deviant from it. The main thing being the cot-caught merger, which distinguishes standard American and most Canadian dialects from our British roots (or our Australian cousins). Americans (aside from back East) have unrounded the lower-back vowels.

This is surprising to people from most other countries because their political and cultural centers are in the same place, such as London in Britain, Paris in France, Madrid in Spain, and so on. In America, the political capitals have been back East (New York, Philadelphia, and Washington DC). But the cultural capitals have always been out West -- starting in the Old Northwest / Northwest Territory (especially Chicago), and later settling on southern California.

That reflects our meta-ethnic frontier with the Indians. East Coasters did get attacked by Indians and drove them westward (or into Florida), but then that was that. The longest and fiercest battles against the Indians were in the Old Northwest, and anywhere west of the Mississippi River. This got particularly fierce once we encountered the semi-nomadic Athabaskan / Na-Dene tribes out in the Plains and Rocky Mountains area, like the Apache, Navajo, Comanche, etc. (only the Pueblo were sedentary and relatively civilized). And of course we waged a war against the Mexicans in the Southwest.

Even when we reached the Pacific Coast, we were still intent on Manifest Destiny / westward expansion, and took over the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. We colonized Hawaii in the middle of the ocean, and came into a collision course with the Japanese who were already expanding in the Pacific Islands region. We tried and failed to take over Korea (though still occupying the southern half that wanted us on their side of a civil war), tried and failed to take over mainland Southeast Asia, though thankfully have not been suicidal enough to try -- and fail -- waging a land war against China.

The point is: out West has always defined the strong Us vs. Them meta-ethnic frontier, has always been the incubator for our collective identity as a people (ethnogenesis), and has always been the main source of the production of American culture.

* * *

The closest analog I can think of is the difference between Moscow and Saint Petersburg in Russia. Russian ethnogenesis is defined by the meta-ethnic frontier against various invaders from the Steppe, which lies to the south of the Russian heartland. There were only sporadic threats from the north -- the ailing Lithuanian Empire, and the microsecond when Sweden was a great power, after the other bona fide empires had decimated themselves during the Thirty Years War.

But in reaction to those northern threats, the rulers of Russia founded a new great city in the north (on the grounds of a former Swedish fortress), and dumped as much money and hype as they could into making it a Window to the West, which would rival the cultural production of the Western Euro empires of the Early Modern period. That city is Saint Petersburg, far up north on the Baltic Sea, which also became the political capital from the early 1700s to the early 1900s.

Moscow lies much further to the south. For political administration, it is classified as Central Russia. But culturally, it is southern, as evidenced by its dialect.

The main split among Russian dialects is a northern-to-southern difference in the use of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. The "akanye" dialects reduce them, and are in the south; the "okanye" dialects do not reduce them, and are in the north. For example, the word for "milk" is transliterated as "moloko," but is pronounced more like "muh-luh-KO-uh" in the southern / akanye dialects, where the first two "o" vowels (in the unstressed syllables) have been reduced to something like a schwa. Northern / okanye dialects pronounce both of them as an "o".

And sure enough, the Moscow dialect is akanye, or vowel-reducing, placing it squarely within the southern cultural region of Russia. (Due west of Moscow lies the country of Belarus, almost all of which is akanye as well, and Belarusian even incorporates that into its orthography, so that these altered vowels have altered spellings as well, to make it transparent. Russian orthography spells them as they were before, similar to English orthography reflecting the state of the language *before* the transformative Great Vowel Shift.)

So, Moscow defines the standard Russian dialect, but is it also the primary incubator for Russian cultural production? If you judge by the standards of "similarity to Western European imperial culture," then the answer is "no" -- that would be Saint Petersburg, whose architecture, music, literary circles, etc., were deliberately meant to be a nexus between the West and Russia.

But as with the Bos-Wash corridor, Russia does not dominate any of those fields -- the German and Austrian empires dominated classical music, the French dominated painting, and most of the architects of Saint Petersburg were foreigners from Italy and elsewhere, not Russians.

The Russian style of ballet came closer to dominant status in its field, and did hail more from the Saint Petersburg region. But even in that field, their greatest global influence came from expats in Paris and elsewhere in the West, who launched the Ballets Russes touring company (whose director, Sergei Diaghilev, was not merely based in the north, but was born and raised there as well -- in the Novgorod province).

Russians did much better in the field of literature, although -- to come to the central point of the post -- their largest contributions came from the south, close to Moscow, and less so from the Saint Petersburg circle. Dostoyevsky, originally from Moscow but part of the Saint Petersburg scene, found high esteem among major cultural figures in the empires to the west on the continent -- Nietzsche, Kafka, Freud, Sartre, and others. This is the role of the city as the Window to the West.

But within Russia itself -- and later, outside as well -- the major literary figure is Tolstoy, who was born, raised, and wrote his major works near Tula, even further south than Moscow. As much as Russians may value Dostoyevsky for psychological and philosophical insight, when it comes to defining the Russian-ness of the Russian people / nation / empire / experience, Tolstoy ranks at the top.

And after Tolstoy, the most important Russian literary figure is Chekhov, who was born and raised in Taganrog, so far south that it's right on the Sea of Azov. The province, Rostov, is part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe -- *the* meta-ethnic frontier for the Russians vs. the Turkic and Mongolian nomads. In early adulthood his family moved to Moscow, where he remained as a writer.

Bulgakov was a southerner, too -- born and raised in Kiev, settling in Moscow as a writer in adulthood. Gorky began life as a central-to-northerner (from Nizhny Novgorod, where vowel reduction is only partial, not full as in the akanye dialects), but he lived in Moscow as a writer. Although lesser figures than the two above, their importance will be seen below, in connection to the birth and spread of dramatic realism.

* * *

I'll leave architecture for another post, perhaps. But as a brief aside, Saint Petersburg did not define Russian architecture -- most of its architects were foreign, and it's not what Russians or foreigners think of as "Russian architecture". That would be the colored onion domes of Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, near the beginning of Russian ethnogenesis, up through the Constructivist and Stalinist styles of the 20th C., also centered in Moscow (such as the Seven Sisters skyscrapers).

Modern architecture is another example of Russia and America, and to a lesser extent Scandinavia, cooperating and convergently evolving to a similar style, as they all distinguished themselves from the cultural production of the moribund and collapsed Western Euro empires, whose architecture was far less monumental than skyscrapers, was elaborately ornamented, and always had an ancient or Medieval revival influence going on somewhere, rather than being new and futuristic. Americans have boogeyman images of "Stalinist architecture" as just a big concrete box, but look at any of the Seven Sisters and see how similar they are to Louis Sullivan, Art Deco, and the skyscraper form in general.

As another even briefer aside, the same approach to furniture and the design of objects in general followed similar trends, pioneered by these same three regions, at the same time, for the same reasons -- to distinguish themselves from the cultural works of Western Euro empires. Art Deco, Danish / Midcentury Modern, Soviet industrial design, all peas in a pod.

* * *

Much like the domain of architecture, the domain of stage drama was more formal, ornamental, and stylized in the Western Euro empires of Britain and France. That included both spoken plays and musical theatre. The German and Austrian empires specialized less in spoken plays, but they did specialize in opera, since they had already dominated classical music.

This influence spread to Italian opera, not only from German and Austrian composers writing in Italian, but even the native Italian opera composers were under Austrian cultural influence, as the opera capital in Milan was under Austrian dominion from the early 1700s through the 1860s -- including when La Scala opera house was built in the late 1700s.

Against these pinnacles of ornamental, stylized, formalist approaches to stage drama, within the main Western Euro empires, there arose an entirely new approach outside. Not entirely outside, as though on the other side of the world, but on the periphery of these empires, interacting with them enough to know what they were producing, but not within them in order to participate in that production itself.

This new approach, roughly called realism or modernism, arose in Scandinavia, beginning with Ibsen (Denmark-Norway) and Strindberg (Sweden) in the live performance format of the 19th C., and later Bergman (Sweden) in the recorded film format of the 20th C. Putting thematic concerns aside, on a formal level its main innovation was to abandon verse and stylized language in favor of prose and an informal register -- and therefore, divorcing drama from opera or musical theatre, which was the dominant trend among the Western Euro empires at the time.

Scandinavia never belonged to any of the European empires -- ever, not just in the Early Modern period. They never spawned an empire of their own either, perhaps with the exception of the sea-borne Viking raiders of the late 1st millennium. Up until two seconds ago, they were not interested in joining NATO, adopting the Euro currency, and other markers of membership in the Western empire.

Nearly simultaneously, Chekhov pioneered the same approach in the Russian empire, in its cultural capital near Moscow, not in the Window to the West of Saint Petersburg. The primary institution through which this development took place was the Moscow Art Theatre, whose founders were both southerners -- actor/director Stanislavski (from Moscow), and Nemirovich-Danchenko (of Ukrainian and Armenian descent, raised in Georgia, moved to Moscow in adulthood). The playwrights whose works they used to develop the realist / modernist approach, were of course the giant Chekhov, but also Gorky and Bulgakov, mentioned earlier.

Somewhat later the same approach arose in the American empire, although now more clearly being an import or influence from Scandinavia and Russia. The big three American playwrights -- O'Neill, Williams, and Miller -- all took this approach. And the American approach to acting was heavily borrowed from Stanislavski's system, although interpreted through Strasberg's own lens. These developments all took place in the culturally backward part of America -- New York -- but as the transition from stage plays to recorded movies took place, and the location of dramatic production shifted from New York to California, Strasberg's "Method" acting from the Actors Studio in New York bore full fruit in the Hollywood studios' output, as Method actors (Brando, De Niro, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, and so on and so forth) incorporated the approach into the movie format.

Although realism / modernism stripped drama of its verbal ornamental artistry, it thereby opened the door to more stylization in the visual component of the total work. True, the typical American movie does not make extensive use of odd camera angles, 10-minute-long winding single takes, or "how'd they do that" special effects. But stylized production design (including constructing sets), lighting, camera work, shot composition, and practical and special effects are far more common than are their counterparts on the verbal side, where dialog and voice-over narration is almost never done in poetic prose, let alone in verse.

These trends have transformed drama into a format that seamlessly integrates naturalistic dialog and acting, with heavily stylized visual storytelling.

But, although it is the quintessentially American narrative format, it is not uniquely American. In parallel, the Russian empire's approach to movie-making produced similar results, owing to their shared roots in the theatre of realism. I don't know much about Soviet / Russian cinema, so can't comment too much on the fine-grained nature of these similarities, only to say that they both continue the realist approach in the verbal and acting side of the production, while allowing for a potentially heavily stylized visual component.

And the center of Russian cinema has always been Moscow, in the cultural south as expected, mainly through the state film monopoly's studio Mosfilm. The director Tarkovsky was raised in Moscow from age 7. And the director of the epic adaptation of War and Peace, Bondarchuk, followed Chekhov's path -- born and raised even further south (born in Kherson, raised in Taganrog, moved to Moscow to direct movies).

As already mentioned, Bergman pioneered more or less the same approach to drama, as the movie format took hold in Sweden.

These three centers of realist / modernist dramatic gravity are responsible for spreading the approach to the collapsed Western Euro empires, who had previously specialized in the highly verbally stylized approach to drama and/or opera. Sweden was not very politically powerful, so they were not as culturally influential as the two remaining empires. Bergman was influential in his own right, but amplified indirectly through his influence on American filmmakers.

America was responsible for spreading the approach to the new members of NATO, especially Britain, France, and Italy, who had very little native film industries, let alone in the realist manner, before their incorporation into the American sphere of influence after WWII. Germany had a decent film industry before, but it was an outgrowth of the highly stylized approach to stage drama of the 19th C. and earlier. After incorporation into NATO, West Germany abandoned their Expressionist roots (mostly) and adopted the realist approach of their new American imperial overlords.

Spanish cinema didn't really pick up speed until the '80s, when they joined NATO as a very late member -- if they'd joined right after WWII, presumably they would've enjoyed a Spanish New Wave to rival French and Italian by the '60s. Better late than never, though.

On the other side of Europe, Russia through the Warsaw Pact spread the realist / modernist approach to its newly acquired territories from the collapsed Austrian Empire, especially Czechoslovakia and Poland. Even after Stalin died, and New Wave took off, the realist / modernist approach remained -- supplanting the verse / opera approach to drama that had been dominant in these lands not very long ago, before their empires collapsed.

Tellingly, nothing comes to mind for the phrase "cinema of Yugoslavia". That's because it did not belong to NATO (until five seconds ago, and still missing its cultural capital, Belgrade / Serbia), but also did not belong to the Soviet Union or the broader Warsaw Pact. And was not a colony of Sweden. It was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and therefore cut off from the goodies that would've flowed from Hollywood or Moscow film studios.

Unlike Sweden, they *were* part of Early Modern empires, the Austrians and Ottomans. Those like the Croatians who were under Austrian control were in no position to challenge the verse / opera approach to drama, and those under Ottoman control could only have challenged the verse / opera approach if their patrons in Constantinople had been pioneering their own independent realist approach to drama. But the Ottomans were not -- too far away from Western Europe to be directly interfacing with it that much, and therefore not really a participant in the verse vs. realism schism in stage drama.

Other major nations in the Non-Aligned Movement also had film industries that never went big beyond their borders, as dominant players in the field. Egypt became a leader in Arabic-language movies, but not beyond the Arabic-speaking world. And Bollywood in India is still synonymous with the verse / opera approach to drama, even in the recorded movie format, unlike virtually all other major film industries. If they had been absorbed into NATO or the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, they would've developed along the realist / modernist lines and gone international in influence.

Japan is the other nation to adopt the realist / modernist approach, no matter how stylized the visual component may be, rather than stick to their verse / opera traditions from previous centuries. But they got absorbed into the American empire after WWII, so they adopted our approach to filmmaking and have become globally renowned for their cinema. The highly stylized verbal component only survives in anime voice acting, and somewhat in Japanese vtuber characters. These are also formats where characters are likely to sing, either lines of dialog or as a purely musical performance.

So yet again, we see that vtubers are the last in the line of the theatrical / operatic approach to live performances, within the American sphere of influence (Bollywood is far more operatic, but Non-Aligned). American vtubers don't come from such a theatrical background -- our cartoons are not as operatic or verbally stylized, their acting styles are similar to live-action movies and TV shows. And so American -- and NATO -- vtubers are likely to follow a realist or naturalistic approach when streaming their personalities (which are not as fictional-character-like as their Japanese counterparts). However, they also have the Disney movies as part of their cultural heritage, and those are fairly verse / opera / musical theatre in their approach, so English-language vtubers who identify with Disney princesses can put on more of a stylized performance if they want (especially Gura).

South Korea shows the same pattern as Japan -- occupied by America since the mid-20th C., absorbing our approach to filmmaking, and becoming globally influential as a result. If they had stuck to whatever verse / opera traditions there were before, they would only be popular in Korea. North Korea has no film industry because we never conquered them, and neither did Russia (or Sweden).

If anything they are a satellite of China, and China was never conquered by America or Russia (or Sweden), and they were too far culturally removed from the Western Euro empires to pick a side in the verse vs. realism schism in drama. And so to this day China has no globally influential film industry, and what little it does it owes to American influence through its NATO member Britain, through its rule over Hong Kong. But that's too many degrees of separation, and Hong Kong cinema is most famous for being acrobatic, slapstick, choreographed, and in other ways that are not very realist or modernist, but would have been at home in earlier centuries of highly stylized stage performances.

Without reviewing the whole rest of the world, the basic point stands: the more closely politically integrated you were with the American or Russian empires, the more you became dominant in the movie format.

* * *

As a final reflection, why did America, Scandinavia, and Russia all independently develop this approach to drama, and cultivate it to mature status as global leaders of the movie format? Because they were not part of the Western Euro empires, who were all rubbing up against each other territorially and therefore culturally. They were in much closer dialog with each other about literature, painting, music, architecture, everything.

America, Russia, and Scandinavia were left out of this club, so why not take a totally different approach to define their cultural identities? Especially in America and Russia, which were intensely Us-conscious empires in urgent need of defining our new selves, after having undergone intense ethnogenesis along a meta-ethnic frontier. Not so much in non-imperial Scandinavia, where there was no intense meta-ethnic frontier requiring a wholly new identity and cultural forms to support and cement it. But nevertheless, requiring some mark of distinction as not belonging to the European empires.

What about the other empires who were also not part of the Western Euro club? The Qing dynasty in China, for example? Well, they weren't interfacing with Western Europe, so they felt no need to distinguish themselves from that particular cultural club. Verse / opera, realism / modernism -- who cares? They weren't consciously competing with nearby empires who had already perfected the operatic approach to drama, so they stuck with verse / opera, which is natural in the performing arts.

That niche felt too full for those on the periphery of the Western Euro empires, so they decided consciously to take a whole 'nother approach. And that is how realism in drama was born, and became the standard in the movies that will be remembered by everyone for centuries (no offense to Bollywood).

Why couldn't some avant-garde of counter-culturalists have spearheaded these new approaches from within those empires that had perfected the stylized approach? Because their cultures had already too much invested in the stylized approach -- the realists would be ruffling way too many feathers, both among the culture-makers themselves as well as their economic patrons and political censors. It's far easier to counteract some trend from outside the system that created it -- like from a whole different nation or empire or sphere of influence.

This is a reminder of how political, military, and territorial dominion can constrain cultural production -- while also allowing it to reach full flower, in a certain direction, as long as it doesn't then totally uproot that flower and try to plant an entirely different species in that same plot of soil. What was the point of cultivating it in the first place?

As the example of Bollywood shows, if any culture-makers are going to conserve or re-introduce the verse / opera approach to drama, even in the age of recorded movies, they will have to do so outside of the American and Russian imperial spheres of influence. In that case, from one of the leading nations of the Non-Aligned Movement -- whose culture now resembles that of their British imperial overlords from the Victorian era, in yet another one of the horseshoe theories of this post (aside from the main one, of American, Scandinavian, and Russian cultural convergence during the Cold War).

Dreamy layered soundscapes in y2k R&B

When I first started figuring out the 15-year excitement cycle, I quickly hit on the tendency for harmonic rather than melodic music during the vulnerable phase of the cycle. Lots of layers, droning, sighing, ethereal, floaty, dreamy -- like coasting down a lazy river ride at a water park. Perfect for audiences who are in a refractory phase, and who don't want much stimulation or else their nervous systems will overload.

For more detail, see these earlier posts on the pattern for both indie and pop genres, here and here.

My examples from the early 2000s vulnerable phase were a bit sparse, because I was going from memory, and as it turns out, most of the key examples were from R&B, and I never listened to it that much at the time or since. But I've been reliving the y2k sound lately, and quite a few examples jumped out, which I would not have recalled from memory.

Only one is technically from the early 2000s, but the other three are from '99 -- they were ahead of the curve, leading into the early 2000s, and do not sound like the rest of the late '90s manic phase (techno, Eurodance, Britney Spears, etc.). The point is that they show the fatigue from the late '90s manic phase was setting in, and the cycle was just about to crash into a refractory state.

The late '90s and early 2000s was pretty weak for rock, compared to earlier eras, and electro dance music wasn't nearly as popular as it would become by the late 2000s and 2010s. The R&B and rap genres were a lot more central to the zeitgeist than before or after, so if you don't know what was going on in those genres, you'll miss a lot of the y2k vibe.

I won't do an in-depth analysis of each song, just a few notes about what they all have in common. As usual with the dream-pop sound, there are zillions of layers, both vocal and instrumental. There's not much melody or even hooks / riffs, but rather sleepy, trance-inducing repetitive motifs (like the harpsichord line in "If You Had My Love"). The rhythm section isn't very danceable, and there is minimal accenting of the off-beat, unlike the UNH-tsss percussion of late '90s techno / Eurodance (and no replacement of the hi-hats with other rhythmic instruments).

Vocal delivery is pretty low-energy and ethereal -- not because it's rap, and not meant to have lots of intonation changes, but because it's a dreamy ethereal time for R&B, rather than the belting-it-out style. Only "Thong Song" has an intense vocal passage, and it's only near the climax, not sustained throughout the song. All of them are written in a minor key, as per yoozh with the dreamy droning don't-disturb-me style.

For comparison, "Believe" by Cher from a bit earlier ('98) has the beginnings of the ethereal soundscape approach, but only in the intro and occasionally afterward. It has the standard UNH-tsss, hi-hat accenting the off-beat, super-danceable rhythm of the techno of its time. And the vocal line is more melodic, has much greater intensity, and is more uplifting. Also, written in a major key.

The songs that follow are quite a radical departure, and showed where the mood would be during the start of the new millennium, as excitement levels plunged into a refractory state.

* * *

"Genie in a Bottle" by Christina Aguilera (1999):



"If You Had My Love" by Jennifer Lopez (1999):



"Thong Song" by Sisqo (1999):



"Try Again" by Aaliyah (2000):

Disco dance percussion in folk revival anthems of the 2010s

In 2020 I wrote extensively on the role of accenting the offbeats in the rhythm to maximize the danceability of a song. See this final survey post, and the three background posts linked in the first paragraph there.

To summarize, though: music and dance are intertwined, the main beats are matched with the delivery motion in the dance, while the offbeats are matched with the winding-up motions in the dance. Letting loose on the main beat requires you to have wound up decently well during the offbeat. To encourage that winding-up motion, the rhythm section accents the offbeat to draw your attention to it.

"Hey, you're supposed to be doing something important here! Like winding up your leg so you can swing it as far as possible for delivery on the main beat." Or winding up your arm, in order to deliver the hardest punch-in-the-air on the main beat, for those who are doing something as simple as fist-pumping.

During the techno danceclub craze of the '90s and early 2000s, the UNH-tsss drum rhythm became so saturated that the electronic danceclub musicians tried to wipe it out during the rest of the 2000s and 2010s. They used the synths as rhythmic instruments, in place of a multi-piece percussion set. This was the hallmark of electroclash, and then electropop.

However, if a genre of music was not closely associated with danceclubs, they were not as beholden to the crusade to eliminate percussion from the rhythm section. Most notable was the dance-rock craze of the 2000s and early 2010s, where disco-style drumming -- with a hi-hat accenting the offbeat -- was ubiquitous. Singer-songwriters could get away with it, too, such as pianist Vanessa Carlton in "Ordinary Day" early in the decade, and rock-oriented Orianthi in "According To You" later on.

As for mainstream mega-hits, though, no genre was more obsessed with using percussion to accent the offbeat than the folk revival craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Folk is usually associated with any location and any occasion *other than* boogeying down in a danceclub. So it was free of the stigma against UNH-tsss drum kits.

Within this campaign of the disco drumming reconquista, the opening salvo was fired by the song everybody unfairly loved to hate at the time, but which has gained "familiar fave" canonical status by now -- "Hey, Soul Sister" by Train, from 2009.



It gradually builds its rhythmic power until 2:50, when the distinctly disco hi-hat comes in for the offbeat, and then begins to really ring out during most of the offbeat interval in the choruses afterward. It's commanding your body to not just sit in your seat as though this were a typical singer-songwriter romantic ballad with cheesy lyrics. No! -- this is the climax, now you're supposed to get up, move around, and cut a little rug with the rest of the crowd!

Even a slow-tempo song like "Ho Hey" by the Lumineers, from 2012, uses a tambourine on the offbeat during the chorus, to motivate their irony-poisoned hipster audience to stand up and shake the snark free from their bodies, before returning to their lounging posture during the verses.

And even if the tone was brooding, a fast-paced song like "Stolen Dance" by Milky Chance, from 2012, uses hi-hats on the offbeats, and a heavy bass drum on the main beats, in a familiar disco percussion rhythm.

By far the closest alliance between the folk and disco genres was Avicii. In "Wake Me Up" from 2013, the folk-inflected verses use handclaps on the offbeat -- the trad percussion instrument for the trad passages of the song. Then during the electro-danceclub choruses, the familiar hi-hat from the disco era comes in on the offbeat. There's the same dynamic in "Hey Brother," but it's not as extensively worked out.



Also from 2013, the final major entry in the genre came from Down Under, in Vance Joy's "Riptide". (For whatever reason, the big British group from the 2010s folk revival, Mumford and Sons, kept percussion out of the offbeat, and relied on rhythmic strumming from the banjo or acoustic guitar.) It's going much further back than the mellow '60s hippie folk songs, evoking the frenetically kicking bodies of Jazz Age danceclubs, similar to the folk / old-timey dance jazz group the Squirrel Nut Zippers from the late '90s. It would've been totally natural to slip this song into the playlist at the trendy Great Gatsby-themed Charleston-dancing flapper parties of the time.

Physical anthropology of orchestral musicians: jocks, not nerds

It's been a very long time since I got to see a professional orchestra IRL, probably the first time in adulthood. And in a Roaring Twenties picture palace, no less, where I could see them fairly well.

I was simply amazed at how corporeal their body types are -- perhaps not surprising if you think of playing a musical instrument as a kinesthetic activity, but I don't think most people do. And if they do, they don't think of a symphony orchestra as "that kind" of musical performance -- so much more brainy, therefore the performers should look the part, right?

All the women were butt women, not boob women -- and not just like they had relatively more around back than up front, we're talking bubbles and thighs so thicc you couldn't help but notice them from 50 feet away. I thought it was a group of gymnasts, dancers, shot-putters, and field hockey players. They were built like jocks, not nerds.

Some were more heavy-set, some more slender, but all were butt people. The strings section was more corporeal than the brass or woodwind section -- bigger butts, more corpulent bodies overall. Still, even the wispy French horn player was conspicuously bending over to arrange things on her chair, with her back to the audience, just like the butt girls in high school bend over their desks to get attention from boys (or the hot guy teacher).

I attribute that difference to how physical the activity is -- strings involve larger / longer motion of the limbs, namely the arm used for bowing. Brass and woodwind motor activity is more fine than gross, you can barely see them moving around at all.

I didn't notice any big difference within the strings section, as though the ones with a cello between their legs had to have more developed bodies than the violinists, or as though the upright bass players needed more leg & butt muscle to put into their standing activity. All of them have the same range of gross motor activity, i.e. their dominant arm that's bowing. Sitting vs. standing doesn't involve motion, and neither does opening vs. closing your legs while sitting.

Naturally the harpist was a meaty butt woman -- that instrument is huge, and requires full extension and contraction of both arms. While executing a glissando, she looks like one of those women who can start a pull-cord lawnmower. I'm guessing the women who play a lyre, which fits on your lap, don't look like they hang out at the squat rack in the gym.

I couldn't help but think of a certain WASP-y Twitter persona who mentioned how much she wanted to learn the harp, and also mentions her weightlifting activities and being a dumptruck ass-haver, all of which are out-of-place on the cerebral platform. (Except for being a Millennial, she'd fit in better with the TikTok accounts.) I won't name her because she probably blushes easily, this is just to provide further confirmation of the correlation. She would stand out as the blonde in the orchestra, though, so maybe she would opt for small cozy recitals, as blondes are evidently more prone to stage-fright.

The guys were similar to their female counterparts in the section, with a fair share of the cellists and bass players -- and the conductor himself -- having pot bellies, while the flautist looked like a twink. This is the only respectable profession that suits fat people.

Hardly any blondes, and this is the Midwest, so there's an ample supply of them in the general population. At least one fiery redhead, although I couldn't make out some of those toward the back, so there could have been another here or there. Blonde hair reflects a recent domestication event in Europe, so brown and red-haired Europeans are the wilder back-to-nature type. Neanderthals had red hair, too. I'll bet that, just like the case with popular music, the elite orchestral musicians in Sweden are way more brunette than the highly-blonde population at large.

Music is inextricably linked with dance, and both of those activities are kinesthetic and put us back in touch with our grug-brain past. Even the forms of it that are intended for -- and performed by -- an elite stratum of society, and are more graceful than lumbering, reflect the animal side of human nature, not the cogitating symbol-manipulating side.

The symphony and the ballet are ways for the modern commercial / financial elite, who are supposed to suppress their brute ancestry, to still indulge their animality -- on occasion, and provided it has the all-important gracefulness to keep the libido from getting out of control once it's started up.

To end on, after figuring out who was present, I was struck by who therefore was absent -- skinny queens, big-naturals, nerds, and all the other people who populate 95% of online platforms. Specifically, the type who if they do make or listen to music, it's always something with minimal musicianship behind it, and never danceable / moshable / headbangable -- indie, punk, lyrics-heavy rap (as opposed to crunk), etc.

Who also makes up 95% of music critics at any media outlet? Yep, the same two-left-feet-having cerebral type who sneer at fat people (anyone with a BMI over 20) as morally unclean and creatively bereft. So delusional -- but what else would you expect from people who are literally lost in their own thoughts for their entire lives?

Rhythmic complexity in "Ordinary Day" by Vanessa Carlton, for feeling swept off your feet and then landing back to Earth

Let's return to a recurring theme here -- that you should ignore the musical takes and tastes of people who can't dance. Music & dance are as inseparable as smell & taste. We ignore food critics who are nose-blind to all smells, and we ignore art critics who are color-blind. So too do we ignore music critics who have two left feet.

A previous post looked into the use of 5-beat measures in Balkan pop music (really, a 2-beat unit followed by a 3-beat unit), tying this unusual time signature to its use in the dances that accompany it.

Several comments beginning here on "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen looked at the use of empty beats, an out-of-phase shift between lyrical and musical rhythm, and a call-and-response use of empty beats in the chorus, all of which evoke her stubborn plodding hesitancy to approach her crush, and needing an external shove to push her right into his space, if she couldn't muster the will all on her own.

I will never discuss unusual rhythms or time signatures in the context of prog rock, out-there forms of jazz, or anything cerebral like that, where it's mainly being done for its own sake, just to sound novel and cool -- rather than to support a dance that requires such a rhythm, or to evoke the bodily motions of the characters in the lyrics. That disembodies music from dance, and music that is unmotivated corporeally is a no-go.

The next song in the series will be "Ordinary Day" by Vanessa Carlton (2002).



This analysis will be pretty in-depth formally, and you might wonder why? It's just a pop song. Well, this one is a contender for being a pop masterpiece, not just radio filler. And almost no aesthetic criticism does formal analysis these days, to clearly uncover what is going on with a work of art. You can cry about it being like ruining a magic act by explaining, in mechanistic detail, how it was done. But we need to understand how the components of a work, and their interactions, make it what it is at the holistic gestalt "like it or hate it" level.

Otherwise, we can just stick with writing one-line reviews with a thumbs up or down, to recommend it or not to potential audiences. But that's a whole different function of a reviewer / critic, and not one that leads to any deeper understanding or appreciation of the work.

* * *

Although at first you assume a slow-tempo piano ballad by an introspective singer-songwriter is not going to have much going on rhythmically, this song will stick in your mind until you figure out why. And it's mainly the rhythm that's catching your attention, whether you're aware or not. I just happened to hear Fauna from Hololive sing this in karaoke, and it wouldn't get out of the back of my mind. So I gave the official release a few listens, and the unusual rhythms stood out. We will investigate the rhythm at increasingly higher levels of structure, or groupings of rhythmic units.

The time signature is 12/8, rare in pop music (or high music, for that matter). In this compound meter, there are 4 main units, each of which consists of 3 smaller units -- a heavy one followed by two weak ones. The initial heavy unit carries extra weight. The duration of each of these 12 tiny units is an 8th-note long. To help saying it aloud:

1-and-a 2-and-a 3-and-a 4-and-a ...

Those two weak notes trailing after the heavy note give this rhythm a feeling of weightlessness, gliding around, and floating. Heavy beats coincide with the delivery motion for the body, such as a foot landing on the ground, the leg reaching max extension during a kick, an arm reaching max extension when punching the air, and so on. Weak beats are for the winding-up motions that set up the delivery motion -- taking a foot off the ground, winding up a kick, winding up a punch, and so on.

With two weak notes, instead of only one, until the body becomes grounded again on the next heavy note, the legs stay in the air longer until landing. So the body feels more suspended in air, and there's more tension that builds up due to the feeling of floating further away until becoming grounded again. This reflects the mood of the singer, who feels somewhat carried off of her feet just from pining for her crush from afar, perhaps beginning to daydream about him, her attention drifting away from reality as much as her body is from the ground.

At the next level up in the rhythmic structure is the grouping of those 4 heavy notes -- but in fact, for most of the song, the 4th and final heavy note is silent (written as [X] below). Listen to the piano and the bass, which emphasize heavy notes 1, 2, 3, -- and then nothing on 4. They do come back in for the two weak notes after the silent 4th heavy note, though:

1 2 3 [X] and-a ...

The silent 4th beat corresponds to leaving the foot on the ground that was supposed to have been raised and landed on that beat. Since it has missed its intended beat and remains planted (written as [X] below), it lands on the next one in sequence, namely the 1st and heaviest beat of the following measure. Supposing you were doing a simple walk or march, and began with the L foot, then the steps would be:

L R L [X], R L R [X], L R L [X], R L R [X]

This empty beat at the end of each measure is therefore a bodily hesitation, leaving your foot grounded, as though unsure whether to continue pacing forward toward your destination or not. This mirrors the singer's emotional hesitation, about whether she should fully commit to approaching her crush, or keep her pining and daydreaming distance.

That foot is only frozen temporarily, though: it does land, albeit after a full beat of hesitation, but continuing her trajectory forward nonetheless. This shows that her emotional state is only wavering, hesitant, and anxious -- not that she's going to wimp out and close herself off altogether.

Each of these empty beats is like a little cliffhanger at the end of the measure -- oh no, what happened to her pacing? Will she carry herself forward, or is she going to just stay put, maybe even retreat? Great way of building tension at this level of the structure.

This also shows that the time signature is 12/8 rather than 6/8, which would be 2 main units of 3 notes, rather than 4 main units of 3 notes. There can be no cliffhangers with two units -- there has to at least be a beginning, then a middle, then a possible end. Cliffhangers and building tension assume there has been some change or direction before the empty spot -- and there can be no change, direction, or dynamics located within a single point. The cliffhanger empty beat after 3 present beats implies that those 4 are a cohesive whole and cannot be subdivided at that level.

See also someone else's old post showing that it is 12/8 rather than 6/8, looking at the chord progressions in the bass line. There are transitions after 4 beats, not after 2. Like me, that guy is not mainly into singer-songwriter piano ballads, but after he heard his daughter playing her CD, this song stuck in his mind and he had to figure it out -- turns out it was the rhythm that was so puzzlingly fascinating to his ear. His was the only post I found when googling to see if anyone else had noticed this song's unusual rhythm (and some database sites incorrectly categorize it as 3/4).

Now, what about those two weak notes that come back in after the empty 4th beat? That corresponds to the body movements needed to pick your frozen foot off the ground in order to make the next available heavy beat. Usually these weak notes don't need to be sounded, if they can assume you're walking at a normal uninterrupted pace. That's why they only play the heavy notes 1, 2, 3, not the "and-a" weak notes after them. Your mind and body can fill in the gaps between the heavy notes with those trailing weak notes.

But when your foot is frozen in hesitancy on the ground, you need to give it a little prodding and cajoling, just to pick it up off the ground. That's why those two weak notes get an overt sound -- what had gone assumed before, cannot be assumed now that your foot is frozen, and you need to say the quiet part loud to wake up that sluggish foot.

This bodily sensation mirrors the singer's emotional state, where she has to consciously will herself into going forward with her plan to talk to him, after a temporary hesitancy. And yet, this on-again / off-again pattern repeats every measure, showing that her emotional resolve is not strong enough to just slap herself once and go gung-ho -- she repeatedly feels too anxious, and repeatedly needs to will herself to commit to the plan. A one-time shot of courage would be reflected in a single burst of sound, or maybe a solo or bridge (a passage that only happens once).

At the next level up in the structure, these measures are arranged into passages, like a verse or chorus. Each verse is split into two halves, with 4 measures each, for 8 total. During the first 4 measures of a verse, the usual cliffhanger measure is used. But for the second 4 measures, this is only used for measures 6 and 8, while 5 and 7 now have their final beat filled in. This requires several listens to pick up on, but you must be noticing it unconsciously at first, you just can't pinpoint it precisely.

This progression over the course of a verse shows that she is gradually hesitating less and less as she approaches her crush. Maybe she simply finds more resolve from within, but given how crucial distance and proximity are in this song, it feels more like she's gaining confidence from him -- he's the strong guide she looks up to, and the closer she steps toward him, the more that his confidence rubs off on her.

During the chorus, there are 4 measures, and the cliffhanger rhythm is used for 1, 2, and 4, while the 3rd one has the final beat filled in. Similar effect as in the second half of the verse -- as he begins addressing her, and making her an offer to accompany him, her hesitancy is still there but is waning. She hasn't yet flown off with him, she's only being made an offer -- but that is enough to reduce her anxiety.

Then there is the brisk instrumental passage after the 2nd chorus, in which every measure has all beats filled in -- no more hesitancy, at all. And yet, no lyrics either -- this corresponds to her feeling whisked right off the ground by her crush, gliding around with no inhibitions, physical or emotional. Because they're soaring through the air now, the heavy notes are not matched with feet landing on the ground, but some other delivery motion -- imagine they're doing a darting movement, like a breaststroke swim through the air, and the heavy notes indicate each major sweeping-back motion of the arms and full extension of the legs kicking back. But still, no heavy note being missed, no hesitation, whether physical or emotional.

The bridge is another passage where every measure has all 4 beats filled in. This is just picking up on the instrumental passage's theme, only now there are lyrics because he's making a different degree of an offer -- not to leave the ground, they've already done that, but to soar off to some specific star or other, to fly through the clouds, or some other decision that she could not have pondered while still back down on the ground. Something she can only commit to now that she's already chosen to leave the ground. She still feels no hesitation, physical or emotional, during this stage.

Then the 3rd verse seems to bring her crashing back down to the mundane realm -- that same ol' cliffhanger hesitation rhythm from the earlier two verses. And the next chorus is pretty similar to the others, only there's a repeat of the final line, so there are 5 measures. Only the 3rd and 4th measures have the final beat filled in. Now we're seemingly back to where we began, mirroring her doubts about whether the soaring climax of the instrumental and bridge sections was only just her imagination. And yet, he's back at her door, so it must have been real.

There is another brief instrumental passage, where once again all measures have the final beat filled in -- no hesitation. This is a concrete musical token of the reality of the previous climax. Without saying it in lyrics, this shows that it was real after all. She's not having another daydream, she's being taken through the air again, to reassure her that it was real. It's not as long and intense as the climax, because it's not a second climax -- just a brief reassurance. A less intense token that proves that the more intense climax was real.

Finally, just as she had to come down from the climax into the 3rd verse, she comes down from the reprise of the instrumental, now that she has been convinced that the climax was real. She doesn't need to experience this reassurance forever -- a brief demonstration will do. And now that she's back down on the ground again, the cliffhanger measures return -- and therefore, so has her tendency to hesitate, notwithstanding the rollercoaster of confidence she has been taken on.

That's more evidence that she got her major boost of confidence from him taking her on a ride. Now that she's on the ground by herself again, the most she can do is plod forward (better than staying frozen), rather than go full-steam-ahead as she could only have done with him guiding her along, radiating his nonchalant confidence onto little ol' (partially) anxious her.

* * *

I'll bet you never thought there was such a dazzling rhythmic rabbit-hole to go down in the realm of pop music -- just a song, just an ordinary song. But complex enough to inspire two unconnected writers to go in-depth about its rhythmic structure, after only a happenstance playing by a younger girl fan (usually written off as having pedestrian tastes). And yet you don't have to be able to explain analytically what its je ne sais quoi is, to appreciate it -- its YouTube video is one of those where all the comments are glowing, "most underrated song ever," and so on. One of the most memorable and enjoyable, for sure.

The Brazil mania of the 2000s (and its place in the history of multicultural globalism)

I was reminded of the mania for all things Brazilian during the 2000s (some of which have continued through today), while tuning in to a recent karaoke stream by Kiara, Hololive's in-house choreographer. She was covering a song that used to be a standard in the dance clubs in the late 2000s and early 2010s -- "Hey Mama" by the Black Eyed Peas.

This was always a personal fave of mine, and I danced a modified samba. The tempo is way too fast to do both the fancy footwork of the samba and get a lot of motion or range at the same time. And when you're up on the main stage, hyping up the whole crowd, they want to see you take up lots of space and move around, not just do footwork in one place. So I would land each foot heavily on the main beat, and then instead of lifting and re-landing my feet on the half or quarter beats in between, I kept each foot fairly grounded, but pushed my legs up and down off of the ball of my feet on those off-beats, to simulate the fast-paced footwork of the samba.

That allows you to keep your feet close to the ground, and glide from side to side in wide strides that end on the main beat, to get more range over the floor. It's a sleight-of-hand -- most of the crowd won't notice, and they're convinced. And it frees up more of your body's energy to get your upper body, arms, and facial expression into the whole performance, rather than the relatively stiff upper body that comes with an emphasis on fancy footwork.

Anyways... I always wished there had been more songs like to get crazy to, but as far as I remember, that was the only samba-friendly staple of the clubs back then. However, after hearing Kiara singing that song, my mind opened up like a volcano, and ancient subterranean MySpace memories came flowing to the surface of my consciousness.

I knew that rhythm sounded familiar, but it wasn't from "Hey Mama" itself -- they sampled the beat of their own song when they released an enhanced re-mix of the '60s samba classic "Mas que Nada" by Sergio Mendes, in 2006. Although I never heard it in the clubs, it did hit #13 on the Billboard Dance Club Play chart here, and made the year-end charts in several European countries. I mainly remember it from the MySpace music player, where it was popular enough that I saw it on someone's profile, and started playing it over and over myself. Pretty sure they had the video for it, not just the audio.



However, the Brazil craze was not limited only to dance-focused genres like rap. Sidebar: it may sound strange today, but rap during the 2000s was at its most dance-crazy -- from crunk, to the Latin dance crossovers ("Hey Mama," "Hips Don't Lie," etc.), to the electropop of "Lollipop". Even mellow pop rock songs like "She Will Be Loved" by Maroon 5 borrowed from samba rhythms and Latin sensuality:



On the less mainstream side of things, samba and bossa nova were prevalent in the Thievery Corporation's lounge music, although it was not strictly focused on Brazil, but including Brazilian music in with other world genres.

Instead, the main rejuvenation source was the indie group Nouvelle Vague, whose concept was to record bossa nova covers of late '70s and '80s new wave icons. This hit so many different 2000s trends all at once -- the '80s revival, Brazil mania, and the whimsical "is it ironic or sincere?" tone of the indie crowd back then. It risked becoming a gimmick, and certainly their live performances got way too self-aware and hammed-up to be sincere tributes to the original, and more "look at how friggin' whimsical we are" contests for the spotlight.

And yet that doesn't detract from the recorded versions, which were popular enough that I heard the one below, "Teenage Kicks" (from the Undertones), as part of the in-flight music during a plane ride. The pining for a girl who doesn't know you exist, really resonates with the original bossa nova classics, like "The Girl from Ipanema". That keeps it from sounding too discordant tonally, which would make it too annoyingly self-aware -- like, "woah, get a load of how wacky we are, doing bossa nova covers of death metal" or something.

Even though a female voice is singing, I still hear it as being about a guy who is pining for a girl, narrated in a third-person by a different girl who has a crush on the guy in the lyrics.

* * *

As a music & dance guy, those are the examples that really stand out to me, but Brazil mania was not confined to music. I'll briefly survey some other domains of culture now, but I'll add any other examples in the comments later if I think of them. Readers feel free to as well.

In food & drink, there was the birth of the obsession with the acai berry. Yeah, I'm sure it has good nutritional value, but so does food from all over the world. This particular berry only became popular because it rode the wave of Brazil mania. Brazilian barbeque restaurants also took off like crazy during the 2000s. Why not something closely related, like Argentine cuisine? Because Argentina is not Brazilian. Gen X club-goers were so saturated in Braziliana that they knew their national drink -- the caipirinha. Any ol' normie could've known about the related lime cocktail, the Cuban mojito, but the trend-setters ordered caipirinhas.

Even the babes in commercials for food & drink were part of the Brazil craze. "Wanna Fanta -- don'tcha wanna?" It was the 2000s, so one of the Fantana girls had to be Brazilian (Andrea De Oliveira, the purple one).

Brazilian models Adriana Lima, Ana Beatriz Barros, Gisele Bundchen, and Alessandra Ambrosio were familiar to both the lad-mag readers and runway audiences of the 2000s.

Brazilians in general were the It Girl exotic ethnicity, from mainstream ads to porn and everything in between. Brazil-themed sexuality was so prevalent that assmen not only learned the Spanish word "culo" but the Brazilian Portuguese counterpart, "bunda". Britney Spears' hanger-on husband, Kevin Federline, released an album in 2006 that went nowhere, but whose first attempt at a single was titled "PopoZao", after the Brazilian term for "big ol' booty".

Brazilian waxing took off during this decade, and it could have been named after any place where women removed more hair down there than had been the norm in America. But those other countries were not Brazil.

Then there was the interest, if not much of the practice, of capoeira -- the mixture of martial arts and dancing. Far more popular was specifically Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, as the UFC rebranded and took over the youth sports culture. What other sport had the under-30 guys watching a reality TV competition to choose its next star athlete? Commentator Joe Rogan introduced this massive audience to the Brazilian pronunciation of Portuguese, every time he referred to "Hoyce" (Royce) Gracie, leader of an influential school of BJJ.

For established high-profile events, it took longer for Brazil mania to result in that country being host to the World Cup (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016), but both of those decisions were made during the late 2000s planning stage.

Not many movies crossed over to American audiences; City of God was about it, and only indie / art house audiences knew of it. But foreign movies are also a tough sell, since audiences have to read subtitles to understand the plot.

* * *

I haven't said anything about why it had to be Brazil, and why this time period. The main goal here is simply to catalog this phenomenon, which does not show up under simple Google searches for Brazil craze, Brazil mania, Brazil 2000s, etc.

But briefly, I think it was trying to present an optimistic and exciting vision of the future of globalization led by the American empire. The nasty reality was something entirely different, as NAFTA de-industrialized our economy, and most of the heavy-scale immigration here was not from culturally vibrant middle-class Brazilians, but de facto slaves from Central America who aren't very exciting. The global depression that began in 2008, and never ended for most people, also put an end to the rosy view of globalism's future.

During the woke 2010s, there was very little interest in culturally integrating the Third World with the American empire. The Brazil craze had some momentum behind it, but that impetus came from the pre-woke 2000s. Elite culture-makers and lay audiences alike found no interest in the rest of Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, India, China, or sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe some interest in shawarma, hookah bars, and MENA baddies, but that's about it.

The primary focus of multiculturalism was other advanced nations in the empire, namely Japan and South Korea. Obsession with the culture of those nations had never been a fraction of what it exploded into during the 2010s, and that trend continues through the 2020s so far. Approaches to global integration have taken something of a step in the realistic direction, seemingly after the dividing line of the 2008 depression, which blew up the untempered end-of-history optimism of the Nineties.

Now the virtual is primary, IRL secondary: From digital people to embodied accounts

As this year shapes up to be worse than 2021, something has become suddenly clear to me about the relationship between virtual reality and physical reality. Zoomers are even more virtual-dependent or virtually-existing than Millennials, who were already bad enough on that score. And Gen Alpha will be worse still.

Usually these discussions treat the virtual and IRL as merely separate domains, with some interfaces. But there's really an ordering where one is more fundamental, and the other is an outgrowth, parasitic, dependent, or otherwise secondary to the fundamental layer underneath.

For most of online history, IRL was primary and the virtual was secondary. Most of young people's conversations in the '90s were face-to-face or voice calls, which fall under IRL (more on voice calls later). That was not affected by them having online access. Online was only for stuff you couldn't already do IRL, and conversing with your friends and family was something you could and did already do IRL. Therefore, nobody had their friends and family on their AOL buddy lists for Instant Messaging, or their email contacts, both of which were instead reserved for accounts belonging to people some distance away who you had encountered only online (in a chat room, bulletin board, etc.).

During the early 2000s, the balance shifted more towards the virtual direction, while still having IRL as primary. In college, most students' AIM buddy lists now included their friends from around campus, not online-only contacts. Ditto for emailing their friends instead of calling them or dropping by their dorm room. Text messaging over a cell phone is, socially, the functional equivalent of IM-ing and emailing, and the opposite of a voice call or face-to-face chat, and texting IRL friends and family also took off during the 2000s.

This trend grew worse over the 2010s as users demanded even more virtual-dependent interactions with their IRL friends, family, and co-workers. This drove the growth of social media platforms, mainly Facebook but also Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, etc. By the later part of the decade, young people's social lives had dramatically shifted toward online interactions with accounts on social media platforms, rather than keeping in touch with IRL friends and family on a dinosaur platform like Facebook.

And now, as of the 2020s, this decades-long shift from IRL to the virtual has finally crossed the threshold where now the virtual is primary and fundamental, while IRL is relegated to secondary and parasitic / dependent status in young people's social lives.

Perhaps this crossover event just happened within the past month or so, rather than 2020 or '21. But I have never seen public spaces so deserted, even compared to 2020 when COVID hysteria was far greater. They basically never leave the house, unless they have to for work, and even then, they're still in online-mode while outside the home.

In 2020, I used to see girls out filming TikTok videos in public places like parks and outdoor shopping centers. That itself was treating virtual reality as primary, and IRL as dependent on it -- we'll only go to the park in order to film a TikTok video and interact with other accounts on that platform as a result of our upload. Or we'll only go to the park to take Instagram-worthy pictures. We'll only hang out at the Starbucks in order to bitch about some aspect of the atmosphere there, on Twitter / Tumblr / Reddit / wherever else. We can have a face-to-face conversation, but the topic has to be what some accounts are discussing on one of the platforms, or what one of my friend-accounts texted me, etc.

But by now I don't even see that level of IRL participation. All TikToks are now being filmed within their hermetically sealed domestic pod. (And maybe the gym? I don't know, never been to one.)

* * *

This post is more of a preliminary one, just to note the crossover event where IRL has finally been driven into secondary status, and the virtual finally having risen to primary status. But to briefly preview where this mini-series is headed...

I'll follow this up with more about what distinguishes IRL from virtual reality, since it's not obvious. For example, most people would not immediately recognize that a relationship where most of your communication is through texting or other messaging tools is a virtual, not an IRL, relationship. That's because IRL, understood as referring to a real space, also goes along with "in real time". Two people in the same place at the same time. But virtual interactions do not require two accounts being in the same virtual space at the same time -- usually they are not. Voice calls do unfold in real time, though, which is why they never felt fake like texting, emailing, or DM-ing do.

The strangest development on that matter is the inability of Skype and Facetime to displace texting and its variants, despite the former seeming to be more techno-futuristic and progress-marking. However, it makes sense because they required communication in real time, and that is anathema to virtual reality. So something that would've seemed out-of-this-world in the '60s, like Facetime, plays second fiddle to a glorified form of pen-pal letters or playing phone tag on each other's answering machines back in the '80s.

And we'll also have to adjust what we consider "going out," "joining the crowd," "enjoying the hustle-bustle environment," "leaving the private behind for the public," and so on and so forth. Now that people's social lives are primarily online, they can "go out in public" by logging on to a public platform and interacting with the other accounts on there, even while remaining alone in their home.

But the flipside of that is that merely leaving their IRL domicile does not constitute "going out in public" -- their mind and behavior is still entirely centered on their online existence, whether it's stewing in what another account posted, or thinking of how to exploit their outside-the-home trip for online engagement (perhaps something as innocuous as leaving a post on their feed about what they picked up at the grocery store, to generate some attention and engagement). They don't tell their neighbor what they got at the store, and they don't share a picture of their hike face-to-face with their family member. Those details are uploaded to an online platform for other accounts to see and interact with.

Sadly, this means the total death of the brick-and-mortar danceclub among young people, its primary demographic. TikTok or its successors will be the virtual danceclub where they go to show their moves, see and be seen, get some quick validation, etc., but without actual physical touching or even proximity and feeling corporeally part of a single pulsating superorganism called a crowd. That will be the hardest IRL space to let go of for me, especially since we're in the restless warm-up phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, and that always means dance fever. Which is in fact happening right now -- but only online, via TikTok, not IRL in clubs.

Oh yeah, and no IRL relationships will ever be initiated spontaneously IRL. Whether for same-sex friends, opposite-sex friends, or romantic / sexual partners, everybody will have to pass through an online app's algorithm, after submitting their personal data. At the very least, you will have to "meet" first online, whether it's an explicitly designed dating app or just a generic social media platform. It will be accounts forming bonds with accounts, primarily. Secondarily, and occasionally, the accounts may take physical form and hang out as friends on the beach, or as lovers scratching their animal itch for sex, before disembodying once again to return to account form in the virtual domain.

Plenty more to say, some of it as per yoozh will be posts-within-the-comments-section, and others will be separate posts altogether.

Vocal harmonies, dance, and cultural correlates of egalitarian economic eras

Checked out a Bee Gees greatest hits CD from the library and been playing it a lot the past couple weeks. It reminded me of this classic post of mine from 2013, back when I was one of the only people popularizing and doing original extensions of Peter Turchin's work on secular cycles and the structural-demographic model. I still basically am the only one.

Still, I've been more fascinated by the cultural correlates of the changing phases of political & economic cycles. Not that they're more important in some utilitarian, society-managing sense -- they're just more interesting.

Anyway, one of the clearest signals I found was close harmony in popular music vocals, linking all of the New Deal era together, and clearly separating it from the neoliberal afterward. After the inauguration of Reagan and Thatcher in the Anglosphere, the only popular groups to use close harmony were Bananarama in the '80s, and Wilson Phillips during their brief heyday of the early '90s. No single member of either group was clearly "the lead singer" or "the one poised for a solo career". But these two groups were the exception during the transition to neoliberalism.

After that, there were a handful of black girl-groups like En Vogue and SWV, but by that point the harmonies were occasional, and most of the vocals were from one girl at a time, moving from one to another. Still less hyper-competitive than one woman doing all the vocals as lead diva, but not as harmonious, as it were, compared to close harmonies throughout. By the y2k era, Destiny's Child was basically Beyonce and two back-up singers, and she quickly launched into a solo career.

A pattern I did not remark on in the OP is that close harmonies are more characteristic of the less pretentious genres -- pop, disco, dance in general. Far less common in rock, especially its harder forms, or any form of rap, which are more about the lead singer / MC who is there to let you know how much better he is than all the other pale imitations among his rivals.

I neglected to include ABBA in the list of harmonizing groups who kept the spirit alive in the '70s, and of course they were mostly a pop / disco group. And no, it's not because Scandinavians are genetically programmed to be more egalitarian (although they are), since their blood-cousins in the Nordic metal bands would never use close harmonies. And whatever Swedish rappers are out there, do not do so either.

That underscores how egalitarian of an environment a dance floor is, whether it's trad folk circle dances or mod neon disco. Sure, there's usually someone (like me) in that room who is the greatest dancer -- they'll even write songs about him (Sister Sledge). But that hierarchy doesn't rise to the level of a lead singer or lead guitar soloist at a stadium rock concert commanding the attention of 10s of thousands of fans. Dance clubs are way more down-to-earth, easy-going, we're all just as special as each other, kinds of places. What's there to be pretentiously hierarchical about? Lighten up -- it's just disco! Cut loose, have fun, and don't worry about someone else hogging all the attention. It's not going to happen.

Perhaps this is another reason why music critics love rock and rap, and hate anything danceable -- aside from the obvious, which is that critics are cerebral nerds who are tone-deaf, can't carry a tune, and have two left feet. They also want to lionize the god-like individual ubermensch, and egalitarian genres like dance, with their communitarian setting of a crowded local dance floor, are never going to produce that, while rock and rap does produce a pronounced hierarchy of gods vs. mere mortals.

It's also another hilarious example of libtards being the most enthusiastically Gilded Age and Ayn Randian in their aesthetic preferences. Nobody loves Victorian novels more than Democrats, and they were produced by a rising-inequality period. Indeed, they barely resonate with the literary output of the egalitarian periods on either side of the Gilded Age -- the Romantic era of 1780 to 1830, or the New Deal era of 1930 to 1980. Even today, they are more wedded to the cultural correlates of 1980 to present, than they are to the New Deal culture (aside from a few token gestures to Seventies Hollywood or French New Wave).

I don't think you have to reject the culture from a period whose economics you ostensibly abhor. Cultural works should be judged and appreciated on their own aesthetic merits. I'm just pointing out what is either a hilarious mismatch between which eras the left wants to work in vs. want to enjoy the culture of -- or to highlight that maybe today's left are barely concealed Victorians and neoliberals, *not* Romantics or New Dealers, and so their cultural sensibilities are entirely concordant with their anti-egalitarian, status-striving, Me Not Them, economic agendas.

At any rate, let's cleanse the palate with a reminder of what the tail-end of the New Deal sounded like, "Too Much Heaven" by the Bee Gees (1979). I was playing this while driving down the main drag through the city yesterday, and a cute girl in tight leggings saw random hot guy cruising slowly and decided to stop my car entirely by strutting her buns across the street, outside of a crosswalk (ooh, such a naughty girl...) That earned her a nice little OWW OWWWW! from the driver.

You may think that a slow or soft song clashes with catcalling, but there's nothing more appropriate than some soulful slow-dance music to get her in the mood for being pleasantly and playfully objectified. Today's tastemakers cannot tolerate catcalling, heterosexuality, dance music, dancing period (especially slow-dancing), and egalitarian social and economic outcomes. But to hell with their degenerate, boring, enervated crap.

Leave the pod, spit out the bugs, rip off the mask, catcall hot girls, and play harmonizing dance music for the masses.

Today's dance report

I started off with a bit of pogo-ing to Dookie by Green Day, but it was not enough to give me that electric ape energy that I truly craved at the time. So I changed the disc in the player to ESPN's Slam Jams. Oh hell yea. "One Step Beyond," "Dancing With Myself," and "Private Idaho" all got me bouncing and jumping around like a jungle shaman possessed by the gorilla god.

As my skin became saturated with simian sweat, I got down to just my underwear, raw ape style. Much greater freedom of movement, as well. Now that the tropical rainforest season is over, I need to find new ways to burn off water weight, other than long walks outside.

Followed it all with a quick, cool shower at night, something I normally do not find the need to do. I no longer smell like a dang paperback book cover.

And oh how sweet that truly is, my friends. All for now.

(With props to the coffee reports from the OG groyper)

Democrat sex work advocacy and conflict between material vs. informational sectors of society

One of the strangest aspects of next-gen Democrats is their obsession with sex work, and sex workers. Is this simply because liberal guys are dickless dorks who could only get laid if they paid for it? Or because they don't want their porn-site lifeline to be taken away from them? While both of those things may be true, the personal is not political. Instead we must analyze this phenomenon in the context of the make-up of their party's coalition — and that of their enemy.

Democrats represent the interests of the elites in the informational sectors of society — finance, media / entertainment, and info-tech. The output of these sectors is not labor-intensive: to reach a larger audience, a media outlet simply sends more copies of their TV broadcast over the airwaves, or a movie studio sends more hard-drives containing its movies to the multiplexes.

That is in contrast to labor-intensive forms of those activities, such as live music and live acting, where the output scales with the number of man-hours going into the production. There, if you want to put more butts in seats, a single live performance can only reach an audience of at most tens of thousands, in the largest stadiums.

If the target market is in the millions or higher orders of magnitude, suddenly you have to put on hundreds or thousands more performances than if you simply recorded one performance and made copies of that recording for mass distribution and projection. And the same troop of actors, or band of musicians, cannot possibly carry out those thousands more performances — you're going to have to hire a whole bunch of troops or bands. And now, your profit margin is strongly influenced by the unit cost of labor, unlike the producer of a movie or pop song.

Republicans, on the other hand, represent the interests of the elites in material sectors, where the output is labor-intensive — military / police / security forces, agriculture, energy extraction, and manufacturing. Not to mention myriad small businesses that are sensitive to the unit cost of labor, e.g. a mom-and-pop restaurant, not a small firm of accountants. If such sectors want to dramatically increase their output, they have to hire a lot more workers and managers, and open more land / space / workplaces for them to do their jobs.

So where does "sex work" fit into this partisan divide? Well, the term is still inchoate and amorphous, but you can see how different types of sex-related industries will be treated by Democrats, depending on whether or not they are labor-intensive. Some examples of labor-intensive sex work: prostitution, stripping / exotic dancing at a club, phone sex conversations, waitressing at a "breastaurant" like Hooters, and so on. Those that are not labor-intensive: any form of online pornographic content, and the remaining offline kinds of porn (DVDs, magazines, etc.).

If they are labor-intensive, their elites will not fit in naturally with the Democrats, and the Democrats will use their para-state armies — the NGOs — to undermine their interests. For example, organizing dancers in the stripping industry into labor unions (against the interests of strip club owners and managers). Whereas if they are not labor-intensive, their elites are a natural fit with the Democrats, and they will be integrated into the party's coalition along with those of other informational sectors. For example, doing favors for the owners and managers of porn studios, and seeking donations or other support from them in turn.

Having said that, which of the two projects will they pursue more? Whichever most advances their own interests. If there's a big prize to win for themselves by undermining the interests of the labor-intensive sex industries, they'll focus more on NGOs vs. the sex-industry elites. If there's more to be won by integrating the elites of sex industries that are not labor-intensive, they'll focus more on building up their own coalition.

In reality, Democrats focus very little on the labor-intensive industries. They are organizing grad students, journalists, and coders more than they are strippers, brothel prostitutes, and phone sex operators. And no, it doesn't matter if they run a union drive at one or two strip clubs out of the nearly 4000 in America. Nor is it material if one or two token prostitutes affiliate with the party; unless a large share of them are integrated into the political machine, they as a sector are left out of its patronage schemes of protection and provision.

The only labor-intensive sectors that Democrats organize are government workers (including health care, which is heavily reliant on government contracts through Medicare and Medicaid). So far, sex work is not produced by the government — and therefore, leftist activists would only unionize prostitutes if they were part of a "state-issued gf" program.

If Democrat NGOs are not redirecting the wealth from labor-intensive industries into their own coffers, via unionization, they do still have some government funding to hoover up, with "sex worker relief" as their mission statement. They will not do the things for workers that unions normally do, like securing higher wages and better working conditions. But they will conduct the all-important "community outreach" to de-stigmatize sex work, educate sex workers of their rights, and maybe pass out a few breadcrumbs of charity (e.g. free condoms for streetwalkers, if that activity ever returns to American streets).

That form of NGO-as-social-worker does nothing materially for the sex workers involved, but nor does it antagonize the elites of that industry (such as strip club owners) because their wealth is not being redirected into the Democrat NGO, whose government funding comes from political connections to Democrat politicians, or perhaps "philanthropic" (social engineering) funding from wealthy Democrat donors. It rustles the fewest feathers, and secures some sinecures for liberal members of the over-produced elite aspirant class.

As people, Democrats are fundamentally averse to interpersonal confrontation, and are socially awkward in large groups, especially if they're strangers and from a different background. These flaws are unimportant in the informational sectors that their party represents, but they are fatal in the labor-intensive sectors, which rely on a large number of man-hours to get stuff done. And when a lot of people work in that sector, they will be pretty diverse.

Organizing a union to directly interfere with owner / management operations would be far too stressful for activists who would rather cattily backstab each other over an internet connection. They are not firebrands or leaders of a conquering army, as a union would be if it won concessions from management. The only masses they can supervise are violent mobs who just destroy shit, like BLM and Antifa. It doesn't require a socially savvy, interpersonally well-oiled machine for leftists to orchestrate a mob burning down a working-class neighborhood in a battleground-state city.

Can you imagine leftists walking up to a group of strippers, and coming off as anything other than pathetic? Some would think the activists were well-meaning but boring and pointless dorks with typical nice-guy syndrome, while others would notice the sex-pest red flags and steer clear of them altogether. Once turned down, the leftists would stew in resentment over the same type of girls not noticing them or rejecting their attention in high school (a mental state the leftists never mature from). That includes leftist women, who would cry sour grapes over being excluded yet again from the pretty and popular girl clique, dismissing them as "typical airheaded cheerleaders, only with tattoos".

Liberals are more of the cerebral than corporeal orientation, and that's even more true the more leftist they are. There's no environment they viscerally fear more than one of kinesthetic performance, whether it's a sports field or a dancefloor where they're easily seen by the crowd. They have two left feet. Strippers might seem to be natural members of the Democrat coalition, but that was only back when the Republicans were the Moral Majority type (defunct since the 1990s). Now it's more of a jocks vs. nerds divide, and pole-dancing could not be any more kinesthetic and less cerebral.

I'm sure strippers are mostly apolitical, but Democrats would still write them off for living in Trump-voting flyover states, having working-class jobs, and not giving out pity sex to post-grads. If they checked some token demographic boxes — black trannies — then Democrats might be interested, but they couldn't care less about them as a class of workers.

That leaves mass media pornography as the sex sector where Democrats would work to integrate their elites, which has already taken place for the established studios in the L.A. area. Although pornographic in content, their business model is basically the same as the big Hollywood feature film studios, so why wouldn't they fit in naturally with the Democrats?

As an aside, this shows why it's misleading to refer to pornographic scenes as prostitution. It's true the girl is getting paid to have sex with some guy she'd otherwise not be with. But he's getting paid too, albeit far less. They're actors putting on a fictional show for an audience. The guy in the scene is not the customer, but all of those in the audience.

Importantly, unlike prostitution, where providing sexual services to a larger market means putting in more woman-hours, for mass media pornography the same scene can reach dozens, thousands, or millions of viewers. It's not like a peep show, where a different girl would have to carry out the performance in front of a different live audience (a dirty version of community stage acting). Porn acting, like movie acting, is not labor-intensive.

The only place left for Democrats to integrate the elites is OnlyFans or other Uber-for-porn platforms. None of the girls' performances are IRL, but are mass-mediated by an IT platform. Growing the audience does not mean having more girls perform, but having more viewers download the app, and for each girl to build her brand by orders of magnitude. The output is not labor-intensive. So the platform's owners and managers are a natural fit with the big-wigs of Silicon Valley and their Democrat political vehicle.

It's also possible that activists would organize the elite ranks of the performers (in both the traditional studio and Uberized versions), akin to the grad student unions at Ivy League colleges, journalist unions at prestige publications, or coder unions at elite tech conglomerates like Alphabet. It would be more of a guild for a labor aristocracy, rather than a broad-based union drawing on legions of workers.

The place to watch there is top-ranked Twitch streamers, some of whom border on titty-streaming. They have already worked hand-in-glove with next-gen Democrat politicians to propagandize and whip votes for the party, as in the Among Us livestream before the 2020 election, where AOC and Ilhan Omar played with the "Queen of Twitch" Pokimane and other video game celebs, who were only too eager to host the politicos.

It's not hard to believe the Democrats would launch similar ventures, and fundraisers, with the elite ranks of porn actresses from the traditional studios and OnlyFans alike, though hosted on an adult site like PornHub instead of Twitch. No different from the standard liberal telethon with celebs from the media / entertainment industry, just those whose mass-mediated entertainment is pornographic.

I can't see leftists organizing similar fundraisers and vote-whipping drives at strip clubs, brothels, or Hooters restaurants. They would be fighting the labor-intensive small-biz owners and managers, who are not 100% Democrat and may even lean (libertarian) Republican. In the eyes of leftists, those elites are just a more salacious flavor of boat dealers and Applebees franchise owners — chuds, deplorables, probably sexual harassers (totally unlike the management of a porn studio or OnlyFans...).

Nor would those labor-intensive workers give a shit if activists in the informational sectors fired up a reputation-smearing campaign against strippers found to be unwoke, Republican, or whatever else. Labor-intensive workers are not chasing fame, since there's no such thing as a stripper who dances in front of millions of viewers at a time, or a Hooters waitress who takes meal orders from millions of patrons at a time.

Their income is not tied to industry-insider reputation and general-public fame. You look cute, you put on the uniform, you smile at the customers, and do the waitressing tasks, you're hired, and you keep your job. But if leftoids wanted to destroy the career of a porn actress, their smear campaign would be highly effective. Those girls are seeking status in an industry where just showing up and going through the motions, as it were, is not enough. They have to have star potential, build their personal brand, and otherwise boost their fame. Anything in the media, including social media, that tarnishes their brand or fame is detrimental to their career.

Some gay media scold on Twitter drove a famous young and active porn actress, August Ames, to suicide during the #MeToo era a few years ago. She had simply warned another actress that the guy she was about to film a scene with was an HIV risk for having had sex with men. The gay media psycho and a broader leftoid social media mob hounded her for homophobia, and she couldn't stand the potential destruction of her reputation, when her status relies so much on reputation. The leftist orthodoxy these days is that porn actresses have to die from AIDS contracted from gay-for-pay actors, to prove they're not homophobic. Otherwise, terrorize them into killing themselves.

Since strippers and other labor-intensive workers are not so easily intimidated by threats to their reputation in the mass media, as they don't have a mass audience to worry about alienating, Democrats would not get involved with them politically. They wouldn't hold much leverage over them, and couldn't boss them around.

There's probably more to say on these differences within the not-at-all homogeneous sex work industry, but the key point is that the make-up of the two parties' coalitions reveals more about their advocacy than does their superficial propaganda ("we support sex workers" or "our enemies are SWERFs," etc.).