Woodgrain + chrome mania during the '70s (extensive image gallery)

The previous post laid out the Midcentury Modern roots of the "woodgrain + chrome" aesthetic that we commonly associate with the woody Seventies, which in fact also had to include the industrial / machine / futuristic material of gleaming silver-tone metal as well (and perhaps also smooth black plastic, like bakelite).

Another post will go further back to the Art Deco era, tracing the birth of this unique American contribution of primitive futurism.

There's not much to add analytically now, just an extensive image gallery in case some people are unfamiliar with the style's peak during the '60s and especially the '70s. Or want a nice soothing refresher for how many product categories it touched.

I'll only comment on one in particular for now: I was really shocked by the storage bins for VHS or audio cassette tapes. If you're Gen X or older, you've had these in your home at some point for years, and if you're younger than that, you've certainly seen them if you visit thrift stores. They were -- and are -- everywhere.

We all recall the woodgrain pattern around most of the box. But on the pulls, there's smooth black plastic -- and what looks like aluminum tape! A shiny silver-tone decal, at any rate. It's not even a solid piece of metal, just a thin sheet glued on. But they required that shiny silver-tone metallic accent, or else it just wouldn't be industrial, machine-age, and futuristic enough for American culture!

This aluminum-ish tape appeared on storage cabinets for 8 track tapes, cassette tapes, Betamax tapes, VHS tapes, and even CDs. It was no accident or after-thought -- it was obligatory, no ifs, ands, or buts. It can't be only primitive -- it has to be futuristic, too.

Just as the toaster and percolator, usually taking part in only the chrome and bakelite combo, eventually did get the woodgrain treatment as well. Not too futuristic, now -- we don't want to slip into Bauhaus decadence like Europeans from collapsed empires. We're Americans!

Finally, note the self-aware tone of the Panasonic ad copy: "With all that walnut-finished wood and midnight black and silver trim, knobs to finagle with and those wild-looking cylindrical speakers."

Woodgrain and chrome: primitive-futurist materials for America's defining design style

Some recent posts have explored how the American Empire's distinctive culture is different from those of the Early Modern Euro empires that perished in WWI, and indeed how the culture of the only one to survive -- the Russian Empire (under the USSR) -- was highly similar to that of America in the aftermath of the World Wars. Scandinavia also resembles these two empires, so it is more about being excluded from the Early Modern Euro empires club, and therefore taking a wholly different approach to cultural creation.

First was a review of realism in drama for the literary arts. Then ornateness vs. Block Symphony in architecture, followed up by a cross-sectional comparison of state capitol buildings around America, and a review (the first I'm aware of) tying together America's contribution to world religions (Mormonism) and architecture (Block Symphony).

Now we turn to "design" in a broader sense, having already looked a bit at architecture. Furniture, consumer household products, interior decoration, and a little industrial design too, like cars. I'll save the images for a gallery / appendix at the end, rather than comment on each one in detail or use specific images to prove a specific point.

* * *

This all started when I kept hearing the audience of several streamers haranguing the poor girls to "buy the Herman Miller chair already!" as though it were obligatory to sit in an Aeron chair for an online-related job. Aside from being over-hyped and overpriced since their explosion in the Dot-Com Bubble Nineties, they just don't look American -- or Japanese, or Swiss, or name some other member of the recent / ongoing cultural elite. They're all-black, made mostly or entirely of synthetics, are too curvilinear in outline, and are too light / airy / meshy.

So I started looking for examples of chairs to suggest to the girls (perhaps I can do that in detail in the comments section). And then it really hit me how different the aesthetic has become since the Early Modern Euro empires, other than Russia, bit the dust in WWI, ushering in a mostly American-led zeitgeist, although strikingly similar to Soviet aesthetics, and joined by the neutral Scandinavians.

This began with the American strains of Art Deco in the '20s, crucially being independent of and in many ways contradictory toward European modernisms such as Bauhaus in design or cubism in painting and sculpture. Bauhaus only had the modern / progressive / futuristic tone, not the juxtaposition of that tone with the trad / reactionary / primitivist tone, which has always defined American aesthetics (since they began, in the late 19th C.). Cubism's blockiness was destructive, evoking the shards of a shattered mirror, whereas American blockiness was constructive, building various scales of blocks into a pleasing -- not dissonant -- rhythmic gestalt.

The American movement peaked creatively during the so-called Midcentury Modern era, after WWII but before the neoliberal era of the '80s and beyond. Midcentury Modern has rarely gone totally out of fashion, so there have been influences, copies, and revivals at various points since -- like crazy from 2005 to 2019, epitomized by the set designs for Mad Men on the sincere side and Austin Powers on the campy side (the original core James Bond movies being prime examples of Midcentury Modern design).

Perhaps the single best expression of the new era, in which America more or less dominated, is its choice of materials. The materials not only convey something about their origin and production -- making finished things from raw ingredients -- but also influence the color and texture and other purely visual aesthetic properties.

By far the prevailing theme for materials was "primitive meets futuristic" -- so it had to include a very old, pre-historic kind of natural material. Something right out of the Stone Age -- wood, stone, even a whole animal skin for a rug or blanket (in lieu of a more civilized item woven from threads of wool).

But it also had to have something very new, industrial, something that only precise machines could manufacture -- not just metal, which is thousands of years old, and may look rough and crude to begin with or patinated with age. Metal that is bright, gleaming, smooth, mirror-like in its reflection of light -- therefore, chrome, or as close to that ideal as a silver-toned metal can get.

Depending on the functional needs of the object, it could have included some plastic as well, in a nod to modern chemical production processes, as long as it too had a glistening, smooth, reflective, uniform surface. And although any color dye could have been added during the production, the main choice was black, followed by white, perhaps imitating the neutral colors of stone materials. Vivid blues, reds, or greens would have looked too unlike raw stone, and ruined the "somewhat trad, somewhat mod" feel.

And of course, all of these choices in materials would still be subject to the constraints of blockiness rather than ornateness.

* * *

For historical context, what did the American-led style *not* look like? Not like the Bauhaus '20s zeitgeist. For example, Breuer's Wassily chair, which does have tubular steel with a reflective finish, but no wood, and whose black leather straps also look too modern rather than trad (smooth, uniform in color, no grain, etc.). It's also deconstructed or analyzed into components or broken down, rather than being a harmonious unanalyzed holistic gestalt. It's also too light and airy, owing to its deconstructed nature -- you can see right "through" it in many places.

Likewise the Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe.

Le Corbusier's furniture is somewhat more in the American vein, probably because he was Swiss and not part of the Early Modern Euro empires club by upbringing. (Breuer was from the collapsing Austrian Empire, and Mies van der Rohe from the collapsing German Empire). There's no single work he made that combines all the key elements, but his club chairs are hefty and blocky, he used highly figured cowhide for upholstery alongside tubular steel (but in a deconstructed and airy "sling" chair), although he never used much wood.

Nor did the American style resemble the various national incarnations of Art Nouveau (Modernisme in Spain, Jugendstil in Germany, etc.). Those were all rooted in Early Modern Euro imperial styles, going back to Baroque and Rococo -- no futuristic / industrial / machine-age suggestions, curvilinear rather than rectilinear, light wispy forms, highly ornate.

Let alone did the American style resemble earlier stages of the Euro imperial cultures. Back East in America, there is more Olde Worlde Euro-LARP-ing, but that's not America's own style, which was born in Chicago and spread toward the western frontier. Even in its revival of European styles, America is far more comfortable resurrecting styles that were not made by America's imperial rivals during its rise. Romanesque (i.e., Frankish and pre-modern French), Byzantine, Roman, Ancient Greek, Egyptian, maybe Gothic at the tenuous latest. And generally those have more massive volumes, more straight lines, and less ornate ornamentation compared to Rococo.

* * *

What's the first major example of the American style in design? As far as I can tell, it's one of the most iconic -- the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, released in 1956. The cushions are wrapped in sleek black leather, and the metal supports have a chrome finish, much like earlier Euro modernist approaches. However, what sets the Eames chair apart is the wooden shell behind and underneath the cushions. Originally, and for decades after, made of Brazilian rosewood, this highly figured wooden component gave the whole piece a wild and primitive tone that none of the progressive / futurist Europeans could have ever dreamed up.

Figured woodgrains had been staples of European furniture for centuries -- but the Eames' veneered it over bent plywood, giving it an industrial-age feel instead of a strictly hand-worked process. And none of those earlier European uses of figured woods paired them with futuristic chrome or sleek black leather. It was a uniquely American combination of materials, for a novel effect. And true to the American blocky volume approach, it was not light or airy or deconstructed, but solid and blocky -- with a few gently rounded corners.

Even simpatico European designers, like the Dane Arne Jacobsen, couldn't quite make this leap in the immediate wake of the Eames revolution. His Egg and Swan chairs, from the late '50s, don't have woodgrain anywhere. And if Danish Modern used wood and/or leather, it didn't also include chrome or other bright silver-toned metal, as prominently as the American style did. It took until the '60s and '70s for European designers to adapt the American approach, especially through the Swiss firm Stoll Giroflex, whose lounge chair and ottoman pair is a slightly curvier Euro refinement of an earlier American invention.

The most prolific, influential, and iconic designer in the American style is Milo Baughman, who used the woodgrain + chrome combination for chairs, sofas, tables, credenzas -- anything. And his lines were more rectilinear and in tune with American Block Symphony from architecture, compared to the Eames' somewhat more playful and curvier lines. Baughman was also more quintessentially American in not only being based in California (as the Eames' also were) but converting to Mormonism.

From the large and expensive design objects -- furniture -- the style emanated out to the smaller and less expensive objects. By the '70s, it was hard *not* to find this mixture of materials -- or their simulation -- in a receiver, television, telephone, lamp, desk sculpture, electric guitar, alarm clock radio, car dashboard, car outer body, tobacco pipe, and any other kind of consumer product.

We used to look back on that era as "the woodgrain era", but that's only half of the picture. Wood, even highly figured wood, has been popular forever. What distinguished that zeitgeist, and set the standard for American design ever after, is its mixture of trad, primitive woodgrain right alongside futuristic industrial chrome (and/or smooth gleaming plastic). That look and feel, and that impression, represents a unique American contribution to global cultural history.

* * *

As the American Empire reached saturation / stagnation during the neoliberal era, Bauhaus and other Euro approaches have come back from the dead, as America can no longer rule the whole world, politically or culturally. Sleek black leather and chrome -- but no woodgrain -- has become popular again, as has "blobitecture" in place of blockitecture, especially in Europe itself. Buildings made of only new-age metal and glass, with no stone or wood to reveal their wild primitive alter ego, make us long for even the least aesthetic strain of Block Symphony -- Brutalism. And all-black, meshy, totally synthetic chairs, rounded all over, are the go-to seat for the so-called creative class.

Even the attempts to adapt Midcentury Modern to today miss the mark because they don't have a good intuition for what the originals were doing. For example, during the 2010s it became popular to make tables and desks out of heavy slabs of wood, perhaps "live edges" revealing all the grain, resting on minimalist metal legs -- which are black and usually matte. This attempt fails because "metal" isn't futuristic -- it's been around for thousands of years! And yes, you can use hand tools alone to give it a minimalist shape and surface appearance.

Those metal legs have to specifically have a shiny, mirror-like silver tone to them, since that's what came out of the industrial age for building materials. Otherwise it looks like iron that's been painted black, like there has been for hundreds of years and did not look futuristic even back then. Their conception of "metal" or "industrial" is something coarse, ugly, and dark, as though industry is supposed to plunge us back into the dark ages.

The Midcentury Modern conception was of industry as producing smooth, gleaming, bright things, in a way that no previous manufacturing technique could have done. That was the forward-looking part of the combination. But the manufacturing of wooden components was also done in a futuristic way, like bending the plywood, or keeping it rectilinear -- anything but plonking down a "live edge" with almost no woodwork performed on it at all, as though it were a freshly felled whole tree.

Today's "live edge table with metal legs" leans too far in the primitive direction, in a sign that we are losing our advanced industrial capacity -- and along with those off-shored factories, our imagination relating to them. It's similar to the steampunk aesthetic in fashion, another product of the neoliberal era and our new cultural dark age. Steampunk is just Victorian LARP-ing, plus a few industrial embellishments -- it's not futuristic at all. Midcentury Modern was first and foremost a futuristic movement, even when using primitive materials. It wasn't a Gothic LARP, with some industrial embellishments.

* * *

Appendix / Gallery

I'm just posting the interior decoration examples now, will update with other consumer products later (as I think most people are familiar with those). Note in the Mad Men set, the wooden panels on the wall, along with the silver-toned metal. In today's neoliberal desecration of modernism, there would never be that much wood, let alone with a visible figure and rich stain. Probably would just be glass panes between the metal skeleton.

The Tooth Fairy and American ethnogenesis

The first reference to the Tooth Fairy is from a Chicago area newspaper (from the Old Northwest, site of intense Indian wars across a meta-ethnic frontier), after the Civil War & Reconstruction period (1908).

There was no precedent for this practice in European or other world history. Superstitions relating to children's teeth are too vague -- the Tooth Fairy is specifically a diminutive fantastical creature that visits children when they're asleep, leaving a gift for the baby tooth that the child has already left under / near their pillow.

Grown Viking real-life men paying children, while the children are awake and away from their bed, to wear their baby teeth in a good luck necklace lacks all of these elements except the transactional exchange, so that is clearly not related.

The only correlate is a single short story for children by Spanish writer Luis Coloma, "Raton Perez", which has all the elements (only the fantastical small creature is a mouse, rather than a fairy). It was first published in a collection of stories in 1902 (Nuevas Lecturas), then in standalone form, with illustrations, in 1911.

Only the standalone version has a preface explaining the supposed origin as him being commissioned by the Queen to write a story to memorialize her royal son losing a baby tooth in 1894. Just-so embellishment later on, or true story? Either way, the story came out around the turn of the century.

Coloma's story also has far more narrative action, dialog, and a richer cast of characters than the simple Tooth Fairy folklore.

If we believe that ordinary Americans at the grassroots level somehow were influenced by Coloma's story, it had to have been almost instantaneous, across a major language barrier (few Spanish speakers in America, esp. the Midwest, at that time), and other cultural barriers (we were barely influenced by Spain).

Also, it would require that we not only altered the small detail of the creature being a rat or a fairy, but stripping out all the other richness of the narrative. Coloma's is a proper fairy tale, not just a simple folkloric practice. If American parents were in the mood of telling their children legends or tales, why wouldn't they keep the narrative, at least in part? There's no narrative to the Tooth Fairy, unlike Raton Perez.

So we did not get the Tooth Fairy from Spain. Another possibility is that Coloma independently came up with all the elements of the Tooth Fairy legend, at roughly the same time, and exerted his creative will to come up with this narrative because he was commissioned by the Queen, whose son was losing a tooth at the time.

The stark similarity and close timing rules out an independent origin. If he was commissioned, that would explain his greater narrative detail -- he wasn't just passing on an old wives' tale, but creating a work for his royal patron, deserving greater aesthetic detail.

Another possibility is they share a common ancestor. But there are no other children of this hypothetical ancestor -- only the American Tooth Fairy, and Raton Perez, both born circa 1900. Since Spain and America had been culturally closed off to each other at that point -- not sharing a greater sphere of cultural influence -- then the ancestor would have to go much further back, like Indo-European or something.

But then, it would have produced children in at least some of the other Indo-European cultures that still exist. And yet, no Tooth Fairy in any of them.

By 1900, the Spanish Empire had already been in the collapse stage of its lifespan for nearly a century, whereas the American Empire was ascendant -- both politically, as well as culturally.

As for the ease of acquiring the relevant information, it would be far easier for a single erudite scholar with royal patronage in Europe to learn about American folk customs, than for entire masses of ordinary Americans in the Midwest to learn of one specific recently published story embedded within a larger collection whose title does not indicate anything about it being children's stories, fairy tales, tooth fairy legends, etc.

Therefore, it's far more likely that -- through whatever links of transmission -- the arrow went from America to Spain, not the other way around.

And so, the Tooth Fairy is, like Santa, a uniquely American cultural creation, whose influence has spread around much of the world as the American Empire eclipsed all others, aside from Russia, over the course of the 20th C.

German imperial ethnogenesis and Easter Bunny traditions

I'm preparing a long post on the ancient Indo-European origins of several Easter / arrival-of-spring holiday traditions, but in the meantime, a quick look into those relating to the Easter Bunny. It's already known that the Easter Bunny / Hare, who brings eggs as presents to children, and leaves them around the home to be discovered in a hunt, comes from Protestant Germans, some of whom introduced the practice to America. This is a major invention, without analogs in other Indo-European cultures.

What's more interesting is the timing: it's not an ancient Germanic tradition, but probably from the second half of the 1600s (the first reference is from 1682). This post will briefly review my overall theory of ethnogenesis, and then the specific case of the German Empire, whose origins and evolution remain only halfway understood by the public.

* * *

The Easter Bunny / egg hunt fits the pattern I've been establishing for the ethnogenesis of various imperial societies, whereby transformational new cultures arise only after an empire's integrative civil war -- the Thirty Years' War, in the case of the fledgling German Empire. They're not so very German before then -- just as Americans were not very American before the Civil War & Reconstruction, nor were the Romans so distinctly Roman until after Caesar's Civil War, and so on and so forth.

The origins of imperial cohesion and expansion stem from a people lying on a meta-ethnic frontier with a very different Other, who pose a serious threat, and may be an advancing empire in their own right. But if the relationship to the Other were the main driver of cultural evolution within the Us side, why would Our culture need to change at all? It could stay exactly the same, and we would simply feel it, display it, and perform it much more intensely. It only requires more chauvinism, not the forging of entirely new cultural markers. Higher quantity, not necessarily a new quality.

Rather, it is the internal dynamic that drives these cultural innovations within Us. Because some of Us lie close to the meta-ethnic frontier with the Other, while some of Us are comfortably far removed from it, there is now variation in how Us-like -- or how opposite of the Other -- the various Us-es are.

And those closest to the frontier will want to prioritize defense and even aggression against the Other, while those farthest from the frontier will say that's no big deal, why waste our resources, time, and delegate local authority to a new central state just to combat something that we barely feel the pain of?

Sooner than later, these internal contradictions within the Us side come to a head, and there is a civil war. But it is integrative, where the winner will incorporate the loser politically, economically, and culturally, as much as possible, into a greater empire, not just let them do their own thing unmolested. Both of the Us-es need to be united in order to take on the Other, so no, the loser cannot be allowed to go back to their comfy isolation.

The most typical cause of this civil war is over how to treat the Other -- should they be militantly resisted, pursued vindictively, conquered, etc.? Or should they be appeased in some way, paid off, given safe passage to bother someone else, etc., so as to not rock the boat too much for any of the parties concerned? When there is an intense meta-ethnic frontier, usually from the Other expanding at the expense of Us, this is not an inconsequential debate.

Those among Us that are closest to the frontier are being unwillingly transformed into leaders of a broader movement against the Other. It's an apocalyptic do-or-die situation for those on the front lines. So to reflect this transformation in political and military roles, they decide to adopt new cultural markers in order to let the other Us-es know who's leading the way, who should be deferred to culturally as a standard for the broad coalition of Us-es.

For, at the outset of this process, there is little variation on the Us side for any cultural domain -- that's what makes Us close together, in contrast to the Other, with whom We have a lot of variation. We speak the same language, albeit with different accents. We eat the same foods, albeit with some regional specialties. We practice the same religion, albeit with minor ritual differences. There simply isn't much in the existing cultural variation within the Us side to amplify or intensify, if one part of Us wants to distinguish itself as the standard-bearer of all the Us-es.

Hence, the urge to forge new cultural markers for the standard-bearing part of Us, which can then be held up as qualitatively distinctive compared to the rearguard or even unwilling part of Us. Of course there is a quantitative ramp-up in intensity after the ball has gotten rolling, but crucially it is not acting on long-standing cultural markers -- but entirely new ones.

* * *

What became the German Empire began with the Duchy of Prussia, a small state centered around the Baltic port city of Konigsberg, which had become encircled by the Lithuanian Empire. Directly to Prussia's east lay the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been expanding since the 13th C., and already by the end of the 14th C. had merged de facto with the Kingdom of Poland, to Prussia's south and west. This encirclement by an expanding empire threw up a meta-ethnic faultline around Prussia, forcing it to cohere intensely to withstand conquest.

Lithuania and Poland represented Baltic and Slavic speakers, and although Old Prussians were originally Baltic speakers as well into the early 2nd millennium, they rapidly abandoned their Baltic language (and other aspects of culture?), and began Germanicizing themselves, in addition to importing heavy numbers of Germans, as well as having Germans within the elite stratum from the region's subjugation by the Teutonic Knights.

Lithuania and Poland were also intensely Catholic -- in that era, as a contrast to the Orthodox churches to their south and east, as the Protestant Reformation had not yet started. However, as Prussian ethnogenesis began, their founding duke Albert adopted Lutheranism in 1525, at the start of the duchy's existence. This was the first Protestant state church. He was originally head of the Teutonic Order, aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, but his encirclement by Catholic superiors provided the motive to adopt a new state church, to heighten the Us vs. Them feeling with respect to religion.

Prussia was still inferior in status, though, and the dukes of Prussia had to pay homage to their Polish overlords.

Duke Albert came from the House of Hohenzollern, who had recently established themselves as the ruling house of Brandenburg (in 1415), and who made Berlin their capital. They gradually acquired the rights of succession in both Brandenburg and Prussia, which culminated in 1618. The next year, the same person (George William) became the leader of both Brandenburg (elector) and Prussia (duke), formalizing their union. But Prussia was still not a fully independent polity, having to pay homage to Poland.

The next round of Brandenburg-Prussian expansion took place during the ruinous civil war among German speakers, the Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, at least until the German-speaking sides agreed to the Peace of Prague in 1635.

It is dubious to lump Brandenburg-Prussia with the Habsburgs (ruling the Duchy of Austria, and serving as Emperors for the fragmented and impotent Holy Roman Empire), as though they constituted two "Us" factions within a civil war, as opposed to an external war. Habsburg Austria was in fact undergoing its own intense ethnogenesis, along the meta-ethnic frontier to their south and east, where the Anatolian Muslims of the Ottoman Empire were making deep incursions into Europe through the Balkans. This pressure eventually led them to oversee the defense against the Ottomans alongside the Czech (Bohemian) and Hungarian regions. And as already mentioned, different churches within Christianity can be powerful meta-ethnic markers as well, as when Prussia had become encircled by Lithuania and Poland, or as when Orthodox Russia eventually expanded into Poland and Lithuania.

What is easier to construe as a real civil war is the struggle among the northern German Protestant states to unify around their new religion, to heighten their difference with Catholics such as Poland, Lithuania -- and yes, even their fellow German-speaking brethren in Austria. An integrative civil war eventually unites all of those who face the same meta-ethnic Other, the one who caused them to start cohering in the first place.

Because Prussia and Austria were forced into defending themselves against entirely separate meta-ethnic nemeses -- Poland-Lithuania, and the Ottomans, respectively -- there could be no civil war that would integrate both of those groups together. This fundamental difference in who their meta-ethnic nemesis was, determined the answer to "the German question," i.e. would one nation-state unite all German speakers, or would the schism remain? The solution had nothing to do with intellectual debates about romantic nationalism, language, etc.

And indeed, Prussia and Austria evolved into separate peer empires, with distinct national / imperial cultures, over the Early Modern and Modern periods. Even after their collapse during the World Wars of the 20th C., they remain separate and different from each other, notwithstanding their shared German language.

* * *

This schism among German-speaking proto-empires began during the Thirty Years' War, where in general the major Protestant groups were fighting the major Catholic groups. However, this war also served as a civil war among the Protestants themselves. Their major leader, culturally and politically, had been Saxony, with Hanover after them. And yet Brandenburg-Prussia had begun expanding, so perhaps they would become the new leaders of the northern Protestants. Protestant leadership was up in the air, raising the stakes considerably, and making a civil war amongst them inevitable.

Saxony has never become an empire during any time in history, as they have been safely ensconced in central Germany from every expanding empire that might force it to cohere and develop a new identity. They were not on the faultline against the Romans (that was the Rhine River in western Germany, which seeded the Frankish Empire). They have no coastline and there were no major cities lying on the main river, the Elbe, during the era of Viking naval raids (who instead raided Paris via the Seine and seeded the French Empire). Dresden, which does lie on the Elbe, was not a city until the early 2nd millennium, so the Vikings of several centuries earlier ignored the region. There were several bulwarks in the east against invasions from Steppe peoples, namely Lithuania and Russia (both of whom became empires). And any invasion from Anatolia or the Balkans got bogged down before reaching Germany, such as the Byzantine expansion that seeded the Bulgarian Empire, and the Ottoman expansion that seeded the Austrian Empire (including Bohemia and Hungary).

They may have been incorporated into other empires, like the Frankish, but they did not lie on a meta-ethnic faultline with anyone, so they never cohered intensely and never developed a fierce collective identity that they converted into territorial and cultural expansion.

And so, during the Thirty Years' War, Saxony, ruled by the House of Wettin, preferred to play the role of controlled opposition to the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria. Saxony would defend Protestant rights in Protestant lands, but they would remain within the Holy Roman Empire, not challenge Austria / the Habsburgs politically or militarily, not seek foreign policy contrary to them, and in general serve as junior partners to the Austrians, pacifying their fellow Protestants in the north.

This weakness of Saxon identity reached an absurd conclusion by the end of the 1600s, when the leader of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, sought the open spot of being king of Poland / grand duke of Lithuania. As a Protestant, he would be required to convert to Catholicism -- and he did! He made this worse by having his son convert, so that the future rulers of Saxony would be Catholic indefinitely, not a one-off era ruled by an eccentric. He did in fact rule as the leader of Poland-Lithuania, as did his son, after a war of succession -- and then that was it. They had jumped onto a sinking ship, as the Lithuanian Empire was already long in the tooth, impotent, and dominated by Sweden and Russia. Within a century, it would cease to exist altogether, carved up by Russia, Austria, and Prussia -- not by Saxony.

Remember that Poland-Lithuania was not just any ol' Catholic polity -- it was the very meta-ethnic nemesis that caused the expansion of Prussia in the first place. This would be like a southeast Italian leader in the 3rd C. BC deciding that, y'know, why don't I also become leader of the Gauls or the Carthagenians -- not to conquer them, but to accept an open spot at the top of their otherwise intact polity and military -- and having to convert to their culture in order to fulfill the invitation! Or if in America of the 1840s, some back-East governor decided to become the head of Mexico, not to conquer it, and having to convert to Catholicism and speak only Spanish in order to do so! Ridiculous, and a clear sign that the region that he ruled would never lead the entire empire after its integrative civil war.

Instead of weakly-held-together Saxony, it was Brandenburg-Prussia who won the internal struggle among the Protestants during the Thirty Years' War. The Saxon goal of appeasing the Habsburgs in order to be left unmolested lost out in favor of the Prussian goal of consolidation of the north and separation from Austria.

Territorially, Saxony added only Lusatia, while Brandenburg-Prussia gained Farther Pomerania, the Duchy of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Kammin, and Minden. Soon after, Prussia won freedom from Polish vassalage (in 1657), and was more responsible than Saxony for driving out the invading great power of Sweden from the German lands (for instance, by participating in the Scanian War, which Saxony sat out). By 1701 Prussia was elevated into a kingdom, and at the end of the Great Northern War, finalized their possession of much of Swedish Pomerania.

By the mid-1700s, Saxony brought further shame upon itself by siding with the losing French side of the Seven Years' War, while Prussia was a leading member (along with Britain) of the winning side, although there was no change in territory at the end. And from there, Brandenburg-Prussia gradually unified all of modern Germany by 1871, including southern Catholic states like Bavaria. This was only the culmination of several centuries of cohesion and expansion by Prussia -- the struggle for Protestant-led German unification had already been lost by Saxony back in the mid-1600s.

Even during Russian occupation after WWII, and right through the post-Soviet era, the political and cultural capital of eastern Germany -- and Germany as a whole -- has been the Hohenzollern capital of Berlin, not the Wettin capital of Dresden or its cultural center of Leipzig.

* * *

And so, it is no surprise to see that the first reference to Easter Bunnies bringing eggs is from 1682, after the civil war in Germany had concluded, whether that is construed as one including Austria on the internal side or not. At a minimum, it was a struggle among the Protestant powers, which Brandenburg-Prussia won and Saxony lost. But after that was settled, consolidation of the Protestant north of Germany could proceed more or less unhindered by internal contradictions. They had to let bygones be bygones, and develop a new, distinctive Protestant culture in the emerging German Empire -- not only in contrast to Catholic Poland and Lithuania, but their German-speaking cousins in the emerging empire of Catholic Austria.

Far from representing a primordial Teutonic heritage, nor even the cultural status quo of the 1500s at the outset of imperiogenesis, the creations that became the standard throughout Germany were revolutionary inventions to mark the birth of a new people. Not only were they different from Poland, Lithuania, and Austria -- they were starkly different from who they themselves were only a couple centuries earlier, having been tested and transformed by their location along a meta-ethnic frontier with an expanding Other.

A new people need a new culture, and that included both a religious component, like the Lutheran Church, as well as folk rituals like the Easter Bunny and egg hunts to celebrate special holidays like the arrival of spring, not to mention high culture like German classical music (whose seminal early figure, Bach, specifically built up the Lutheran Church's new culture).

Pizza is American (Midwestern), not Italian, not East Coast

Lone food post here as I'm investigating other topics in greater detail. But my comment about Pizza Hut providing a public space back in the good ol' days got me thinking -- what is the role of pizza in American ethnogenesis? I'm really trying to avoid the topic of food for now, but I couldn't help it.

Everyone knows the hamburger is an American invention, and so distinctive of us that foreigners call us "burgers". I already reviewed (perhaps in a comment) that burgers fit the usual pattern of American cultural creation -- belonging to the out-West region (from the Midwest to the West Coast), and taking shape after the Civil War & Reconstruction era.

If either sub-section of the back-East region were the definers of American standards, we would have nationally adopted either fish / seafood or chicken as our national meat, instead of beef (and hamburgers specifically).

But what about pizza, which ranks right up there with hamburgers in defining American tastes? Doesn't that have an Italian name, and wasn't it brought here by immigrants from Italy? Doesn't it stretch back into time immemorial, at least in the Olde Worlde, and we are just the most recent group of people to enjoy this ancient meal?

Not at all -- this is America we're talking about here. But it's really true of every empire, whose expansion accompanies (is driven by) a rise in collective cohesion (asabiya), which has been raised so high by the people finding themselves on a meta-ethnic frontier. In banding together and cohering so intensely, they produce a whole new culture, no longer the culture they used to be before they had been tested and transformed by their engagements with the meta-ethnic Other.

Claims about the invention of pizza go back no earlier than the 1800s, which is not even Early Modern. And because none of the claimants can agree, it means they're mostly making it up, to boost their regional hometown pride. Otherwise everyone would know where it came from, and perhaps even when -- like haggis being Scottish rather than from southern England.

The one specific claim of which individual or which establishment is Raffaele Esposito, who supposedly invented it in 1889 in Naples. If it had an older provenance, no one -- not even a southern Italian -- would have the gall to try and claim personal credit for its invention. So, something like pizza was being made at least by one guy in one city in Italy in the very late 1800s.

But the first pizzeria in America was opened in 1905 (Lombardi's in NYC), and several regional styles were already under way by the 1920s (such as New Haven style). Because pizza was not even widely established in Naples circa 1900 -- having been invented by one guy, or at least being a new trend, just 10 years earlier -- it makes no sense to treat it as an origin, and the American styles as derivatives or carry-overs.

They were contemporaries, or siblings, or peers -- not parents and children. It's just that some of those siblings were growing up in southern Italy, and other siblings were growing up in America (by people genetically related to the former, but becoming culturally assimilated into their new country, like dropping their Romance language).

And much like other forms of sibling rivalry, some siblings excel more than others, are more popular, and so on. Ultimately, by the mid-1900s, American pizza won over its southern Italian sibling. The whole world treats American pizza as the standard, for the unqualified term "pizza", and its former rival has to be qualified with "Neopolitan" or "Sicilian" or whatever. Americans are responsible for spreading pizza around the world by now, not anyone from any region of Italy.

We can go further than that, though, and trace the triumph among varying styles of pizza within America. Neither of the East Coast styles became the standard, and both are closer to the Neopolitan sibling style.

New Haven pizza does not require cheese -- and spiced tomato sauce on a baked flatbread is not pizza. It does not require meat or vegetable toppings of any kind. And the crust is thin, chewy, and easily foldable, similar to New York pizza.

New York pizza does require cheese, and it is spread over most / all of the surface -- unlike Neopolitan pizza, where spaced-apart hunks of mozzarella are treated as a topping rather than a base layer. But it also tends to avoid meat and vegetable toppings. The crust is very thin, chewy, and foldable -- and indeed, that is how it is actually eaten, folded over into what is actually a kind of two-faced sandwich. The mouthfeel is bread on the top of your mouth, bread on your tongue and lower mouth, with the tomato sauce and cheese oozing out of one side like a filling.

It's like a calzone, with some assembly required by the user. Literally nobody else eats pizza that way, and no one bakes the crust to accommodate that form of eating it. This is also why their slices are so huge -- they're meant to be folded in half, so they aren't so unwieldy in the hand, unless you mistakenly eat it like standard pizza (without folding, trying to hold up the entire lower crust with one hand).

Just like their low back rounded vowels that they refuse to give up after a national -- and by now, international -- standard has been settled upon, New York pizza eaters refuse to give up their "calzone with some assembly required" model of pizza. And they refuse to cover it with meat and/or vegetable toppings, preferring it with the base layer of cheese only.

Also in the first half of the 1900s, getting started sometime between the '20s and '40s, came the Chicago style. The timing makes it another sibling of the early period of innovation, not a derivative from another preceding style. Although not quite the national standard, this is much closer to what became the standard, and if any single style is the origin of the standard, it's Chicago style.

It's circular, cut into wedges, has a thick enough and solid enough crust that it doesn't bend or fold much in the hand, the perimeter has a noticeable height to it (helping to grip it), it's more of a deep-dish or pan thickness, and indeed it is baked in a pan (with walls to shape the outer crust upwards) rather than on a totally flat sheet. Most importantly, though, it added whole new categories of key ingredients -- meat and/or vegetable toppings, like pepperoni.

Pepperoni is so necessary for pizza, that it's hardly pizza without pepperoni -- or some other meat in its place, but ideally as close as possible, like Italian sausage, not ground beef (fine for burgers, but totally out of place on a pizza). And vice versa -- Americans almost only eat pepperoni on pizza, not as an all-purpose lunch meat (that would be salami).

The incredible thickness of Chicago pizza must be linked with the appearance of loads of meat & veg toppings, since it can withstand all that extra weight, and the perimeter is walled, so they're less likely to spill off over the side.

You simply can't pile toppings onto New York pizza, given how flimsy the crust is. You could hypothetically pile toppings onto one half of the slice, meant to be the lower side of the eventual calzone, and then leave the other half with no toppings, which would fold over the topping side like a blanket. If toppings were on both halves of the slice, they would spill off of the top half of the calzone when turned upside down to fold over the other half. Toppings on only half of each slice requires too much fussing around when spreading the toppings -- you'd have to slice it first, then spread toppings on half of each slice at a time, instead of spreading the toppings over the whole surface at once, then slicing it.

Similar to Chicago style is Detroit style, invented in the '40s, which is rectangular (and cut rectangularly), but also baked in a pan with high walls, making it deep-dish, the crust is not flimsy, and requiring meat / veg toppings. The only difference is the cheese is spread from edge-to-edge, forming a hard crispy edge of cheese around the perimeter where it's contacting the baking pan. Other than the lack of a familiar un-cheesed perimeter, it's close to the standard.

Quad Cities style, on the Iowa / Illinois border, and invented in the '50s, is another type close to the standard. It has a dense enough crust to support ample toppings, requiring meat (such as sausage), there's an un-cheesed and raised lip of bread around the perimeter, and the only notable difference is the cheese going on top of the sauce and meat, rather than between those layers. It's circular and cut into strips, not wedges.

St. Louis style is similar to the standard as well, only having a much harder and crispier crust, like a cracker, since the dough is unleavened. And so, despite being thin-crust, it's still sturdy enough to carry tons of meat & veg toppings without folding and spilling them. It's circular and cut into strips or squared-off pieces. I can't easily find when it first came out, but the main chain for this style -- Imo's -- was founded in '64, so no later than then.

There is still enough variation in pizza that it can be thin-crust or deep-dish, as long as the crust is strong enough to support lots of toppings. Even Chicago, famous for the deepest-dish style, also has a thin-crust style, but it too is sturdier and piled with toppings, unlike the East Coast and Neopolitan styles.

* * *

To recap -- it's all about the meat (and possibly vegetables). Neopolitan pizza does not require meat toppings, nor do New Haven and the usual New York styles (at most, New York style has some sparse pepperoni, not multiple / piled-high toppings). This transforms what would have otherwise been a mainly bread meal into something with animal protein and fat (some of which renders out into the cheese and sauce -- mmmm). It gives it a savoriness, crispiness, and well-roundedness that would not be there without the meat.

Sicilian style comes somewhat close to this concept, since it often (but not necessarily) includes anchovies -- yes, that's where this strangest of toppings came from. There's nothing more non-standard than putting fish on pizza, even though it is a meat. It's not the right kind, because it wasn't created in the right region of the world for pizza innovation -- the American Midwest. Perhaps related to the Midwest not having tons of seafood available, marking anchovies as suspiciously East Coast -- and by that mere fact, not feasible as an all-American standard.

Neopolitan pizza doesn't even cover most or all of the surface with a single vast expanse of cheese -- even New York pizza manages that!

Claiming that American pizza is merely Neopolitan pizza "with meat / veg toppings", as though it's a slight variation on an existing theme, is like saying a slice of bread with onions, lettuce, and tomato, and ketchup & mustard, is a "hamburger" -- the American hamburger merely adding the beef patty onto the existing, traditional "hamburger" that had no meat at all. Yeah sure. No meat, no burger. No meat -- especially pepperoni -- no pizza. And if there's no meat, it had better be loaded with olives, onions, and other vegetables to make up for it -- not a lack of toppings altogether!

* * *

Having established what makes pizza pizza, and roughly when and where it was invented, let's take a quick tour through the biggest pizza chains today, some of which are internationally dominant, and see where they're from.

Pizza Hut is by far *the* American pizza maker, and it's not from any of the 4 major Midwestern pizza regions -- but Kansas! Even further out West. But still resembling the other Midwestern styles, not the East Coast or southern Italian styles.

It was founded in 1958 by Dan and Frank Carney -- doesn't sound like their ancestors brought a recipe with them from Italy. Pizza is American, anybody can innovate on the basic concept, regardless of where their bloodline traces back to. And of course even with Italians, it isn't their genes that cook the pizzas, since their genes have been there forever, and Neopolitan pizza only showed up around 1890. But even broadening "family background" to mean culture, not genes, pizza is still open to anyone, even if your ancestors were culturally Irish.

Next is Domino's, hailing from Michigan, although not reflecting the Detroit style very much. It's similar to Pizza Hut, but with a less thick crust. Founded in 1960 by two brothers whose last name is Monaghan -- not very Italian, again. They did, however, acquire their first store from Dominick DeVarti, who is of Italian background.

Third by number of US locations is Little Caesars. Perhaps you thought of this chain when reading about the Detroit style, and in fact they were founded in Detroit in 1959, by Mike Ilitch -- a first-gen American whose parents were Macedonian (i.e. southwest Bulgarian). Although they do offer the standard style, they have usually included a Detroit style as well -- Big! Big! Cheese, Pizza by the Foot (some of the best pizza I have ever eaten), Pan! Pan!, etc. Their standard style was good, but their Detroit style rivaled Pizza Hut for deep dish goodness, without the "grease sponge" texture that Pizza Hut was known for. And that crispy caramelized ring of cheese around the perimeter really does add something crunchy and burned-y that standard styles don't have.

Next-biggest chain is Papa John's, founded in southern Indiana (on the border with Louisville, KY), much more recently than the others, in 1984, by John Schnatter -- not an Italian-American. It's in the standard style, with a pronounced lip of dough around the edge, mimicking the look and feel of a deep-dish style (which they do offer separately).

After them is Papa Murphy's -- another non-Italian name -- which hails from all the way out West on the Pacific Coast, originating in a 1995 merger of one store from the Portland area and another from the San Francisco area, now headquartered in Vancouver, WA. They offer a standard array of styles, and their distinction is the take-and-bake model instead of baking them in-store with ovens and equipment that only a specialized pizzeria could afford (you use your own oven and sheet).

The last chain with over 1,000 stores is Marco's, from the Toledo, OH area. It was founded by an Italian immigrant, Pasquale Giammarco, somewhat earlier than Papa John's (1978), but looks pretty similar to it or Domino's. Standard style.

Several rungs below in the ranking is Sbarro, with about 300 locations in America, which is the only East Coast style pizza that most Americans have ever had, due to its staple status in mall food courts. It was founded by immigrants from Naples to New York City, who opened their first pizzeria in 1970 in Brooklyn. It's more likely to have meat toppings, and less flimsy in its crust, than the typical New York slice, but it's still squarely within that style. Even when we were at the all-American food court, at an all-American mall, we could still tell that this was not all-American pizza -- it had to be qualified with "New York style" or whatever.

Americans treat New York pizza like a curious and amusing novelty, not as the ur-form to be revered as sacred -- much like how we treat New York accents (or Southeast accents, for that matter).

Ranking right up there with hamburgers, the most all-American of foods -- pizza -- is not an Italian creation, not something that originated on the East Coast and spread out from there, not something even created by people of Italian genetic or cultural ancestry. The inclusion of meat and/or vegetable toppings, especially the practice of piling on multiple toppings, and the requisite durable crust (thick / deep-dish, or cracker-like thin-crust), marks this as an entirely distinct meal from the flimsy flatbread + tomato sauce + scattered hunks of mozzarella.

It is fundamentally Midwestern American, particularly near the Great Lakes, but extending through the Plains all the way out to the West Coast. And it was invented in the early-to-mid 1900s.

This all lines up with the ethnogenesis of the Americans -- strongest where the frontier with the Indians had been most intense (including the Old Northwest, where Indian Wars were still being fought post-Independence), and taking place after our Civil War & Reconstruction, i.e. from the late 19th C. onward. That determined which Americans were the most American of all Americans, to set a national standard -- those out West, including the Midwest, not those back East.

"Stream Me" (parasocial slow jam, Silk parody)

Getting more into the '90s revival, I got caught on the slow jam "Freak Me" by Silk (lyrics here). I just had to adapt it!

So without further ado, a soulful serenade for all those streamer sisters out there...

Pronunciation guide: the chorus follows the original rhythm closely, and the verses have the same prosody -- four feet of da-DA (sometimes leaving out the first unstressed syllable).

* * *

Stream me, baby
Stream me, baby
Stream me, baby
Stream me, baby

Let me click you up and down
Till your PC pops
Let me fave all your content, baby
Like your one-man bot
Let me boost all the signals
You want me to boost
'Cause online, baby,
I wanna get streamy with you

Don't care if we catch a ban
Your card's so hot we hear the fan
My frame is gonna fill your screen
And we'll be making more than memes
Customize your site controls
And give your mouse the smoothest scroll
I wanna click you up and down
So baby please unmute your sound

Let me click you up and down
Till your PC pops
Let me fave all your content, baby
Like your one-man bot
Let me boost all the signals
You want me to boost
'Cause online, baby,
I wanna get streamy with you

We lead the board, the perfect team
Our bantz so hot you'll priv the stream
Girl, you such a naughty nerd
So shocked it's hard to type more words
Don't want your fine lil' frames to skip
So I'm-a come upgrade your chip
Let me access all your posts
'Cause your content's what I gotta host

Let me click you up and down
Till your PC pops
Let me fave all your content, baby
Like your one-man bot
Let me boost all the signals
You want me to boost
'Cause online, baby,
I wanna get streamy with you

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.

"Virtual Angel" (valentine for Gawr Gura, parody of the Penguins)

To celebrate today, a tribute in the style of duwu-wop. Performing tonight, the group that's got all the sharks' a-swoonin'... The Parasocialiners.

This is technically written in first-person singular, but it's on behalf of the entire fandom, not just one crustacean crooner.

Lyrics here. The original is by the Penguins (here), though below I'm embedding the more dramatic arrangement of the version from Back to the Future. It was also covered by New Edition around that time for The Karate Kid Part II (here). I'm imagining a rendition that combines the lead vocal and instruments of the BTTF one, and the group vocals of the original or the New Edition one (since the BTTF version sadly only has the one voice).

For the sweetest shark in the sea. Muaaa! ^_^

Pronunciation guide: "lols and loli-ness" have the same stressed vowel (as in "all"). To squeeze "virtual" into the space of "Earth," use the rest beat in the line. There are 4 beats, with "ang-" landing on 1 and 3. In the original, beats 2 and 4 are rests, with "Earth" coming in on the off-beat after 2 and 4. So, put "vir-" on beats 2 and 4, with the two quick syllables "tu-al" trailing into the offbeat after. It's a bit more packed than the mellow original, but at least it fits.

* * *

Virtual angel, virtual angel
Will you be mine?
My sharky dear
On and offline
I'm just a noob
A noob whose buff is you

Virtual angel, virtual angel
My heartache unborked
Together so edgy
Ebi and shork
I'm just a noob
A noob whose buff is you

You swam right through, the cathode tube
Uplifting with your lols and loli-ness
I post and I fave, to repay
And be uplifting of your chat, chattiness

Virtual angel, virtual angel
Please be mine
My sharky dear
On and offline
I'm just a noob
A noob whose buff is you

You swam right through, the cathode tube
Uplifting with your lols and loli-ness
I post and I fave, to repay
And be uplifting of your chat, chattiness

Virtual angel, virtual angel
Please be mine
My sharky dear
On and offline
I'm just a noob
A noob whose buff is you

Girls think dreams are real, guys think they compete against reality (childlike vs. grown-up nature)

Well, I wrote a whole 'nother post in the comments section again, but this time it's quite a bit off-topic and something I normally don't write a whole lot about, so figured I'll draw your attention to it here in a new post, if you don't read the comments.

I won't copy-paste it, just link to the first comment in the chain. You can react here or there.

It's the mixture of tones you expect from the most interesting person on the internet -- comical, serious, pop cultural, academic, totally unexpected yet immediately relatable, etc.

And it all started with a little vignette from a vtuber's stream -- aside from their entertainment value, and social-emotional bond, good streamers provide inspiration for discussion. Couldn't have done it without you babes. ^_^