Still not caring about new movies, given their track record, I didn't bother going somewhere to see the Oscars. But curious nevertheless about the award ceremony as a sign of the times, I went over to TMZ and found a nice gallery of red carpet fashion disasters of the past.
We are constantly told how the 1980s were the "decade of excess," but all those claims ever amount to are that people used to grow fuller and longer hair and wear colorful clothes. Flipping through TMZ's look back at over-the-top stupidity on the red carpet, we see the truth that it's almost exclusively a feature of the '90s and 2000s.
Someone should do the same thing for the MTV Video Music Awards, where attendees are given wider freedom to dress however provocatively they want, and where they have less sober preferences. I've only watched a handful of them, but I distinctly remember the 1998 ones where Rose Mcgowan really trashed it up, accompanied by fellow attention whore Marilyn Manson no less.
[Googling...] Hold on, Us Magazine put together a list of the worst VMA looks of all time, and whaddaya know, they're all from the '90s and 2000s, even though the award show began back in 1984. I was too young to be into it at that time, but I do recall seeing much later on Madonna's performance of "Like a Virgin." About the only excessive thing she wore was her "BOY TOY" belt over her wedding dress. Nothing else stands out as attention-whoring about the '80s shows, or even the ones I saw in the early '90s. The first one I recall was sometime in the mid-'90s when uber-skank Courtney Love began lobbing a bunch of junk up at the pre-show hosts just so she'd get noticed. After they invited her up to their set, she made a complete jackass out of herself (she didn't have to try hard).
I didn't think of it earlier, but the appearance and behavior of people at award ceremonies is just another example of the impossibility of sympathy in the culture of the past 15 to 20 years, where everyone strives to wear a kabuki mask rather than look and act like a real human being.
February 28, 2011
February 24, 2011
Looks matter most to young girls, even in a long-term partner
In the comments to the post below about hair, Dahlia and Rob brought up the question of whether male attractiveness is about looks or wealth-and-status or something else.
In just about every popular writing within the broad framework of evolutionary psychology, as well as within the specialist journal articles, the writers always play down how much male looks matter to girls. The only exception is if the female raters are beyond their peak years of reproductive value, which are roughly the later teens and early 20s.
When older women rate, they value looks less and wealth-and-status more. That story fits with what's familiar to readers over the age of 25 or so, and readers don't want to hear something they didn't already believe, so that's the story that gets told the most. No one wants to be reminded of what the mating market was like in middle school, high school, and college.
When it is these younger females who rate, as is the case with just about all studies published in journals (usually undergrad students in Psych 101), virtually nothing matters except for a guy's looks. I thought about collecting examples from a bunch of studies, but because there are so many, I'm just going with the most recent one I read for a seminar. *
The authors wanted to see if females (whose average age was 18.4) preferred the faces of males who had higher testosterone levels, as well as the faces of men who really liked infants. The idea was that they would prefer these guys in different contexts -- the higher-T guys for short-term partners and the infant-loving guys for long-term partners. That hunch was borne out, making a novel contribution and advancing our understanding of bla bla bla bla bla. But when you look at their findings, all of that stuff was overwhelmed by the effect of how good-looking the guy's face was:
Under "short-term mate attractiveness," we see that whether a girl, after looking at a guy's face, rated him as liking children or kind made no significant difference in his value as a short-term mate to her. Although it didn't hurt either. If she perceived him as masculine, that bumped up his short-term mate value. But the strongest factor is whether she found him physically attractive -- the effect size is over 3 times as large, and the p-value 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Well, sure, no big surprise there -- if she's just going to be with him for a brief affair, why bother judging him on anything other than his looks and masculinity?
Here is where most people's painful memories of high school come flooding back. Look at the upper half of the table. Under "long-term mate attractiveness," we see that masculinity drops out as a predictor, and now being kind and liking children make a difference, each about as strong of an influence as the other. So far so good, but then look at the "physically attractive" predictor -- it's more than twice as strong as being kind or liking children, and the p-value is an order of magnitude lower. So even when she is selecting a long-term partner, a college babe is choosing more based on looks than that other stuff.
And it gets better -- compare the strength of the effect of looks in the long-term vs. short-term lists. It's only slightly stronger in the short-term case (0.388 vs. 0.327), and it may not even be a significant difference (they didn't test that idea). So it's not just that "looks matter" in a long-term mate -- that's not so hard to believe -- but that their power is only slightly dampened compared to their force in determining who makes a good Spring Break fling.
I stress that results like these are entirely typical. (Someone in the seminar suggested that the looks variable is so much stronger because it's just a lot easier to tell who's good-looking from faces, whereas kindness and liking children are harder to read from faces. A possibility, but not likely when we see that the "all about looks" interpretation is supported by every single adolescent's own real-life experiences.)
Two interesting questions suggest themselves, although they are never discussed in these articles or newspaper reports or blog commentaries or whatever:
1) Why do looks matter so much to girls when choosing a long-term mate? That would seem to be something good only for short-term mating, where good looks signal good genes that she wants to get for her unborn child and then move on to get some other guy, a fatherly guy with lots of resources, to raise it.
2) Why doesn't anyone talk about these results, or why do people only want to hear the story about male long-term attractiveness being mostly a matter of his wealth and status, not looks?
Going in reverse order, most academics and their audience -- people who read Thinking Books -- were total losers in high school and college. Being plain or ugly, the guys never got much attention and are still bitter and resentful about being overlooked or rejected by "the superficial cheerleader" type -- in reality, any girl he ever had an interest in. If he can just block that part of his life out, then he'll see only the part where wealth and status do matter, namely when looking for women much beyond their peak reproductive value. And since these guys make a decent buck and aren't at the bottom of the status totem pole, it boosts their own self-esteem to think that wealth-and-status is what drives women crazy.
Why do women writers and readers go along with this lie? They may get some slight self-esteem boost, as though they're somewhat embarrassed for having been so caught up in a guy's looks when they were younger. But they can't get that warm of a glow. I think they just want to keep their male age-mates believing what both perceive to be a harmless and even beneficial lie. And not just for selfish reasons, like "Don't let them know how we work!" Rather, if women remind men that, among the females who matter most, looks swamp just about everything else, that could open up old wounds and cause a rise in mistrust or cynicism between the sexes. If everyone pretends that it's all about being a go-getting breadwinner, then men and women get along better.
As for why looks matter so much even in a long-term mate, we know that attractive people are more symmetrical and so probably have "good genes," ones that are better at withstanding the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as we're developing. And this symmetry is heritable, meaning that one person being more symmetrical than another is partly a function of genetic differences between them. If a woman wants the best genes for her child, she'll try to get pregnant by the more symmetrical guy, regardless of whether he sticks around to provide for the kid or not. That's the short-term value of good looks, and it's the only one that people talk about.
But for just about all of human history -- probably everything before men worked in a service economy within industrial capitalism -- being able to do well as a dad involved lots of physical activity. To earn a living, he was a hunter, a herder, a farm-worker, or a wage laborer who worked a lot with his hands and body. He had to physically protect his social circle and perhaps go off to fight others. Plus, playing with children and showing them the ropes of growing up is intensely physical, as any parent knows who's been worn out from chasing their kid around the house or the yard.
So, even in their role as paternal providers, males almost always had to be in good shape and full of energy, hence good genes would benefit him even outside of the one night stand. That's why young girls are so taken by a guy's dreamy looks even in the long-term case -- they want a promising forecast of how able he'll be to hunt, herd, plant, play, and fix stuff up farther on down the line. If he looks busted up now, he won't be able to do any of that stuff later on.
It's only in very recent times in the developed world where being a good provider became possible even if you weren't in good shape and weren't terribly energetic. Just take the customers' orders, don't mouth off to the boss, and you'll get a steady paycheck that can go toward caring for your wife and kids.
It's odd that the solution to the paradox is a standard one in evolutionary psychology -- that we live out-of-touch with the environment that we evolved in, and that we need to pay closer attention to what life was like then and there. You'd think this would make the pattern clearer to see.
* Roney et al (2006). Reading men's faces: women's mate attractiveness judgments track men's testosterone and interest in infants. Proc R Soc B, 273: 2169-75.
In just about every popular writing within the broad framework of evolutionary psychology, as well as within the specialist journal articles, the writers always play down how much male looks matter to girls. The only exception is if the female raters are beyond their peak years of reproductive value, which are roughly the later teens and early 20s.
When older women rate, they value looks less and wealth-and-status more. That story fits with what's familiar to readers over the age of 25 or so, and readers don't want to hear something they didn't already believe, so that's the story that gets told the most. No one wants to be reminded of what the mating market was like in middle school, high school, and college.
When it is these younger females who rate, as is the case with just about all studies published in journals (usually undergrad students in Psych 101), virtually nothing matters except for a guy's looks. I thought about collecting examples from a bunch of studies, but because there are so many, I'm just going with the most recent one I read for a seminar. *
The authors wanted to see if females (whose average age was 18.4) preferred the faces of males who had higher testosterone levels, as well as the faces of men who really liked infants. The idea was that they would prefer these guys in different contexts -- the higher-T guys for short-term partners and the infant-loving guys for long-term partners. That hunch was borne out, making a novel contribution and advancing our understanding of bla bla bla bla bla. But when you look at their findings, all of that stuff was overwhelmed by the effect of how good-looking the guy's face was:
Under "short-term mate attractiveness," we see that whether a girl, after looking at a guy's face, rated him as liking children or kind made no significant difference in his value as a short-term mate to her. Although it didn't hurt either. If she perceived him as masculine, that bumped up his short-term mate value. But the strongest factor is whether she found him physically attractive -- the effect size is over 3 times as large, and the p-value 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Well, sure, no big surprise there -- if she's just going to be with him for a brief affair, why bother judging him on anything other than his looks and masculinity?
Here is where most people's painful memories of high school come flooding back. Look at the upper half of the table. Under "long-term mate attractiveness," we see that masculinity drops out as a predictor, and now being kind and liking children make a difference, each about as strong of an influence as the other. So far so good, but then look at the "physically attractive" predictor -- it's more than twice as strong as being kind or liking children, and the p-value is an order of magnitude lower. So even when she is selecting a long-term partner, a college babe is choosing more based on looks than that other stuff.
And it gets better -- compare the strength of the effect of looks in the long-term vs. short-term lists. It's only slightly stronger in the short-term case (0.388 vs. 0.327), and it may not even be a significant difference (they didn't test that idea). So it's not just that "looks matter" in a long-term mate -- that's not so hard to believe -- but that their power is only slightly dampened compared to their force in determining who makes a good Spring Break fling.
I stress that results like these are entirely typical. (Someone in the seminar suggested that the looks variable is so much stronger because it's just a lot easier to tell who's good-looking from faces, whereas kindness and liking children are harder to read from faces. A possibility, but not likely when we see that the "all about looks" interpretation is supported by every single adolescent's own real-life experiences.)
Two interesting questions suggest themselves, although they are never discussed in these articles or newspaper reports or blog commentaries or whatever:
1) Why do looks matter so much to girls when choosing a long-term mate? That would seem to be something good only for short-term mating, where good looks signal good genes that she wants to get for her unborn child and then move on to get some other guy, a fatherly guy with lots of resources, to raise it.
2) Why doesn't anyone talk about these results, or why do people only want to hear the story about male long-term attractiveness being mostly a matter of his wealth and status, not looks?
Going in reverse order, most academics and their audience -- people who read Thinking Books -- were total losers in high school and college. Being plain or ugly, the guys never got much attention and are still bitter and resentful about being overlooked or rejected by "the superficial cheerleader" type -- in reality, any girl he ever had an interest in. If he can just block that part of his life out, then he'll see only the part where wealth and status do matter, namely when looking for women much beyond their peak reproductive value. And since these guys make a decent buck and aren't at the bottom of the status totem pole, it boosts their own self-esteem to think that wealth-and-status is what drives women crazy.
Why do women writers and readers go along with this lie? They may get some slight self-esteem boost, as though they're somewhat embarrassed for having been so caught up in a guy's looks when they were younger. But they can't get that warm of a glow. I think they just want to keep their male age-mates believing what both perceive to be a harmless and even beneficial lie. And not just for selfish reasons, like "Don't let them know how we work!" Rather, if women remind men that, among the females who matter most, looks swamp just about everything else, that could open up old wounds and cause a rise in mistrust or cynicism between the sexes. If everyone pretends that it's all about being a go-getting breadwinner, then men and women get along better.
As for why looks matter so much even in a long-term mate, we know that attractive people are more symmetrical and so probably have "good genes," ones that are better at withstanding the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as we're developing. And this symmetry is heritable, meaning that one person being more symmetrical than another is partly a function of genetic differences between them. If a woman wants the best genes for her child, she'll try to get pregnant by the more symmetrical guy, regardless of whether he sticks around to provide for the kid or not. That's the short-term value of good looks, and it's the only one that people talk about.
But for just about all of human history -- probably everything before men worked in a service economy within industrial capitalism -- being able to do well as a dad involved lots of physical activity. To earn a living, he was a hunter, a herder, a farm-worker, or a wage laborer who worked a lot with his hands and body. He had to physically protect his social circle and perhaps go off to fight others. Plus, playing with children and showing them the ropes of growing up is intensely physical, as any parent knows who's been worn out from chasing their kid around the house or the yard.
So, even in their role as paternal providers, males almost always had to be in good shape and full of energy, hence good genes would benefit him even outside of the one night stand. That's why young girls are so taken by a guy's dreamy looks even in the long-term case -- they want a promising forecast of how able he'll be to hunt, herd, plant, play, and fix stuff up farther on down the line. If he looks busted up now, he won't be able to do any of that stuff later on.
It's only in very recent times in the developed world where being a good provider became possible even if you weren't in good shape and weren't terribly energetic. Just take the customers' orders, don't mouth off to the boss, and you'll get a steady paycheck that can go toward caring for your wife and kids.
It's odd that the solution to the paradox is a standard one in evolutionary psychology -- that we live out-of-touch with the environment that we evolved in, and that we need to pay closer attention to what life was like then and there. You'd think this would make the pattern clearer to see.
* Roney et al (2006). Reading men's faces: women's mate attractiveness judgments track men's testosterone and interest in infants. Proc R Soc B, 273: 2169-75.
February 23, 2011
What's behind the man-child phenomenon?
Here's a summary from the WSJ on man-children and the women who are annoyed to date them. It's good overall but still needs some corrections.
The author does get the timing right:
But, as with every other social commentator, she doesn't know that this means it reflects the massive decline in violence and general wildness.
It doesn't have to do with more people going to college since the 1980s, which would cause more young males to delay marriage, etc., by an additional four years than if they had not gone to college. That predicts that pre-1980, the minority of males who did go to college would show man-child behavior, but they did not.
The same goes for "our increasingly labyrinthine labor market," which throws up further obstacles and delays for males on their way to establishing their knowledge-economy career. But that predicts that males who aren't going to college and aren't part of the knowledge economy wouldn't turn into man-children. Yet just visit any blue-collar or middle-class area, and you will find just as high a fraction of 20 and 30-something males dithering away their time with their Xbox 360, Spike TV, internet porn, and making runs to 7-11 for subsistence.
Because the shift away from maturing and toward man-childishness cuts across all classes, even if some more than others, all economic arguments are weak at best. The larger social change must be something that has affected all classes. The plummeting rate of violence, drug use, etc., is just such a change: when you perceive a longer life because the world has become less violent, then you delay milestones more than before. And everyone is a lot less subject to physical threats, a lot less drugged out than before.
So, Hymowitz's characterization of today's guy as a "boy rebel" who buys Maxim's "entirely undomesticated" philosophy is off the mark. More like "infantilized." Some dork who never talks to girls and wastes all his time with his frat buddies playing video games is the opposite of an untamed rebel -- he's built his own version of the domestic prison, where he is a happy slave. Truly undomesticated rebels have more or less died off since the decline in violence; indeed that's just another way of phrasing what happened. There are no more Jeff Spicolis in the average American high school, no more smokin' in the boys room, or any of that stuff.
True, the man-child doesn't do what he's told, as far as settling down and starting a family goes, but it's not because he's out roaming wild and loving-and-leaving a series of girls.
Here she comes much closer to what's causing this shift:
Obviously "women moving ahead" in the economy is not it, because that began during the 1970s, yet men of the '70s and '80s didn't let that affect their self-image. Nope, those were two of the most testosterone-charged decades of the past 200 years.
It gets down to their roles as protectors and providers -- and, Hymowitz forgot to mention, as lovers. Those are basically the three jobs that females look to males for: to aggress against someone else for gain or protect his own social circle against this type of aggression coming from outside, to be good provider dads, and to sweep her off her feet and go along with her on a carefree and exciting love adventure.
Since violence and promiscuity have plummeted over the past 20 years, guys' roles as fighters and lovers are not in such high demand as they were before. The only one left is the provider role. In other times and places, being a good provider might have required physical prowess, as when we were hunter-gatherers, or pastoralists tending to herds (and driving away anything or anyone who threatened the herd), or even the typically feminized farmer stooped over yanking weeds out of the ground, but who also had to chop firewood, repair his property, and chase off trespassers.
Making a living by sitting still all day, however, and providing for wife and kids that way doesn't offer much in the way of masculine dignity. As she points out, if a guy is wandering in this kind of existential drift, he might see little else to do but block it out and self-medicate with a beer and a five-hour session of Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer.
At the same time, we should focus on the demand-side and not just the supply-side in the market for males. If females really wanted someone more bold, ambitious, exciting, and manly -- "Where have all the cowboys gone?" -- then why aren't entrepreneurial males stepping in to give them what they want? If this were a temporary mismatch, OK; but it's been a persistent pattern for about two decades now.
In reality, girls themselves have become incredibly boring over this same time period, just as the average guy has, reflecting the decline in violence. As much as they may gripe about it, they want a declawed and neutered husband. Consider by contrast two of the hit singles from the Footloose soundtrack. Bonnie Tyler expresses her desire for a fighter-and-protector male in "Holdin' Out for a Hero," while in "Let's Hear it for the Boy" Deniece Williams easily forgives all of her lover's superficial defects because "what he does, he does so well -- makes me wanna yell!" Those damsel-in-distress and boy-crazy mindsets have all but evaporated by now, though.
With female demand asking only for provider males, then, it's not very likely that they'll end up being supplied with stoic and courageous partners, not in a service-and-knowledge economy at any rate. There are some spots open in that way of making a living that allow a guy to kick ass, lead a team, and so on, but those jobs are the exception.
So this is just a case of people complaining about the unfair trade-offs of real life. If women want more of a manly man, they must accept more infidelity and higher divorce rates. If they want to avoid those, then they must accept that he won't be a cowboy with steel nerves but more of a man-child who wants to provide for the kids and then be left alone to putter around in the den or the video game room.
The author does get the timing right:
For most of us, the cultural habitat of pre-adulthood no longer seems noteworthy. After all, popular culture has been crowded with pre-adults for almost two decades. Hollywood started the affair in the early 1990s with movies like "Singles," "Reality Bites," "Single White Female" and "Swingers." Television soon deepened the relationship, giving us the agreeable company of Monica, Joey, Rachel and Ross; Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer; Carrie, Miranda, et al.
But, as with every other social commentator, she doesn't know that this means it reflects the massive decline in violence and general wildness.
It doesn't have to do with more people going to college since the 1980s, which would cause more young males to delay marriage, etc., by an additional four years than if they had not gone to college. That predicts that pre-1980, the minority of males who did go to college would show man-child behavior, but they did not.
The same goes for "our increasingly labyrinthine labor market," which throws up further obstacles and delays for males on their way to establishing their knowledge-economy career. But that predicts that males who aren't going to college and aren't part of the knowledge economy wouldn't turn into man-children. Yet just visit any blue-collar or middle-class area, and you will find just as high a fraction of 20 and 30-something males dithering away their time with their Xbox 360, Spike TV, internet porn, and making runs to 7-11 for subsistence.
Because the shift away from maturing and toward man-childishness cuts across all classes, even if some more than others, all economic arguments are weak at best. The larger social change must be something that has affected all classes. The plummeting rate of violence, drug use, etc., is just such a change: when you perceive a longer life because the world has become less violent, then you delay milestones more than before. And everyone is a lot less subject to physical threats, a lot less drugged out than before.
So, Hymowitz's characterization of today's guy as a "boy rebel" who buys Maxim's "entirely undomesticated" philosophy is off the mark. More like "infantilized." Some dork who never talks to girls and wastes all his time with his frat buddies playing video games is the opposite of an untamed rebel -- he's built his own version of the domestic prison, where he is a happy slave. Truly undomesticated rebels have more or less died off since the decline in violence; indeed that's just another way of phrasing what happened. There are no more Jeff Spicolis in the average American high school, no more smokin' in the boys room, or any of that stuff.
True, the man-child doesn't do what he's told, as far as settling down and starting a family goes, but it's not because he's out roaming wild and loving-and-leaving a series of girls.
Here she comes much closer to what's causing this shift:
It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Obviously "women moving ahead" in the economy is not it, because that began during the 1970s, yet men of the '70s and '80s didn't let that affect their self-image. Nope, those were two of the most testosterone-charged decades of the past 200 years.
It gets down to their roles as protectors and providers -- and, Hymowitz forgot to mention, as lovers. Those are basically the three jobs that females look to males for: to aggress against someone else for gain or protect his own social circle against this type of aggression coming from outside, to be good provider dads, and to sweep her off her feet and go along with her on a carefree and exciting love adventure.
Since violence and promiscuity have plummeted over the past 20 years, guys' roles as fighters and lovers are not in such high demand as they were before. The only one left is the provider role. In other times and places, being a good provider might have required physical prowess, as when we were hunter-gatherers, or pastoralists tending to herds (and driving away anything or anyone who threatened the herd), or even the typically feminized farmer stooped over yanking weeds out of the ground, but who also had to chop firewood, repair his property, and chase off trespassers.
Making a living by sitting still all day, however, and providing for wife and kids that way doesn't offer much in the way of masculine dignity. As she points out, if a guy is wandering in this kind of existential drift, he might see little else to do but block it out and self-medicate with a beer and a five-hour session of Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer.
At the same time, we should focus on the demand-side and not just the supply-side in the market for males. If females really wanted someone more bold, ambitious, exciting, and manly -- "Where have all the cowboys gone?" -- then why aren't entrepreneurial males stepping in to give them what they want? If this were a temporary mismatch, OK; but it's been a persistent pattern for about two decades now.
In reality, girls themselves have become incredibly boring over this same time period, just as the average guy has, reflecting the decline in violence. As much as they may gripe about it, they want a declawed and neutered husband. Consider by contrast two of the hit singles from the Footloose soundtrack. Bonnie Tyler expresses her desire for a fighter-and-protector male in "Holdin' Out for a Hero," while in "Let's Hear it for the Boy" Deniece Williams easily forgives all of her lover's superficial defects because "what he does, he does so well -- makes me wanna yell!" Those damsel-in-distress and boy-crazy mindsets have all but evaporated by now, though.
With female demand asking only for provider males, then, it's not very likely that they'll end up being supplied with stoic and courageous partners, not in a service-and-knowledge economy at any rate. There are some spots open in that way of making a living that allow a guy to kick ass, lead a team, and so on, but those jobs are the exception.
So this is just a case of people complaining about the unfair trade-offs of real life. If women want more of a manly man, they must accept more infidelity and higher divorce rates. If they want to avoid those, then they must accept that he won't be a cowboy with steel nerves but more of a man-child who wants to provide for the kids and then be left alone to putter around in the den or the video game room.
February 21, 2011
Everything you wanted to know about the purpose of hair
- On the face
Beards are much more popular in safer times than during wild times. When the European homicide rate was two orders of magnitude greater than now, anywhere from the late 14th C. through the early 16th, the aristocracy -- who committed a disproportionate share of all violent crime -- shaved their faces. Fast-forward to the Victorian era, when crime had plummeted so much, and suddenly men look like the wolfman. That's despite the cheaper cost of shaving, since the industrial revolution had already begun. Nowadays lots of guys have extensive facial hair, unlike the '60s through the '80s when at most the average guy -- not a hippie on the periphery -- might have a moustache or sideburns.
Their evolutionary purpose is serve as signals in male-male competition, not courtship of females. Just look at all the boys and men who adorn the walls of females with the greatest reproductive value, roughly ages 15 to 24 -- zero percent have a beard, or even a prominent moustache or goatee. Sideburns at most. This does not reflect female preference for boyish looks -- square-jawed heavy metal singers, athletes, and guy's-guy actors are almost entirely clean-shaven too.
A clean-shaven face shows how healthy the skin is and how symmetrical the face is, whereas a beard obscures both of those features.
Girls will allow a week of stubble, but that's about it. I had a week's worth of hair and that didn't deter a tiny teenage cutie pie from dancing close at '80s night and telling me at the end, ...and now i have to kiss you on the cheekkkk. Women's objections to facial hair are all based on horniness -- they want it to feel better when they kiss. They're more tolerant of beards in a long-term relationship because those are less based on sex, and she is glad that the guy is preventing his sex appeal by growing a beard, lest other females try to poach him or lest he think too much of his looks and make an attempt at cheating.
- On the body
Hair is designed to grow universally in only two places in adults -- under the arms and in the pubic area. Therefore hair anywhere else cannot be strictly better from the point-of-view of natural selection, or everyone would have hairy bodies. Body hair is probably a side-effect of a behavioral strategy that is constrained by a trade-off. Again it seems like it serves as a signal in male-male competition, not courtship of females, for the exact same reasons above about facial hair.
So the current vogue for shaving or mowing down your pubic hair and armpit hair is about as unnatural as you can imagine. (Shaving the chest, etc., doesn't look so weird, since a good fraction of males look like that naturally.)
You'd think this high supply of shaved-down-there reflects a high demand for it, but lots of things that guys and girls do with their appearance is more to stay in fashion than to attract the opposite sex. For example, girls keep their hair way too short, and will often chop a good deal off even after asking a bunch of guys for their opinion, all of whom always say "don't cut it." I know that most younger guys are grossed out by a girl with even semi-natural hair. (By the way, one of greatest English slang words is "furburger" -- with all those repeated "er" syllables, it just sounds funny.)
But do girls really desire a trimmed or shaven lower ab region on guys? Hard to tell from the pictures of guys they like, since those are never fully nude. A couple weeks ago at '80s night, a group of honey bunnies passing by as I was dancing asked me to pull up my shirt and show my belly (I think they did use the word "belly"). Although they began cheering, I'm not sure why -- the mere fact that I was doing it, the look of my stomach, or what. But I don't mess around with the hair around my belly button, so perhaps they'd been longing to see a guy with natural hair there (not that it's copious either).
- On the scalp
There are three very different features that serve as signals for three very different traits, but people tend to ignore some or conflate others. They are:
1) Pigmentation. This is the signal of aging: only if you're into mid-life and beyond do you show decreased pigmentation.
2) Length, fullness, and luster -- how big and shiny it is. This is a signal of current health: if you're sick, your hair stops growing, becomes limp, and dries out. If you're in good shape, it grows longer, fuller, and more lustrous. Current health reflects both your current nutrition, disease burden, etc., but also how good your genes are at protecting against environmental insults. Big, long, lubricated hair is a handicap since all those proteins in the hair and the fatty acids used to oil it could be used for more productive purposes than to make you look purty.
That's why males who specialize more in courtship-of-females than male-male competition tend to have longer hair -- if it were short, the female might unconsciously think he wasn't healthy enough to grow a mane of hair. To the extent that healthy hair is a signal for good genes, females will be impressed by it, whereas male competitors in a guys-only contest will not (they aren't after your good genes like a female on the prowl is). And in physical male-male contests, long hair may be too great of a handicap -- it can be yanked, get in your eyes, etc.
3) Borders within which hair grows. This is a signal of male mating strategy: males whose hair grows more or less fully over their scalp (regardless of length or pigmentation) are more oriented to short-term mating, while those who show baldness are more oriented to long-term mating. The evolutionary function of baldness deserves a post of its own, but a brief review of key facts can't hurt here.
First, only some human populations have a greater-than-zero prevalence of baldness, and even in those groups that do have baldness, only some fraction of men will get it. In contrast, all males in all groups grow old and get sick. Thus, baldness is not a signal of aging (that would be pigmentation -- my grandfather had a full head of hair until he died in his late 80s, although it was white). And also, baldness is not a sign of poor health -- when you get sick, it's not as though your hairline recedes back six inches, and when you recover it shoots back to where it was. Health is indicated by big-and-shiny.
So again, baldness must reflect some kind of behavioral strategy that is subject to trade-offs, or else all males would grow bald, or none would.
Basically, a balding hairline is a guy's honest signal to his long-term mate that he won't be running around with anyone in the future. He's going to settle down and stick with her. How does this work? In the future, when he will be tempted to cheat with a young babe, he will be unable to find any willing partners because younger girls just get weirded out by a bald hairline, especially if he's middle-aged or older. Thus, the balding guy is saying, "Honey dear, don't take my word for it -- do you really think some pretty young thing is going to want to sleep with me if I'm bald?" Unlike cheap talk, this involuntary loss of his hairline is a credible commitment to be with only her. A less-balding or not-at-all-balding guy cannot be counted on so easily.
Notice that because it does not signal poor health, his wife will not interpret his balding as portending ill health later on. And because it is not related to male-male competition, she won't interpret it as a future inability to earn a living and provide for the family. He'll be perfectly healthy and able to hold down a job -- it's just that he won't ever get to sleep around. Baldness is an honest signal of self-domestication.
That's why the European aristocracy used to cover up any baldness by using wigs -- they wanted to stay on the mating market forever -- while the Victorian era and beyond gave us high-status males, bourgeois this time, who were OK with a bald head.
And that's why Australian aborigines don't go bald -- they have a gerontacracy where elder males monopolize women and are on the mating market into old age. Victorian England and the Australian aborigines are just two examples from the entire spectrum, but the rest fills in this way too. Look even at a smaller scale -- far fewer Scottish and Irish men go bald compared to the English. And sure enough, the Celtic groups are more in the rambunctious, fun-loving dirty-old-man direction than the English are.
I think there's even a decade-level change where guys are more likely to go bald during falling-crime times, when they switch to a more long-term and monogamous style. Looking through pictures of guys in their 20s or 30s from the 1960s through the '80s, you hardly see the same level of receding hairlines and baldness that you do among guys of the '90s and especially the 2000s. True nutrition went down the tubes in the past 20 to 30 years, but again that doesn't affect the hairline so much as how long, full, and lustrous the hair is.
Females want it all in a man, but because of trade-offs they must settle for going after this type of guy for this purpose and that type of guy for that purpose. For example, they want a gentle guy as the father of their children, but a more macho guy for a fling. They don't mind, and may even prefer, a balding guy as their long-term husband. But again look at who they want a brief adventure with -- the lead singer of a rock band, an athlete, a dreamy actor, a powerful executive or politician, all have less of a receding hairline than guys who are more suited to being good reliable dads. Just look at the faculty page of any academic department, men who carry their baby in one of those chest-pouches, and so on.
Beards are much more popular in safer times than during wild times. When the European homicide rate was two orders of magnitude greater than now, anywhere from the late 14th C. through the early 16th, the aristocracy -- who committed a disproportionate share of all violent crime -- shaved their faces. Fast-forward to the Victorian era, when crime had plummeted so much, and suddenly men look like the wolfman. That's despite the cheaper cost of shaving, since the industrial revolution had already begun. Nowadays lots of guys have extensive facial hair, unlike the '60s through the '80s when at most the average guy -- not a hippie on the periphery -- might have a moustache or sideburns.
Their evolutionary purpose is serve as signals in male-male competition, not courtship of females. Just look at all the boys and men who adorn the walls of females with the greatest reproductive value, roughly ages 15 to 24 -- zero percent have a beard, or even a prominent moustache or goatee. Sideburns at most. This does not reflect female preference for boyish looks -- square-jawed heavy metal singers, athletes, and guy's-guy actors are almost entirely clean-shaven too.
A clean-shaven face shows how healthy the skin is and how symmetrical the face is, whereas a beard obscures both of those features.
Girls will allow a week of stubble, but that's about it. I had a week's worth of hair and that didn't deter a tiny teenage cutie pie from dancing close at '80s night and telling me at the end, ...and now i have to kiss you on the cheekkkk. Women's objections to facial hair are all based on horniness -- they want it to feel better when they kiss. They're more tolerant of beards in a long-term relationship because those are less based on sex, and she is glad that the guy is preventing his sex appeal by growing a beard, lest other females try to poach him or lest he think too much of his looks and make an attempt at cheating.
- On the body
Hair is designed to grow universally in only two places in adults -- under the arms and in the pubic area. Therefore hair anywhere else cannot be strictly better from the point-of-view of natural selection, or everyone would have hairy bodies. Body hair is probably a side-effect of a behavioral strategy that is constrained by a trade-off. Again it seems like it serves as a signal in male-male competition, not courtship of females, for the exact same reasons above about facial hair.
So the current vogue for shaving or mowing down your pubic hair and armpit hair is about as unnatural as you can imagine. (Shaving the chest, etc., doesn't look so weird, since a good fraction of males look like that naturally.)
You'd think this high supply of shaved-down-there reflects a high demand for it, but lots of things that guys and girls do with their appearance is more to stay in fashion than to attract the opposite sex. For example, girls keep their hair way too short, and will often chop a good deal off even after asking a bunch of guys for their opinion, all of whom always say "don't cut it." I know that most younger guys are grossed out by a girl with even semi-natural hair. (By the way, one of greatest English slang words is "furburger" -- with all those repeated "er" syllables, it just sounds funny.)
But do girls really desire a trimmed or shaven lower ab region on guys? Hard to tell from the pictures of guys they like, since those are never fully nude. A couple weeks ago at '80s night, a group of honey bunnies passing by as I was dancing asked me to pull up my shirt and show my belly (I think they did use the word "belly"). Although they began cheering, I'm not sure why -- the mere fact that I was doing it, the look of my stomach, or what. But I don't mess around with the hair around my belly button, so perhaps they'd been longing to see a guy with natural hair there (not that it's copious either).
- On the scalp
There are three very different features that serve as signals for three very different traits, but people tend to ignore some or conflate others. They are:
1) Pigmentation. This is the signal of aging: only if you're into mid-life and beyond do you show decreased pigmentation.
2) Length, fullness, and luster -- how big and shiny it is. This is a signal of current health: if you're sick, your hair stops growing, becomes limp, and dries out. If you're in good shape, it grows longer, fuller, and more lustrous. Current health reflects both your current nutrition, disease burden, etc., but also how good your genes are at protecting against environmental insults. Big, long, lubricated hair is a handicap since all those proteins in the hair and the fatty acids used to oil it could be used for more productive purposes than to make you look purty.
That's why males who specialize more in courtship-of-females than male-male competition tend to have longer hair -- if it were short, the female might unconsciously think he wasn't healthy enough to grow a mane of hair. To the extent that healthy hair is a signal for good genes, females will be impressed by it, whereas male competitors in a guys-only contest will not (they aren't after your good genes like a female on the prowl is). And in physical male-male contests, long hair may be too great of a handicap -- it can be yanked, get in your eyes, etc.
3) Borders within which hair grows. This is a signal of male mating strategy: males whose hair grows more or less fully over their scalp (regardless of length or pigmentation) are more oriented to short-term mating, while those who show baldness are more oriented to long-term mating. The evolutionary function of baldness deserves a post of its own, but a brief review of key facts can't hurt here.
First, only some human populations have a greater-than-zero prevalence of baldness, and even in those groups that do have baldness, only some fraction of men will get it. In contrast, all males in all groups grow old and get sick. Thus, baldness is not a signal of aging (that would be pigmentation -- my grandfather had a full head of hair until he died in his late 80s, although it was white). And also, baldness is not a sign of poor health -- when you get sick, it's not as though your hairline recedes back six inches, and when you recover it shoots back to where it was. Health is indicated by big-and-shiny.
So again, baldness must reflect some kind of behavioral strategy that is subject to trade-offs, or else all males would grow bald, or none would.
Basically, a balding hairline is a guy's honest signal to his long-term mate that he won't be running around with anyone in the future. He's going to settle down and stick with her. How does this work? In the future, when he will be tempted to cheat with a young babe, he will be unable to find any willing partners because younger girls just get weirded out by a bald hairline, especially if he's middle-aged or older. Thus, the balding guy is saying, "Honey dear, don't take my word for it -- do you really think some pretty young thing is going to want to sleep with me if I'm bald?" Unlike cheap talk, this involuntary loss of his hairline is a credible commitment to be with only her. A less-balding or not-at-all-balding guy cannot be counted on so easily.
Notice that because it does not signal poor health, his wife will not interpret his balding as portending ill health later on. And because it is not related to male-male competition, she won't interpret it as a future inability to earn a living and provide for the family. He'll be perfectly healthy and able to hold down a job -- it's just that he won't ever get to sleep around. Baldness is an honest signal of self-domestication.
That's why the European aristocracy used to cover up any baldness by using wigs -- they wanted to stay on the mating market forever -- while the Victorian era and beyond gave us high-status males, bourgeois this time, who were OK with a bald head.
And that's why Australian aborigines don't go bald -- they have a gerontacracy where elder males monopolize women and are on the mating market into old age. Victorian England and the Australian aborigines are just two examples from the entire spectrum, but the rest fills in this way too. Look even at a smaller scale -- far fewer Scottish and Irish men go bald compared to the English. And sure enough, the Celtic groups are more in the rambunctious, fun-loving dirty-old-man direction than the English are.
I think there's even a decade-level change where guys are more likely to go bald during falling-crime times, when they switch to a more long-term and monogamous style. Looking through pictures of guys in their 20s or 30s from the 1960s through the '80s, you hardly see the same level of receding hairlines and baldness that you do among guys of the '90s and especially the 2000s. True nutrition went down the tubes in the past 20 to 30 years, but again that doesn't affect the hairline so much as how long, full, and lustrous the hair is.
Females want it all in a man, but because of trade-offs they must settle for going after this type of guy for this purpose and that type of guy for that purpose. For example, they want a gentle guy as the father of their children, but a more macho guy for a fling. They don't mind, and may even prefer, a balding guy as their long-term husband. But again look at who they want a brief adventure with -- the lead singer of a rock band, an athlete, a dreamy actor, a powerful executive or politician, all have less of a receding hairline than guys who are more suited to being good reliable dads. Just look at the faculty page of any academic department, men who carry their baby in one of those chest-pouches, and so on.
The share-it-all generation closes the blinds
From the NYT:
We've been hearing forever about how exhibitionistic the Millennials are, but I was never very convinced and have periodically shown why that was wrong. The most obvious fact is that they don't hang out in public spaces like young people used to. Their social lives are more like those of the tupperware party women of the 1950s, not the out-and-about carnivalesque of Woodstock, Studio 54, or the megamall. Second, there is ascertainment bias -- we can only see exhibitionists if the technology for detecting them is any good. In 1968 it was a lot more difficult for preening young people to be seen and heard; just imagine if they had had YouTube back then. And last, as I pointed out awhile ago, the practice of streaking and flashing your boobs at a concert have totally died out. (I'll bet skinnydipping has too, but that's harder to get an impression about.)
This move among young people from more visible websites like a blog to less visible websites like Facebook is just another example of the pattern of their only going into public spaces if there's no alternative, but preferring to keep their thoughts and actions completely private, at most only sharing them with their tiny real-life social circle.
Most of the Baby Boomer observers, who started the rumor about share-it-all Millennials, have no idea how private Facebook has become since 2008 or so. It used to be that anyone could see anyone else's profile, within a very large network that both belonged to, like any two people who listed Boston as their residence or Hill Valley High as their school. Now you can only see someone's profile if you're mutual acquaintances.
Also, the potential for exhibitionism on Facebook is virtually nonexistent these day. Back in the wild, wild west days of Facebook -- up through about 2007 -- teenagers decorated their profiles with all kinds of junk, especially girls. It looked like the wall of their room -- funny phrases and joke pictures, pictures of hot boys and girls, pictures of their role models, still images from their favorite movies or TV shows, and so on. Some of these were added by their close friends, but if they didn't want them up, they could always have taken them down. And for awhile you could embed a video clip on your main profile page.
Now you can't do any of that, and the profile resembles a blog, just one that is only viewable by a small number of known people. There's a really long comment thread in the middle, a list of friends on one side, a list of ads on the other, and some barebones information and a picture at the top. The "all about me" information -- where people blab about what their favorite music, movies, and other interests are, what their brief life story is, and where they put an endless list of quotes (either movie/TV/music quotes or inside jokes) -- has been banished to a separate tab that no one will ever click on.
We can also point to the immediate death of MySpace once Facebook offered a social network site that was at least somewhat closed. The Facebook networks were still very large at first, but they didn't include everybody like MySpace did. Again compare how pimped out the average MySpace profile was compared to the average Facebook profile -- orders of magnitude more bling.
During the euphoria of the peak housing bubble years (say, 2003 to 2006), the otherwise don't-look-at-me Millennials opened up quite a bit and strutted their stuff, but that really was just a blip. I too was blinded by that moment of craziness and took that to be their natural way, but now that the housing bubble party has been over for three years, and also looking back at the late '90s and early 2000s, it's clear that their basic preferences are to not stand out or cause a sensation. At least I got to get close to them when they were still rather outgoing and fun-loving, during my stint as a tutor. And that's what counts, since your memory tends to block out how boring a once-exciting scene eventually became. Sure was fun while it lasted.
Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs.
We've been hearing forever about how exhibitionistic the Millennials are, but I was never very convinced and have periodically shown why that was wrong. The most obvious fact is that they don't hang out in public spaces like young people used to. Their social lives are more like those of the tupperware party women of the 1950s, not the out-and-about carnivalesque of Woodstock, Studio 54, or the megamall. Second, there is ascertainment bias -- we can only see exhibitionists if the technology for detecting them is any good. In 1968 it was a lot more difficult for preening young people to be seen and heard; just imagine if they had had YouTube back then. And last, as I pointed out awhile ago, the practice of streaking and flashing your boobs at a concert have totally died out. (I'll bet skinnydipping has too, but that's harder to get an impression about.)
This move among young people from more visible websites like a blog to less visible websites like Facebook is just another example of the pattern of their only going into public spaces if there's no alternative, but preferring to keep their thoughts and actions completely private, at most only sharing them with their tiny real-life social circle.
Most of the Baby Boomer observers, who started the rumor about share-it-all Millennials, have no idea how private Facebook has become since 2008 or so. It used to be that anyone could see anyone else's profile, within a very large network that both belonged to, like any two people who listed Boston as their residence or Hill Valley High as their school. Now you can only see someone's profile if you're mutual acquaintances.
Also, the potential for exhibitionism on Facebook is virtually nonexistent these day. Back in the wild, wild west days of Facebook -- up through about 2007 -- teenagers decorated their profiles with all kinds of junk, especially girls. It looked like the wall of their room -- funny phrases and joke pictures, pictures of hot boys and girls, pictures of their role models, still images from their favorite movies or TV shows, and so on. Some of these were added by their close friends, but if they didn't want them up, they could always have taken them down. And for awhile you could embed a video clip on your main profile page.
Now you can't do any of that, and the profile resembles a blog, just one that is only viewable by a small number of known people. There's a really long comment thread in the middle, a list of friends on one side, a list of ads on the other, and some barebones information and a picture at the top. The "all about me" information -- where people blab about what their favorite music, movies, and other interests are, what their brief life story is, and where they put an endless list of quotes (either movie/TV/music quotes or inside jokes) -- has been banished to a separate tab that no one will ever click on.
We can also point to the immediate death of MySpace once Facebook offered a social network site that was at least somewhat closed. The Facebook networks were still very large at first, but they didn't include everybody like MySpace did. Again compare how pimped out the average MySpace profile was compared to the average Facebook profile -- orders of magnitude more bling.
During the euphoria of the peak housing bubble years (say, 2003 to 2006), the otherwise don't-look-at-me Millennials opened up quite a bit and strutted their stuff, but that really was just a blip. I too was blinded by that moment of craziness and took that to be their natural way, but now that the housing bubble party has been over for three years, and also looking back at the late '90s and early 2000s, it's clear that their basic preferences are to not stand out or cause a sensation. At least I got to get close to them when they were still rather outgoing and fun-loving, during my stint as a tutor. And that's what counts, since your memory tends to block out how boring a once-exciting scene eventually became. Sure was fun while it lasted.
February 20, 2011
February 17, 2011
Rock songs with a rap section?
When the hit song "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang introduced the average listener to rap music in 1979, rock groups took notice, some of them even working in a rap sound to their own songs. How extensive was this borrowing, though?
I'm not counting rap covers of a rock song, like Run-D.M.C.'s version of "Walk This Way" with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, but original rock songs with some rap element to them. Also, I'm restricting this to rock music, not alternative / emo / indie or nu metal like Korn and the Bloodhound Gang, so like 1992 at the latest.
I can only think of three from browsing stuff that I own, and I'm too lazy right now to rummage through every song in my mental closet to come up with others.
"Rapture" by Blondie (1980)
"Eyes Without a Face" by Billy Idol (1983)
"Calling All Nations" by INXS (1987)
Any others? The first two were big hits, while the third is a good song but never released as a single. So by my admittedly cursory look, it seems that the interest of white rock musicians in rap didn't last much longer than five years.
I'm not counting rap covers of a rock song, like Run-D.M.C.'s version of "Walk This Way" with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, but original rock songs with some rap element to them. Also, I'm restricting this to rock music, not alternative / emo / indie or nu metal like Korn and the Bloodhound Gang, so like 1992 at the latest.
I can only think of three from browsing stuff that I own, and I'm too lazy right now to rummage through every song in my mental closet to come up with others.
"Rapture" by Blondie (1980)
"Eyes Without a Face" by Billy Idol (1983)
"Calling All Nations" by INXS (1987)
Any others? The first two were big hits, while the third is a good song but never released as a single. So by my admittedly cursory look, it seems that the interest of white rock musicians in rap didn't last much longer than five years.
February 16, 2011
Why do we crave carbs when it's cold, and meat when it's warm?
Recently I mentioned that I experimented with a candy bar diet when I got sick and kept from getting worse, even getting better. That was just one episode in a larger trek away from a paleo kind of diet during the winter holidays. I did that last year as well during winter.
I find myself much more likely to want carbs when the weather is really cold, and even if I try to return to a caveman diet, it's incredibly more difficult during the winter than during the spring or summer. For instance, when I had some cupcakes and ice cream at my mother's birthday party a couple summers ago, I bounced right back. In fact, when I first started eating low-carb, it was spring and I took to it without any pain at all.
And it's not just me. We have holidays and festivals scattered throughout the year, yet it's only the ones during cold-weather times when we feel like pigging out on starches and sweets. During hot-weather times, we feel more like feasting on animals and leaving the sweets aside. Most of this is obvious, but if you want to check, just go to Google Trends and search for something like "pie" or "cake" or the generic "sweets," and you'll see that people search the internet for these things much more when the weather is cold and hardly at all when it's warm.
Just to run through the examples, though:
- The first big gorging-on-carbs holiday is Halloween, right at the end of October. It features little or no meat, or even savory vegetables and fresh fruit. Nope, it's all about easily digestible carbs like sugar.
- Then comes Thanksgiving about a month later. Although there is some meat -- it wouldn't be an omnivore's meal without one -- it is dwarfed by the starches and sugars. Out come the buckets of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn pudding, sweet potato casserole, rolls, and then a seemingly endless train of pies. There is little whole fruit, and not even that many real vegetables -- maybe a token tray of asparagus or brussel sprouts at most. This meal extends all the way through Thanksgiving weekend.
- Next is Christmas, where again there is some meat but mostly a repeat of the Thanksgiving style of dinner, which also lasts for a lot longer than just one meal. In Google trends, "candy" shows two spikes -- one leading up to Halloween and one just before Christmas. Throw in all those candied and chocolate-covered nuts that your relatives send you, plus eggnog, hot chocolate, and apple cider, all of which are consumed during winter broadly.
- Among Jews, Hannukah time is full of the same kind of sweets that everybody else eats (cakes, pastries), starches (potato pancakes), plus chocolate gelt.
- New Year's Eve is like Thanksgiving or Christmas without the big hunk of meat, although food comes in smaller portions.
- Super Bowl Sunday features little meat, aside from some wings (and even these are soaked in sugary sauces). It's mostly about pizza, chips, bean dip, nachos, beer, and soda. It's close to a carbo-voric vegan's dream holiday. "Chinese food" shows a spike in Google Trends during the winter holidays, and I'm sure some of that is Super Bowl-related. (Not due to Chinese New Year, since Chinese Americans would never search the internet for "Chinese food.")
- Valentine's Day is all about sugary sweets.
- Mardi Gras has no standard big helping of meat, and like Valentine's Day is mostly about sweet pastries like the king cake, and candy.
So from roughly November through February, we go into carboholic mode. There aren't any big holidays in March, except St. Patrick's Day, although that has no standard food, and to the extent that it does it's carb-loaded alcoholic drinks. Jews celebrate Passover Seder with a fairly savory and fat-and-protein-rich meal. Even all the stuff made with matzo isn't sweet. There may or may not be a Passover cake. I distinctly remember a Seder dinner with my friend in 8th grade, and it was no starch-and-sweets binge like Hannukah.
- Getting into spring, Easter is neither here nor there. On the one hand, kids eat some Peeps and Cadbury creme eggs, but it's only a little bit and probably nothing much more than they would normally be allowed during the weekend. And on the other hand, the most famous tradition is to decorate and eat a bunch of hard-boiled eggs -- no carbs, lots of fat and protein.
- Spring Break features little sugar or starch, and more animal foods. It's a generic beach meal; see July 4th and other summer festivals.
- In May and June, there's Mother's Day and Father's Day. Why don't we buy them really starchy or sugary foods then? If they were held in January, you can bet we'd send them pies, cakes, cupcakes, candied nuts, cookies, pastries, or something. If food is involved at all, we take them out for dinner, and it's no different from your typical nice dinner out.
- Memorial Day weekend has no special foods, but people haven't turned to it as an excuse to binge on sugar like they have with cold-weather holidays. People usually make something like a light version of Fourth of July food.
- July 4th has very little emphasis on sweets for a holiday. There might be some potato salad and ambrosia, but most of what everyone eats is dead animals -- hot dogs and hamburgers especially, but also steaks, lamb chops, pork chops, and anything else you can throw on the grill.
- New England clambakes, where people gorge on animal foods and not much at all on sweets, are held mostly during the middle half of the year. Same with Midwestern fish boils. And also Hawaiian luaus. In general, summer festivals are all about slaughtering a bunch of animals and setting them on fire.
- Going back to Jews, neither Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur features super-starchy or sugary food. Maybe some semi-saccharine fruits for Rosh Hashanah, but no cornucopia of pies, pastries, cakes, etc.
- Labor Day weekend is also like a light version of the Fourth of July. No explosion of pies, cakes, pastries, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, or whatever.
- Finally, Oktoberfest, where it is celebrated, takes place in September-October and is very meat-intensive, along with a handful of starch (and beer), with hardly any sweets.
So from roughly March through October, and especially during the summer, we leave carboholic mode and start to chow down on any animal food we can get our hands on. The only exception is that people eat more ice cream and popsicles during the summer, although even that is dwarfed by all the muffins, brownies, cookies, etc. that we wolf down during cold weather.
Clearly this has nothing to do with the availability of these foods here and now. Sweets are available year-round at the same level, and so is meat, thanks to industrialization, refrigeration, etc. Our tastes therefore reflect what adapted us to earlier environments. It's probably not farming life that made us this way, since they never would have had a huge supply of meat at any time during the year, in contrast to the summertime carnivores that we become. Hunter-gatherer and pastoralist life could have created these tastes since it's easier to hunt down animals in warm weather, and since it's less risky to ritually slaughter one of your livestock for a feast during warm weather when the rest of the herd is feeding well and breeding.
As cold weather sets in, it's like we're trying to fatten ourselves up by gorging on easily digestible carbs, just in case it's a harsh winter. It could be to maintain a reserve of energy that could be burned if we encounter little food, as well as to provide us with insulation against the cold.
By the way, "diet" and "dieting" peak in Google Trends right after we've had Thanksgiving and Christmas carb binges. It is not "caused by" the tradition of New Year's resolutions, which is the effect and not the cause -- we picked that time to make ritual resolutions because that's when we naturally think to ourselves, "Good god, what have I been doing to my body lately?" That's surely one reason why dieting doesn't work -- people try it mostly when they're in carb-munching mode and their insulin is too jacked up to let the fat out of their adipose tissue.
There is no peak for diet or dieting before summer, when supposedly everyone is worried about how they'll look with their shirt off or in a swimsuit. And there's no peak after summer, when people might worry about all the burgers and dogs they ate. Deep down we know that loading up on animals is not unhealthy, and we feel no need to diet then, and so we would never make our resolutions during the summertime. The regeneration of springtime and the new pulse of life of summertime would surely make a good background story for why we're making our resolutions to turn over a new leaf, but we just don't have the need to during these times.
I'm not sure whether the wintertime sugar bomb stems more from our hunter-gatherer or pastoralist past, but my hunch is the latter. It was just not possible for hunter-gatherers to find lots of sugar at any time during the year, whereas pastoralists have always existed alongside settled farmers who had domesticated fruits to taste super-sweet (try a crabapple to see how wild fruit tastes), and they also grew really starchy grains and even sweeteners, though they were still fairly rare. The pastoralists could either have just raided the farmers and stolen these ingredients for sweets, or they could have been part of a trading network where they gave up some of their cheese or butter or animal hairs to the farmers. Either way, this would have to wait until after the autumn harvest, or the farmers would have little to offer the herders.
If the farmers had built even more advanced societies, there might even be specialists who had made cakes, pies, etc., already and that these were traded in exchange for the herders' animal products.
Having told that story, though, it seems like the source of our seasonal fluctuation in preference for sugar vs. meat comes from the historical intertwining of both farmers and herders. Without the products of both groups, there could have been no icing, toffee, ice cream, whipped cream, cheesecake, eggnog, cheese danishes, or a plate of cookies or brownies with milk.
I find myself much more likely to want carbs when the weather is really cold, and even if I try to return to a caveman diet, it's incredibly more difficult during the winter than during the spring or summer. For instance, when I had some cupcakes and ice cream at my mother's birthday party a couple summers ago, I bounced right back. In fact, when I first started eating low-carb, it was spring and I took to it without any pain at all.
And it's not just me. We have holidays and festivals scattered throughout the year, yet it's only the ones during cold-weather times when we feel like pigging out on starches and sweets. During hot-weather times, we feel more like feasting on animals and leaving the sweets aside. Most of this is obvious, but if you want to check, just go to Google Trends and search for something like "pie" or "cake" or the generic "sweets," and you'll see that people search the internet for these things much more when the weather is cold and hardly at all when it's warm.
Just to run through the examples, though:
- The first big gorging-on-carbs holiday is Halloween, right at the end of October. It features little or no meat, or even savory vegetables and fresh fruit. Nope, it's all about easily digestible carbs like sugar.
- Then comes Thanksgiving about a month later. Although there is some meat -- it wouldn't be an omnivore's meal without one -- it is dwarfed by the starches and sugars. Out come the buckets of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, corn pudding, sweet potato casserole, rolls, and then a seemingly endless train of pies. There is little whole fruit, and not even that many real vegetables -- maybe a token tray of asparagus or brussel sprouts at most. This meal extends all the way through Thanksgiving weekend.
- Next is Christmas, where again there is some meat but mostly a repeat of the Thanksgiving style of dinner, which also lasts for a lot longer than just one meal. In Google trends, "candy" shows two spikes -- one leading up to Halloween and one just before Christmas. Throw in all those candied and chocolate-covered nuts that your relatives send you, plus eggnog, hot chocolate, and apple cider, all of which are consumed during winter broadly.
- Among Jews, Hannukah time is full of the same kind of sweets that everybody else eats (cakes, pastries), starches (potato pancakes), plus chocolate gelt.
- New Year's Eve is like Thanksgiving or Christmas without the big hunk of meat, although food comes in smaller portions.
- Super Bowl Sunday features little meat, aside from some wings (and even these are soaked in sugary sauces). It's mostly about pizza, chips, bean dip, nachos, beer, and soda. It's close to a carbo-voric vegan's dream holiday. "Chinese food" shows a spike in Google Trends during the winter holidays, and I'm sure some of that is Super Bowl-related. (Not due to Chinese New Year, since Chinese Americans would never search the internet for "Chinese food.")
- Valentine's Day is all about sugary sweets.
- Mardi Gras has no standard big helping of meat, and like Valentine's Day is mostly about sweet pastries like the king cake, and candy.
So from roughly November through February, we go into carboholic mode. There aren't any big holidays in March, except St. Patrick's Day, although that has no standard food, and to the extent that it does it's carb-loaded alcoholic drinks. Jews celebrate Passover Seder with a fairly savory and fat-and-protein-rich meal. Even all the stuff made with matzo isn't sweet. There may or may not be a Passover cake. I distinctly remember a Seder dinner with my friend in 8th grade, and it was no starch-and-sweets binge like Hannukah.
- Getting into spring, Easter is neither here nor there. On the one hand, kids eat some Peeps and Cadbury creme eggs, but it's only a little bit and probably nothing much more than they would normally be allowed during the weekend. And on the other hand, the most famous tradition is to decorate and eat a bunch of hard-boiled eggs -- no carbs, lots of fat and protein.
- Spring Break features little sugar or starch, and more animal foods. It's a generic beach meal; see July 4th and other summer festivals.
- In May and June, there's Mother's Day and Father's Day. Why don't we buy them really starchy or sugary foods then? If they were held in January, you can bet we'd send them pies, cakes, cupcakes, candied nuts, cookies, pastries, or something. If food is involved at all, we take them out for dinner, and it's no different from your typical nice dinner out.
- Memorial Day weekend has no special foods, but people haven't turned to it as an excuse to binge on sugar like they have with cold-weather holidays. People usually make something like a light version of Fourth of July food.
- July 4th has very little emphasis on sweets for a holiday. There might be some potato salad and ambrosia, but most of what everyone eats is dead animals -- hot dogs and hamburgers especially, but also steaks, lamb chops, pork chops, and anything else you can throw on the grill.
- New England clambakes, where people gorge on animal foods and not much at all on sweets, are held mostly during the middle half of the year. Same with Midwestern fish boils. And also Hawaiian luaus. In general, summer festivals are all about slaughtering a bunch of animals and setting them on fire.
- Going back to Jews, neither Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur features super-starchy or sugary food. Maybe some semi-saccharine fruits for Rosh Hashanah, but no cornucopia of pies, pastries, cakes, etc.
- Labor Day weekend is also like a light version of the Fourth of July. No explosion of pies, cakes, pastries, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, or whatever.
- Finally, Oktoberfest, where it is celebrated, takes place in September-October and is very meat-intensive, along with a handful of starch (and beer), with hardly any sweets.
So from roughly March through October, and especially during the summer, we leave carboholic mode and start to chow down on any animal food we can get our hands on. The only exception is that people eat more ice cream and popsicles during the summer, although even that is dwarfed by all the muffins, brownies, cookies, etc. that we wolf down during cold weather.
Clearly this has nothing to do with the availability of these foods here and now. Sweets are available year-round at the same level, and so is meat, thanks to industrialization, refrigeration, etc. Our tastes therefore reflect what adapted us to earlier environments. It's probably not farming life that made us this way, since they never would have had a huge supply of meat at any time during the year, in contrast to the summertime carnivores that we become. Hunter-gatherer and pastoralist life could have created these tastes since it's easier to hunt down animals in warm weather, and since it's less risky to ritually slaughter one of your livestock for a feast during warm weather when the rest of the herd is feeding well and breeding.
As cold weather sets in, it's like we're trying to fatten ourselves up by gorging on easily digestible carbs, just in case it's a harsh winter. It could be to maintain a reserve of energy that could be burned if we encounter little food, as well as to provide us with insulation against the cold.
By the way, "diet" and "dieting" peak in Google Trends right after we've had Thanksgiving and Christmas carb binges. It is not "caused by" the tradition of New Year's resolutions, which is the effect and not the cause -- we picked that time to make ritual resolutions because that's when we naturally think to ourselves, "Good god, what have I been doing to my body lately?" That's surely one reason why dieting doesn't work -- people try it mostly when they're in carb-munching mode and their insulin is too jacked up to let the fat out of their adipose tissue.
There is no peak for diet or dieting before summer, when supposedly everyone is worried about how they'll look with their shirt off or in a swimsuit. And there's no peak after summer, when people might worry about all the burgers and dogs they ate. Deep down we know that loading up on animals is not unhealthy, and we feel no need to diet then, and so we would never make our resolutions during the summertime. The regeneration of springtime and the new pulse of life of summertime would surely make a good background story for why we're making our resolutions to turn over a new leaf, but we just don't have the need to during these times.
I'm not sure whether the wintertime sugar bomb stems more from our hunter-gatherer or pastoralist past, but my hunch is the latter. It was just not possible for hunter-gatherers to find lots of sugar at any time during the year, whereas pastoralists have always existed alongside settled farmers who had domesticated fruits to taste super-sweet (try a crabapple to see how wild fruit tastes), and they also grew really starchy grains and even sweeteners, though they were still fairly rare. The pastoralists could either have just raided the farmers and stolen these ingredients for sweets, or they could have been part of a trading network where they gave up some of their cheese or butter or animal hairs to the farmers. Either way, this would have to wait until after the autumn harvest, or the farmers would have little to offer the herders.
If the farmers had built even more advanced societies, there might even be specialists who had made cakes, pies, etc., already and that these were traded in exchange for the herders' animal products.
Having told that story, though, it seems like the source of our seasonal fluctuation in preference for sugar vs. meat comes from the historical intertwining of both farmers and herders. Without the products of both groups, there could have been no icing, toffee, ice cream, whipped cream, cheesecake, eggnog, cheese danishes, or a plate of cookies or brownies with milk.
February 14, 2011
Crowd-pleasing music (notes from unpaid fieldwork)
Driving without music playing feels so unnatural. Even if it's just to run some errands for 15 minutes worth of driving, I can't leave without picking up a CD or two for the ride. And for whatever reason, I don't like driving with the car windows up all the way -- it just feels weird. Even when it's cold I leave them open a crack. One, it keeps me more in touch with my surroundings, and more importantly, two, I get to annoy people with the music I'm playing.
Ever since the music culture died during the '90s, the average listener bristles at care-free, feel-good music, as well as more introspective or downer music that is more about vulnerability rather than the trend of the '90s and 2000s of mopey or bitter or outraged music. The culture overall has just become a lot more fake, especially in social relations. People are too afraid or too prudish or too something to show how they feel, whether good or bad. Good-times pictures on Facebook show kabuki faces, not real facial expressions, and bad-times pictures on MySpace show this-is-my-hardest-teen-angst poses.
Naturally then, real music is going to rub these people the wrong way, and there's nothing more satisfying than disturbing someone who needs to lighten the fuck up. As a bonus, if you run into the minority who do appreciate real music, you'll put a big smile on their face, like "Oh thank god someone's still playing some good songs around here!"
It only rarely goes as far as me getting some kind of acknowledgment from the people within earshot, but over the past couple years it has happened quite a few times. Everyone has memories of where they were when they heard a song that carved the memory onto their brain. With such a moribund music culture out there, I now get that feeling based on positive "audience" response when I'm out driving around.
Here is a close to complete list of these episodes. I may be overlooking one here or there, but it's hard to forget those fleeting connecting-with-strangers moments. Obviously this method of detecting what music is crowd-pleasing will have plenty of false negatives, where I'm playing something good and everyone likes it but for whatever reason doesn't send an acknowledging look. However, it won't produce false positives -- if a total stranger is willing to exchange a knowing, appreciate look, that's just the tip of the iceberg of fans of the song, who aren't always going to be so forward.
Actually, first it's worth looking at what never gets a response, no matter how often I've played it in however broad a variety of settings. Rock music from the '60s and early '70s never gets a nod or anything from Baby Boomers who grew up on it, let alone people who heard it much later. It's not that it gets sneers or eye-rolls, as if I were to play Eminem or Korn, but I was surprised at how neutral the reactions always are. This includes any of the Velvet Underground albums, Lou Reed's Transformer album, Rubber Soul by The Beatles, compilation albums by The Beach Boys, The Byrds, and The Searchers, and Electric Warrior and The Slider by T. Rex.
The appraisal of the public seems to be that these are good musicians who did pioneering work, but that perhaps a bit more of their fame that is comfortable to admit out loud is due to their laying the ground for better music groups. It's like how you study a little bit of Pollaiuolo in an art history class before you dig deep into Michelangelo. There seems to be a similar appraisal of New Hollywood movies like The Graduate, which were a nice experimental waking up from a slumber, but that still can't compare to the non-stop excitement once the industry began hitting its stride, here as well, during the mid-1970s and lasting through the early 1990s.
Also, none of the original independent rock ("college rock," "college radio," etc.) ever gets acknowledged. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Camper Van Beethoven, The Replacements, The Dead Milkmen, Echo and the Bunnymen, Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail, etc. The audience for that music was mostly college students who thought of themselves as artistic, non-conformist, bla bla bla -- in other words, they used music almost entirely as a tribal or individual marker of their awesome uniqueness, and hardly at all because they liked the music itself. In typical narcissistic fashion, they and their present-day counterparts have thrown their former idols under the bus and have kept moving on to some other new crop of "obscure bands" to signal their non-mainstreaminess. I used to play a good amount of the "post-punk revival" music from the mid-2000s, but that never got any responses either.
Now on to what has played well, with a remark or two about the episode.
- "Round and Round" by Ratt. Pulling out of the parking lot at the local supermarket. A couple that's in their early-mid 30s and dressed in the long black trench coat look of the '90s hears this and smiles genuinely, like this is what they listened to when they were pubescent or slightly before. "Dang, hardass music used to actually sound hardass," I could hear them thinking to themselves.
- "Lucky Star" by Madonna. Leaving the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. A group of two or three couples in their later 30s through mid 40s is crossing in front, when one woman spontaneously breaks into a dance and strut halfway through crossing.
- "Get Into the Groove" by Madonna. Entering the shopping center parking lot. A group of Gen X-ers is sitting around an outside table, and one woman begins to bounce and pump her arms around. However, I couldn't see her eyes since she had sunglasses on, so it was difficult to tell if she was responding in mockery or not.
- "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis & the News. Pulling into a parking space at the shopping center. I must have been blasting this one so loud that the couple in the pickup just to my right heard it through their closed windows. The woman's face lit up like a little girl whose lost teddy bear turns up out of the blue after weeks of fruitless searching. They were in their late 30s or early 40s.
- "Social Disease" by Bon Jovi. Out for a cruise on a 7 or 8-lane drag. A guy driving along my right side has his windows down just like I do, since it's summer. He looks over and, not wanting to get all gushy or anything, looks back ahead but starts bobbing his head back and forth. He was about 40 and Slippery When Wet must have been his cruising-for-chicks soundtrack when he was in high school. (He still had long hair in the back, and about top-of-the-ear length in front, not a mullet.)
- "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House. I don't have this on CD, but when I saw Adventureland in the theater there was a group of five or six people in their later 30s sitting nearby. When this song comes on, it's set against the background of "summer love" and "summer nights," which is laying it on a bit thick. Still, one guy in the group couldn't help himself and started singing along -- not meta-ironically, but like it was streaming over the radio during the final few twilight weeks of the school year.
- "Children of the Damned" by Iron Maiden. Parking almost in front of an indie coffeeshop, where two groups of people are lounging on the outdoor patio. There's a group of two metalheads, about 35 years old, one of whom shrieks out "Children of the daaaaaaaamned!!!" and smiles when I get out of my car. In general, heavy metal fans are the most loyal, so the chances of this happening are high if you happen to find one, although they are small in total numbers.
- Several songs by Michael Jackson, especially from Bad. I don't have clear memories of any specific episodes here because it's pretty common, although the reactions tend not to be so memorable -- non-toothy smiles, a look over the shoulder, that kind of thing.
- "We Belong" by Pat Benatar. Pulling into the supermarket parking lot. Two guys in their mid-late 30s get out of their car about the same time, and one says "We belong to the night!" in a self-conscious vampire kind of voice.
- "The Ballad of Wendell Scott" by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper. Here's a slight exception to the "college rock doesn't go well" rule, although it was all construction workers, who certainly never heard the song before. They were just glad to hear some fast-paced, yee-haw getaway music during their lunch break.
- "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle. Slowly prowling around the shopping center parking lot, which is packed. Ahead about 30 feet are two Gen X women, like late 30s, walking with their backs to my car. Once one of them recognizes the song, she doesn't just look over her shoulder but spins her entire upper body around and is too transported to a better place to notice that her eyes are bugging out and her jaw has dropped wide open. Then just as soon as she does so, she regains her composure and they resume their stroll. She very willingly lost her virginity to this song over Christmas vacation, 1987, probably as a junior in high school with an older boyfriend who had come home from college.
Her hair is dark grey, and she's still wearing it in one of those shortish '80s hairdos -- not cropped like Madonna or in a bob, more like Sandy Duncan back then. She and the friend are dressed in contemporary yuppie uniforms, though. Looking at someone who was her age and so wrapped up in furthering her career, you'd never suspect that she was such a wild teenager. But that was back when youthful craziness was nearing its peak in the population, so even people who are by inclination more strait-laced were pulled into the larger youth rebellion.
- "Automatic" by Prince. Leaving a popular nearby park. A group of four gay men in their later 30s are passing in front, and one of them breaks into a kind of a shuffle halfway through the crosswalk. He gets really nervous and self-conscious, though, and tries to continue walking normally.
- "My Best Friend's Girl" by The Cars. Slowing down at a stop sign, and a group of pedestrians on the sidewalk (in their 40s) look over and smile a little bit.
- "Mediate" by INXS. Coming to a stop behind a line of cars at a red light. I'm next to the sidewalk, and two women in their late 30s are walking toward one of the main government buildings -- a courthouse or something -- and are in lawyer chick skirt suits. Being lawyers, they're not as cool as the girl who beamed to Belinda Carlisle, but one of them does turn her head over her shoulder and mixes "Hey, I remember that song!" with "Oh god, it's that song again..." Her high school boyfriend must have played Kick as his make-out music (or at least "Need You Tonight," which comes right before this one), and she grew a little tired of it after awhile.
It's odd that every week '80s night is packed with college kids, yet no young people ever respond to the same music outside the club. It seems like it's more of a goof for a good number of the people there, not something they really like deep down. Michael Jackson is different, of course -- everyone knows and likes his songs -- but overall music is not central to their lives.
And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that they didn't hear those songs when they first came out. Kids my age weren't born when "Bohemian Rhapsody" came out, but we heard it from the Wayne's World movie and loved it right away. Anyone who was in fifth grade when that movie came out still holds that as one of their "don't let it end" songs from their childhood, before everything started changing in middle school.
Unfortunately the most positive reactions have been from people who were at least a good five or tens years older than me, which doesn't bode well for finding people to relate to musically even within my age group. Most of your core musical tastes are in place by around 20, so in order to avoid taking indie / alternative / emo seriously (or nu metal, gangsta rap, etc.), you had to have been born before 1975 or so. Born from 1976 through 1985, you might have heard good music on the radio when you were a child, but it probably didn't play much of a role in your adolescence, when music matters much more. Born after 1985, there's nothing good left to hear even in childhood, let alone as a teenager.
Returning to the lack of response from older Baby Boomers, they were adolescents when rock music was still maturing, so they have a decent ear for it but let the peak stage pass them by as they entered their later 20s and 30s. If you were 20 during the mid-'70s when it really gets going, though, rock music of any kind still resonates really well with you. So people born between, roughly, 1955 and 1975 know the score and appreciate just about anything worth appreciating. They're the ones you want to talk to about music. Hopefully some of them are writing things down, since they're the only group that really knows anything. It would be a shame for them to enter their forgetful years in a few decades without having recorded what it was all about for posterity.
Ever since the music culture died during the '90s, the average listener bristles at care-free, feel-good music, as well as more introspective or downer music that is more about vulnerability rather than the trend of the '90s and 2000s of mopey or bitter or outraged music. The culture overall has just become a lot more fake, especially in social relations. People are too afraid or too prudish or too something to show how they feel, whether good or bad. Good-times pictures on Facebook show kabuki faces, not real facial expressions, and bad-times pictures on MySpace show this-is-my-hardest-teen-angst poses.
Naturally then, real music is going to rub these people the wrong way, and there's nothing more satisfying than disturbing someone who needs to lighten the fuck up. As a bonus, if you run into the minority who do appreciate real music, you'll put a big smile on their face, like "Oh thank god someone's still playing some good songs around here!"
It only rarely goes as far as me getting some kind of acknowledgment from the people within earshot, but over the past couple years it has happened quite a few times. Everyone has memories of where they were when they heard a song that carved the memory onto their brain. With such a moribund music culture out there, I now get that feeling based on positive "audience" response when I'm out driving around.
Here is a close to complete list of these episodes. I may be overlooking one here or there, but it's hard to forget those fleeting connecting-with-strangers moments. Obviously this method of detecting what music is crowd-pleasing will have plenty of false negatives, where I'm playing something good and everyone likes it but for whatever reason doesn't send an acknowledging look. However, it won't produce false positives -- if a total stranger is willing to exchange a knowing, appreciate look, that's just the tip of the iceberg of fans of the song, who aren't always going to be so forward.
Actually, first it's worth looking at what never gets a response, no matter how often I've played it in however broad a variety of settings. Rock music from the '60s and early '70s never gets a nod or anything from Baby Boomers who grew up on it, let alone people who heard it much later. It's not that it gets sneers or eye-rolls, as if I were to play Eminem or Korn, but I was surprised at how neutral the reactions always are. This includes any of the Velvet Underground albums, Lou Reed's Transformer album, Rubber Soul by The Beatles, compilation albums by The Beach Boys, The Byrds, and The Searchers, and Electric Warrior and The Slider by T. Rex.
The appraisal of the public seems to be that these are good musicians who did pioneering work, but that perhaps a bit more of their fame that is comfortable to admit out loud is due to their laying the ground for better music groups. It's like how you study a little bit of Pollaiuolo in an art history class before you dig deep into Michelangelo. There seems to be a similar appraisal of New Hollywood movies like The Graduate, which were a nice experimental waking up from a slumber, but that still can't compare to the non-stop excitement once the industry began hitting its stride, here as well, during the mid-1970s and lasting through the early 1990s.
Also, none of the original independent rock ("college rock," "college radio," etc.) ever gets acknowledged. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Camper Van Beethoven, The Replacements, The Dead Milkmen, Echo and the Bunnymen, Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail, etc. The audience for that music was mostly college students who thought of themselves as artistic, non-conformist, bla bla bla -- in other words, they used music almost entirely as a tribal or individual marker of their awesome uniqueness, and hardly at all because they liked the music itself. In typical narcissistic fashion, they and their present-day counterparts have thrown their former idols under the bus and have kept moving on to some other new crop of "obscure bands" to signal their non-mainstreaminess. I used to play a good amount of the "post-punk revival" music from the mid-2000s, but that never got any responses either.
Now on to what has played well, with a remark or two about the episode.
- "Round and Round" by Ratt. Pulling out of the parking lot at the local supermarket. A couple that's in their early-mid 30s and dressed in the long black trench coat look of the '90s hears this and smiles genuinely, like this is what they listened to when they were pubescent or slightly before. "Dang, hardass music used to actually sound hardass," I could hear them thinking to themselves.
- "Lucky Star" by Madonna. Leaving the parking lot of a nearby shopping center. A group of two or three couples in their later 30s through mid 40s is crossing in front, when one woman spontaneously breaks into a dance and strut halfway through crossing.
- "Get Into the Groove" by Madonna. Entering the shopping center parking lot. A group of Gen X-ers is sitting around an outside table, and one woman begins to bounce and pump her arms around. However, I couldn't see her eyes since she had sunglasses on, so it was difficult to tell if she was responding in mockery or not.
- "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis & the News. Pulling into a parking space at the shopping center. I must have been blasting this one so loud that the couple in the pickup just to my right heard it through their closed windows. The woman's face lit up like a little girl whose lost teddy bear turns up out of the blue after weeks of fruitless searching. They were in their late 30s or early 40s.
- "Social Disease" by Bon Jovi. Out for a cruise on a 7 or 8-lane drag. A guy driving along my right side has his windows down just like I do, since it's summer. He looks over and, not wanting to get all gushy or anything, looks back ahead but starts bobbing his head back and forth. He was about 40 and Slippery When Wet must have been his cruising-for-chicks soundtrack when he was in high school. (He still had long hair in the back, and about top-of-the-ear length in front, not a mullet.)
- "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House. I don't have this on CD, but when I saw Adventureland in the theater there was a group of five or six people in their later 30s sitting nearby. When this song comes on, it's set against the background of "summer love" and "summer nights," which is laying it on a bit thick. Still, one guy in the group couldn't help himself and started singing along -- not meta-ironically, but like it was streaming over the radio during the final few twilight weeks of the school year.
- "Children of the Damned" by Iron Maiden. Parking almost in front of an indie coffeeshop, where two groups of people are lounging on the outdoor patio. There's a group of two metalheads, about 35 years old, one of whom shrieks out "Children of the daaaaaaaamned!!!" and smiles when I get out of my car. In general, heavy metal fans are the most loyal, so the chances of this happening are high if you happen to find one, although they are small in total numbers.
- Several songs by Michael Jackson, especially from Bad. I don't have clear memories of any specific episodes here because it's pretty common, although the reactions tend not to be so memorable -- non-toothy smiles, a look over the shoulder, that kind of thing.
- "We Belong" by Pat Benatar. Pulling into the supermarket parking lot. Two guys in their mid-late 30s get out of their car about the same time, and one says "We belong to the night!" in a self-conscious vampire kind of voice.
- "The Ballad of Wendell Scott" by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper. Here's a slight exception to the "college rock doesn't go well" rule, although it was all construction workers, who certainly never heard the song before. They were just glad to hear some fast-paced, yee-haw getaway music during their lunch break.
- "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle. Slowly prowling around the shopping center parking lot, which is packed. Ahead about 30 feet are two Gen X women, like late 30s, walking with their backs to my car. Once one of them recognizes the song, she doesn't just look over her shoulder but spins her entire upper body around and is too transported to a better place to notice that her eyes are bugging out and her jaw has dropped wide open. Then just as soon as she does so, she regains her composure and they resume their stroll. She very willingly lost her virginity to this song over Christmas vacation, 1987, probably as a junior in high school with an older boyfriend who had come home from college.
Her hair is dark grey, and she's still wearing it in one of those shortish '80s hairdos -- not cropped like Madonna or in a bob, more like Sandy Duncan back then. She and the friend are dressed in contemporary yuppie uniforms, though. Looking at someone who was her age and so wrapped up in furthering her career, you'd never suspect that she was such a wild teenager. But that was back when youthful craziness was nearing its peak in the population, so even people who are by inclination more strait-laced were pulled into the larger youth rebellion.
- "Automatic" by Prince. Leaving a popular nearby park. A group of four gay men in their later 30s are passing in front, and one of them breaks into a kind of a shuffle halfway through the crosswalk. He gets really nervous and self-conscious, though, and tries to continue walking normally.
- "My Best Friend's Girl" by The Cars. Slowing down at a stop sign, and a group of pedestrians on the sidewalk (in their 40s) look over and smile a little bit.
- "Mediate" by INXS. Coming to a stop behind a line of cars at a red light. I'm next to the sidewalk, and two women in their late 30s are walking toward one of the main government buildings -- a courthouse or something -- and are in lawyer chick skirt suits. Being lawyers, they're not as cool as the girl who beamed to Belinda Carlisle, but one of them does turn her head over her shoulder and mixes "Hey, I remember that song!" with "Oh god, it's that song again..." Her high school boyfriend must have played Kick as his make-out music (or at least "Need You Tonight," which comes right before this one), and she grew a little tired of it after awhile.
It's odd that every week '80s night is packed with college kids, yet no young people ever respond to the same music outside the club. It seems like it's more of a goof for a good number of the people there, not something they really like deep down. Michael Jackson is different, of course -- everyone knows and likes his songs -- but overall music is not central to their lives.
And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that they didn't hear those songs when they first came out. Kids my age weren't born when "Bohemian Rhapsody" came out, but we heard it from the Wayne's World movie and loved it right away. Anyone who was in fifth grade when that movie came out still holds that as one of their "don't let it end" songs from their childhood, before everything started changing in middle school.
Unfortunately the most positive reactions have been from people who were at least a good five or tens years older than me, which doesn't bode well for finding people to relate to musically even within my age group. Most of your core musical tastes are in place by around 20, so in order to avoid taking indie / alternative / emo seriously (or nu metal, gangsta rap, etc.), you had to have been born before 1975 or so. Born from 1976 through 1985, you might have heard good music on the radio when you were a child, but it probably didn't play much of a role in your adolescence, when music matters much more. Born after 1985, there's nothing good left to hear even in childhood, let alone as a teenager.
Returning to the lack of response from older Baby Boomers, they were adolescents when rock music was still maturing, so they have a decent ear for it but let the peak stage pass them by as they entered their later 20s and 30s. If you were 20 during the mid-'70s when it really gets going, though, rock music of any kind still resonates really well with you. So people born between, roughly, 1955 and 1975 know the score and appreciate just about anything worth appreciating. They're the ones you want to talk to about music. Hopefully some of them are writing things down, since they're the only group that really knows anything. It would be a shame for them to enter their forgetful years in a few decades without having recorded what it was all about for posterity.
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