Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

March 14, 2010

Women and the Academy Awards

In the NY Times, film critic Manohla Dargis is all worked up over Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first women to win the Best Director Oscar: a triumph for feminism!

Dargis is smart enough that she seems vaguely uneasy over the fact that it's a little more complicated than that. (For example, women are on-screen for no more than 2 minutes in "The Hurt Locker.")

The dirty little secret that Dargis can't quite bring herself to mention is that the triumph of her kind of auteur-worshiping film theory that lionizes titans like Orson Welles has lessened appreciation of women as directors, few of whom have the requisite ambitiousness.

For example, the 1988 comedy "Big" was, in retrospect, the first of a long run of good movies starring Tom Hanks, but few could see Penny Marshall (Laverne on Laverne and Shirley) as a Best Director for "Big." On the other hand, if you conceive the role of the film director as less a Beethoven-like giant of self-expression molding his profound artistic statement and more as a presiding coordinator who keeps everybody moving together in the right direction, well, then, sure, Penny Marshall did a bang-up job on "Big."

But there are lots of other demographic oddities when you look through the history of the Oscars. I've pointed out before that no woman has ever been nominated for Best Cinematography. (One reason is that it's very hard for a woman to serve as an apprentice in that craft because the entry-level job is lugging heavy lights up ladders, so upper body strength is a requirement).

Another disparity I've just noticed is the lack of women nominees for Best Score (background music, not songs). Rachel Portman was nominated three times between 1996 and 2000, and in 1996 became the first woman to win. Before her, no woman had been nominated since Ann Ronell in 1945 (at least that's my guess based on first names).

And no woman has been nominated since 2000, so that's 45 men out of the last 45 nominees.

Granted, Best Score is one of those awards where you aren't really certain if the person nominated did the actual work. Randy Newman's uncle Alfred Newman received 45 nominations because he was the head of the music department at his studio and insisted that he get sole credit for all the work done by his staff. And, it's a small and nepotistic business: six Newmans have been nominated. (All male, by the way.)

So, it could well be that an anonymous female staffer actually wrote the music for one or more of the last 45 films nominated for Best Score. The Writer's Guild offers a credit dispute resolution system for ensuring that screenplay nominations go to the people who wrote the largest parts of the script, but I don't believe anything like that exists for scores.

Still, it's a remarkable disparity between the sexes.

Orchestral composition is one of those skills that are so far beyond my talent range that I really have no concept of what is involved, and why men so outnumber women at it. Two centuries ago, from Beethoven onward, composing for orchestra was perhaps the single most lionized of all artistic trades, so it's not surprising that the mystique surrounding it would attract the most ambitious of artists, such as Wagner, and that it would remain an all-male domain.

Yet over the last half century, however, it's dropped off to a niche field. Moreover, film scoring itself isn't on the cutting edge of musical art. It's more of a nice-paying job for musicians who are very highly skilled but lacking in the Beethoven-like ambition to assault Olympus, and instead are willing to subordinate their egos to help punch up the emotional impact of the scene where Jennifer Aniston realizes how much Owen Wilson's dog means to him.

So, the sex disparity in Best Score nominations presumably reflects actual disparities in compositional talent at the far right edge of the musical bell curve.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 9, 2010

Running Amok "My Way"

From the NY Times:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Yeah, it appeals to jerks and losers -- e.g., Sid Vicious's 1978 post-Sex Pistols cover version of "My Way" (video here, and here's Gary Oldman's version from Sid and Nancy).

By the way, Wikipedia asserts: "In the Philippines it was believed that Vicious' version was inspired by deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, where in the first part of the song Vicious attempted to imitate the voice of the late dictator." I suspect this Manila Urban Legend says more about Filipinos' obsession with "My Way" than it does about the late Mr. Vicious, whom I can't imagine had much of an idea who Ferdinand E. Marcos even was.

Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.

Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

There's an old tradition in Southeast Asia of men suddenly "running amok." Wikipedia writes:
Although commonly used in a colloquial and less-violent sense, the phrase is particularly associated with a specific sociopathic culture-bound syndrome in Malaysian culture. In a typical case of running amok, a male who has shown no previous sign of anger or any inclination to violence will acquire a weapon and, in a sudden frenzy, will attempt to kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters. ...

W. W. Skeat wrote in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

A Malay will suddenly and apparently without reason rush into the street armed with a kris or other weapons, and slash and cut at everybody he meets till he is killed. These frenzies were formerly regarded as due to sudden insanity. It is now, however, certain that the typical amok is the result of circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render a Malay desperate and weary of his life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide. The act of running amuck is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some amount of control, as the custom has now died out in the British possessions in the peninsula, the offenders probably objecting to being caught and tried in cold blood.

Always trust content from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 13, 2009

Jody's HBD magnum opus

Commenter Jody sends me his Magnum Opus (or, as he would type it: commenter jody sends me his magnum opus).
steve, been working on this for a long time. not the email itself of course, but the ideas inside. the release of the new call of duty video game encouraged me to send it to you. anything that you read here and like, feel free to use it as your own. no need to credit me. so, let's begin:

THE TRANSITION IS COMPLETE

the transition from music to video games as the primary form of entertainment for young men is complete, as call of duty sets the all-time sales record of 4.7 MILLION copies sold, in ONE SINGLE DAY. generating a whopping $310 million in revenue already, and likely to pass 1 billion in sales within a year, it is so far beyond even the best selling albums in history as to render them nearly trivial. and this is just sales in the US, canada, and UK. not even counting sales worldwide.

as i observed about 8 years ago, men now get excited about major new games, and no longer about major new albums (there aren't any to get excited about anyway). they wait outside the best buy at midnight, not outside the music store. indeed, the music store itself is largely extinct, and television commercials are run which literally portray men in their 20s and 30s returning from the best buy at 1am, unwrapping the game and immediately playing it like drug addicts. which is completely and totally accurate.

it is without hesitation that i say the best mainstream american music is long behind us, and we'll be listening to the 80s and 90s on repeat. teenagers are less interested in making music than they have been since the 50s rock and roll explosion. playing video games and watching movies have appropriated their free time. why learn to play an instrument? that's hard. pick up a controller instead.

i have done lots of amateur research into not only this topic, but the topic of human performance capabilities in general, including how athletes and scientists work. i have come to conclude that there is a powerful effect in operation here that i call the rule of 27. that is to say, almost all musicians, athletes, and math-based academics perform their best work at or around age 27, and then begin to decline until at about age 40, at which point they no longer produce any important work. there are exceptions, but the rule is highly predictive, like any decent, reliable hypothesis in science. for instance, you can wikipedia the birthdates of every major figure in heavy metal, and what you will find is that almost to a man, they produced their best albums between ages 26 and 29, many hitting the rule of 27 almost exactly. for instance, james hetfield, born in 1963:

1983 age 20 kill 'em all
1984 age 21 ride the lightning
1986 age 23 master of puppets
1988 age 25 and justice for all
1991 age 28 metallica

-30 year old transition point, beginning of natural decline for all professionals in fields with intense demands on mental and physical faculties, and the limit at which most musicians can still write major works-

1996 age 33 load
1997 age 34 reload

-40 year old barrier, the point at which almost no musicians can produce anything worth listening to anymore-

2003 age 40 saint anger
2008 age 45 death magnetic

Okay, but how about Verdi coming out of retirement to debut Otello at 76 and Falstaff at 79? Granted, they aren't Master of Puppets, but some people like them.

Beethoven's Great Leap Forward, the 3rd Symphony, came when he was 33, and he stayed great through his death at 56 (?), although he had a dry spell in his 40s. Presumably, classical composing just takes longer to get really, really good at.
it is likewise in NBA basketball, of which i am a fairly big fan. dirk nowitzki had the best season of his career when he was 27, as do most basketball players. by the time he won the NBA MVP at age 29 he was already out of his peak and scoring less points per game. kobe bryant had the best game of career on january 22 2006, when he scored 81 points by himself on the toronto raptors. he was...exactly 27 years old. he's actually been in decline since the 2007 season. he's still in his prime, but he's already out of his peak. the general peak performance years of many athletes in many sports can be predicted reliably in a similar manner. simply add 27 to the year of birth and you will see that lebron james, for instance, at age 24, will continue to improve for the next 3 years. this does not work in every sport, for instance in boxing, where boxers are at their peak in their 30s, and track, where distance runners are also at their peak in their 30s. but it is predictive for many sports. there are more sports that it predicts for than sports it doesn't predict for. it works for swimming, where michael phelps will continue to get even faster for the next 3 years, as he is the same age as lebron james.

now you may be asking, how does the rule of 27 apply, in general, to the decline of american music, if we have already established that the rise of a mature video game industry is the primary culprit, as video games, and not making music, are what is sucking up all the free time of young men. millions of man-hours per year, in fact, have been diverted from learning and playing instruments into learning and playing video games.

the answer is, the rule of 27 dovetails with the development of reliable birth control medicine. reliable and effective birth control, which became widespread around 1965, greatly reduced the birthrate in the US. after 1965, people started having less and less kids. in addition to many other major effects on society, this naturally reduces the future talent pool for any activity or endeavor, and it is no different with mainstream music. we now use the rule of 27, and the year 1965, to describe trends in american music:

1973: right at the beginning of a major era of rock music, due naturally to the 1973 - 27 = 1946, or first year of the baby boom. many major musicians are in their prime here. indeed, all of the 70s can be viewed as the decade that the baby boomers were in their 20s, beginning an era of the production of a MASSIVE amount of pop music that would continue into the 90s. led zeppelin, pink floyd, eagles, rolling stones, elton john, boston, neil diamond, the who, the bee gees, queen, barbara streisand, aerosmith, eric clapton, fleetwood mac, barry manilow, black sabbath.

1981: the rise of punk and new wave, such as the clash, duran duran, and the cars. this is the 50s generation, 1981 - 27 = 1954. the 50s, long considered by some as the greatest era of american life, produces what is, in my opinion, the peak decade of american music. michael jackson, bruce springsteen, van halen, billy joel, madonna, prince, journey, stevie wonder, john mellencamp, tom petty, and whitney houston are in their prime. the world contributes AC/DC, the police, genesis, judas priest, iron maiden, and ozzy osbourne finds randy rhoads (born 1956 so 1956 + 27 = 1983, so he died 2 years before his peak but still delivered music in his prime, 1980 and 1981). phil collins and peter gabriel emerge from genesis. rush releases their best record, as geddy lee is...exactly 27 years old when moving pictures is written.

1988: the emergence of hair metal and thrash, the development of rap, the first musical output of people born in the 60s or 1988 - 27 = 1961. guns n roses, run DMC, bon jovi, bryan adams, metallica, public enemy, michael bolton, the beastie boys, U2, motley crue, NWA, def leppard. larry mullen, the primary force behind U2 and the band's founder, is born in exactly 1961. 26 years later he releases the joshua tree, U2's most important album. NWA releases the first recognizable gangster rap album, straight outta compton, in 1988.

1992: the lollapalooza era, and D-day for american music. the last time there was a recognizable musical climate or a dominant american music. the effects of widespread adoption of birth control begin here. 1965 + 27 = 1992. after 1992, the talent pool of american musicians in their prime begins to decline as every year after 1965, people were having less and less baby making sex. pearl jam, snoop dogg, nirvana, luther vandross, soundgarden, ice cube, smashing pumpkins, pantera, boys ii men, stone temple pilots, janet jackson, red hot chili peppers. dimebag darrell's parents conceive him in 1965, he goes on to become perhaps the last great american guitar player. at his funeral in 2005, eddie van halen shows up and puts his yellow frankenstein stratocaster in the coffin, to be forever buried with dime. kurt cobain, born in 1967, does not reach his peak, as he kills himself at age 27 instead of writing an album.

1997: the decline begins as the birth control of the late 60s exerts it's first effects. the first musicians born in 1970 hit their peak, 1970 + 27, but it is a lower peak than musicians born in decades before, as there are simply less people in the talent pool now. this is EXACTLY the year that american music began a recognizable decline. MTV flipped deliberately to showing reality television and rap, and the FCC deregulated FM radio, which was quickly turned into a medium for pumping out a corporate playlist. garth brooks, mariah carey, dave matthews band, celine dion, korn, shania twain, kenny g, tupac, matchbox 20, backstreet boys, tool, r kelly, britney spears, jay-z, dixie chicks, n sync, eminem, creed.

fast forward to today. it is 2009. that means that the musicians in their prime today were born in 2009 - 27 = 1982. so, if we want to know who they are, all we have to do is think about who was having baby making sex in 1982. and we find that it is generally rural whites and urban blacks. urban and suburban whites stopped having baby making sex in the 70s, reducing their family size to 2, and leaving the big families to southern whites and black americans in cities. in fact, urban and suburban whites have reduced their family size even further in this decade, down to 1. so there will never, EVER be anything like lollapalooza again, which, reduced to it's most basic description, was simply a meeting of suburban white guys and their guitars. this demographic group, the main creative force in the world, long ago put down their guitars and drum sticks in favor of keyboards, game controllers, and movie cameras.

the predictive value of the rule of 27 is in full effect. most american musicians today are:

1) rural white americans, who have developed the american country music industry into one of the dominant forces in american music. indeed, according to my research with soundscan, something like 60%, maybe even 70% of white american musicians who deliver top 20 debuts on the billboard top 200 are southern whites. even modern rock music today is written primarily by southerners. there hasn't been a major new white american rock band in a LONG time. nickelback, the most recent band to elevate itself to an international act, is canadian. rock music appears to be very, VERY over. it is actually white american WOMEN who seem to be more interested in making music, and primarily pop music at that. lady gaga, taylor swift, and miley cyrus are the most prominent white american musicians releasing new, career defining material right now. this seems natural, as women are less interested in video games, and would maintain interest in music.

2) urban and suburban black americans, who used to participate in all forms of music, but who have now limited themselves almost completely to rap and r&b. unfortunately, their output has become less musical and less listenable due to this shift. there used to be a vibrance and an easy listening, catchy joy to the best material from black american musicians. at their best, black jazz, motown, disco, and 80s pop music were fun. but that time is long gone. most black american musicians today deliver sounds that are abrasive and hard to listen to. darius rucker is the only prominent black american musician who plays rock or country music anymore. in fact, aside from alicia keys (who is genetically almost completely white) and john legend, there are few major black american musicians who even play any instrument.

In baseball, 27 has long been recognized as the peak age, although it may have gone up a year or two due to better conditioning and surgery. Generally, famous baseball players are in decline. In fact, overall, the vast majority of celebrities are in the decline phase of their careers. They don't become celebrities until they are close to their peaks, but their are lots of ways to stay a celebrity without being close to your peak.

Age 27 seems to be roughly the peak year for a number of different careers that emphasize youthful manhood and individual skill.

One of the big advantages the British Invasion rock bands had was that they became stars very young, well before peaks, and thus kept getting better while they were in the spotlight.

Other fields have much different age profiles: for example, there are extremely few 27 year old NFL head coaches who win the Super Bowl. It would be interesting to know, however, how a first rate coach would do as a 27-year-old. Being a football coach is like being an architect: they don't entrust you with anything big until you've been around awhile.

Being a coach is a more intellectually demanding job than being a player -- you have to know more stuff -- so, it would seem natural that the peak age for being a coach is later than for a player, but we don't really know that that's true. One problem is that we have better means for selecting good players than good coaches, because the coach's influence is misted over by questions about the quality of players. It takes a number of seasons to get a sense how good a coach is.

You could look at public high school coaches who are not supposed to recruit to get some objective measure of peak age for football coaching. Still, I recall reading about some amazing coach at a small town in Kansas who has been winning for 40 years, and I got the impression that people were moving to that little town just so their sons could be coached by this guy.

Even with high school coaches, differences in player quality make a huge deal. For example, at my old high school, two years after I graduated, they hired a very young coach in 1978, Kevin Rooney, who was around age 27. Over the years, he became more and more successful, winning his first SoCal championship in 1994, with Chris Sailer kicking seven 50+ field goals. After that, he started getting players like Justin Fargas (now with the Oakland Raiders) and all these other great kickers, and it's been easier for him to stay on top. For example, the 14-year-old quarterback on his school's freshman team is already 6'5" and his parents drive him 40 miles from Claremont everyday to go to the high school where the last two quarterbacks have earned scholarships to USC and Notre Dame. So, it's hard to tell if Rooney's really a better coach now than when he first got the job, or if the rest of the world has just woken up to how good he is.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 8, 2009

November 9, 1989

Dennis Dutton's Arts & Letters Daily has a heap o' links, and Ross Douthat has a good column.

Let's party like it's 1989 with songs about the Berlin Wall:

David Bowie: Heroes, 1977: Video / Lyrics (and here's a terrific live version video, supposedly from a show in Berlin in 2002; it doesn't have as much of the great Robert Fripp wall-of-sound of the studio version, but Bowie looks like a million bucks at age 55, kind of like how Cary Grant reached his peak at the same age in North by Northwest).

Sex Pistols: Holidays in the Sun, 1977: Video / Lyrics ("It's guys like me they'd shoot first")

Jesus Jones: Right Here, Right Now, 1990: Video / Lyrics

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 17, 2009

Pandora

A few years ago, I tried out Pandora, the "Music Genome Project" for Internet radio. You tell them a song you like, and they stream over the Internet to you other songs that share similar musical elements, as rated by their staff of professional musicians for about 250 factors. It's not a recommendation system where people who share your tastes tell you what they like, it's based on the actual musical content of the songs.

I found it worked pretty well. But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn't a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music. I sent in an email pointing this out, and got a detailed apology from Pandora's CEO, suggesting to me that maybe the boss had too much time on his hands to write to his customers (who weren't paying him, anyway).

So, I'm glad that they've survived financially. Now, there's a long article in the NYT Magazine, "The Song Decoders" by Rob Walker, about how Pandora works:
[CEO Paul] Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice. (When I ran Bob Lefsetz’s dismissal of Pandora by him [for responding to a Jackson Browne song with a Journey song], he laughed it off, and transitioned to arguing that Journey is, actually, a great band.)

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

When I started up Pandora again for the first time in years, it remembered all the songs I had entered years before and set up "radio stations" based on each one. Here are some examples of what it came up with in response to my suggestions from the 1975-1990 era. Keep in mind that Pandora doesn't seem to play songs in order of similarity to the source song. It just picks a bunch of songs that are kind of like the one you chose and then it shuffles them. So, each time you return, it offers you somewhat different songs.

Something I hadn't expected was that Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes. Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy. I'm not saying that's what people of my generation like that actually liked, just that it would make sense.

Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven's autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy / Sandhurst man.

So, it's no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby's, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.

- Steve's Pick: Death or Glory - The Clash ("But I believe in this and it's been tested by research" -- What better lyrics to try out Pandora upon?)
- Pandora's #1 response: Queen Bitch - David Bowie
A very Lou Reed-like electric guitar riff rocker. I guess it points out the influence of Reed on The Clash as well as on Bowie. Still, the Bowie song is missing the inspiring masculine militarism of Death or Glory. Ultimately, David Bowie and Joe Strummer are different personalities and will appeal to different listeners.
- Pandora #2: Career Opportunities - The Clash
Well, that wasn't too much of a stretch! But it does raise the issue that Career Opportunities isn't quite as good as Death or Glory. The Clash had already done a bunch of songs like Career Opportunities, and they weren't putting more basic punk rock songs like that on their London Calling album. Death or Glory, as the title suggests, was intended to top their earlier stuff, or go down in flames.

- Steve: Story of My Life - Social Distortion (Scots-Irish-American roots rock anthem, both self-pitying and uplifting, much like Death or Glory)
- Pandora #1: Death or Glory - Social Distortion
I guess I should have seen this one coming!
- Pandora #2. Sunday Morning Coming Down - Me First & the Gimme Gimmes
A Scots-Irish rock cover of the fine Kris Kristoffersen song made famous by Johnny Cash -- I'd never heard of the band but I liked it a lot.

- S: The Great Curve - Talking Heads (from their Afrobeat groove era when they had 9 musicians)
- P1: Waiting for the Roar - Fastway
Pretty good AC-DCish metal, but not at all like Remain in Light-era Talking Heads.
- P2: Misfit Love - Queens of the Stone Age
This is a grunge groove song that has some similar elements to the Talking Heads song, but is much heavier and less lilting.

- S: In Between Days - The Cure
- P1: A Night Like This - The Cure
For English heterosexual foppish romanticism, you can't beat The Cure. On the other hand, once again, while A Night Like This resembles In Between Days, it isn't as good.
- P7: I Melt With You - Modern English
This has always struck me as the closest predecessor to In Between Days. Perhaps Pandora isn't set up so that the closest match is the first song played?

- S: Heroes - David Bowie (with Brian Eno)
- P1: Space Oddity - David Bowie
I suppose there's some underlying chord structure similarity, but the gestalt is radically different between the acoustic guitar Space Oddity and the shimmering Wall of Synths of Heroes, but then Heroes is a pretty unique artifact. Offhand, I can't think of any songs that Heroes is like. (Holidays in the Sun is also about the Berlin Wall, but not very close musically).
- P2: Bad Girls - Don Felder (of The Eagles)
Nah ...
- P4: More Than This - Roxy Music
Great languid song, although I'd probably put it on my In Between Days Fop Rock station (see above). One thing you learn as you see songs show up on one of your stations that you think are more like the source song for a different station is how related all your songs are. For example, on my Veronica station below, Pandora played a song I had never heard before, Shut Your Eyes by the Shout Out Louds, which sounds just like a more straight-ahead, less shimmering version of In Between Days.

- S: Revolution Rock - Clash (joyous reggae)
- P: Too Late to Turn Back Now - Don Carlos (happy reggae cover of the soul song by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose)
Good choice. This is the kind of thing I would never find by myself.

- S: Genius of Love - Tom-Tom Club (offshoot of Talking Heads)
A fun dance song
- P1: Mystereality - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
Nah
- P2: Space Is Deep - Hawkwind
Nah

- S: Veronica - Elvis Costello (w/Paul McCartney)
- P: Takin' Me Back - Cheap Trick
I was a big Cheap Trick fan in the 1970s, so this is a pretty good call. Most of the recommendations on this channel are conventional rock songs, but lack the expertise that McCartney brought to Costello in 1988. (I've always thought that the dyspeptic Costello was McCartney's best possible replacement for John Lennon in terms of pushing McCartney to repress his kitschy side. If McCartney had teamed up with Costello in 1978 right after Costello's first album, who knows how good they could have been together.)

I think that's a basic problem that you can't get around in Pandora: if you like a song not so much because of the style but because it's an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn't as good as a recommendation site.

Overall, I think the above examples are a little unfair to Pandora, since there isn't a notable dropoff in correlations as the songs go on. Possibly they randomly mix the order of the songs in terms of similarity so that listeners don't get progressively more displeased as they go.

It would be interesting to use Pandora's remarkable database for scholarly purposes. For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own "school" of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I've always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you'd heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 1, 2009

Anti-Disgrace

One reader commented upon my review of Disgrace, the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Nobel-winning novel with John Malkovich as a South African literature professor and aging Don Juan who retires in disgrace to the countryside to write an opera about the Italian adventures of Lord Byron, author of Don Juan:
"OK, that was the most depressing movie review I've ever read."

So, let me recount a happier story.

Coetzee almost certainly found some inspiration for the main character in Disgrace, David Lurie, the Cape Town Casanova, a literature professor who wants to write an opera about a a great lover, in the amusing career of Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), a rogue who constantly found himself banished in disgrace, only to re-emerge triumphant in a new city. But Da Ponte's life is much too upbeat a story for a man of Coetzee's misanthropic temperament to cite directly. So, Lurie lives out the miserable inverse of Da Ponte's absurdly buoyant life story.

Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano, son of a Jewish tanner in a ghetto in the Republic of Venice. Da Ponte converted to Roman Catholicism and took the name of the bishop who baptized him at age 14. He was ordained a Catholic priest, but, even by 18th Century Venetian standards, Father Da Ponte's piety was suspect: he hung out with Casanova, had three children by a lady of dubious virtue, and opened a brothel. The pimp priest was banished in disgrace from Venice.

He arrived in Vienna and talked himself into the job of royal Poet to the Theaters. He struck up a working relationship with Mozart, and wrote the librettos for The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, and Don Giovanni. (Casanova appears to have offered suggestions to his old friend Da Ponte for this last and greatest effort with Mozart). Although we don't know much about the inner workings of their collaboration, it appears that da Ponte had the good sense to let Mozart take the lead.

With the deaths of Mozart and the Emperor, Da Ponte's popularity in Vienna waned, especially after running off with another man's wife. He wound up in London, where he may or may not have married a Jewish lady with whom he had five children. They presented themselves as Anglicans. Da Ponte went broke in England. To stay out of debtor's prison, he fled to the new American republic, where he went into the grocery business.

But, even in old age in provincial America, he still had a knack for making friends who were culturally influential. Granted, Clement Moore was a less glittering figure than Casanova or Mozart, but the author of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" (which codified the American Santa Clause) got the 76-year-old Da Ponte the job of Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia. Da Ponte is sometimes said to have been Columbia's first Jewish professor and its first professor who had been a Catholic priest. He was definitely the last Columbia professor to share in the creation of Don Giovanni.

He was a popular and influential figure, introducing New Yorkers to the glories of Dante and Rossini. At 79, Da Ponte became an American citizen, and at 85 he was instrumental in the construction of the first dedicated opera house in the U.S.

Although the dying Don Giovanni, like Coetzee's David Lurie at his sexual harassment hearing, had refused to repent, Da Ponte was more prudent. A 1957 Time review of a Da Ponte biography says:
Da Ponte died in 1838 at 89 and his passing was a grand operatic spectacle: with his magnificent head upon a sea of pillows, he lavishly blessed a weeping troupe of opera singers who knelt around his bed. At the very last moment he summoned a Roman Catholic priest, who received the old Jewish-Catholic-Anglican back into the fold.

He was given a huge Catholic funeral at old St. Patrick's Cathedral.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 16, 2009

My Taki column on country music

My Wednesday column on Taki's Magazine is up. It's a reflection on the permanent features of country music that you notice from an HBD-aware perspective:

Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard’s Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new.

A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I’m talking about when it comes to music is a certain knack for seeing the forest through the trees.

From that 30,000-foot perspective, the answer to what’s new in country turned out to be (as with most genres of popular music in the last couple of decades): not much.

Indeed, what seems odd for an old fogey like me is how much a country radio station these days sounds like a mainstream FM rock station in the 1970s. ...

When we lived in Chicago, my wife used to take guitar classes from the alternative country singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, who would fulminate amusingly to his students at the Old Town School of Folk Music about the indignities he’d had to put up with as a songwriter in Nashville. As Fulks phrased it in a song about Nashville with a title that’s NSFW:

Hey, this ain’t country-western!
It’s just soft-rock feminist crap!

Read it at Taki's and comment about it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 6, 2009

Once you get the joke ...

... the many articles over the last 20 years like this new one in Slate are pretty unintentionally funny:
Does this Purple Mink Make Me Look Gay?
The rise of no homo and the changing face of hip-hop homophobia
By Jonah Weiner

I particularly like the picture of Kanye West trying to look tough.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 5, 2009

WWTDD on the Michael Jackson Memorial

The Washington Post reports:

Like a modern-day Willy Wonka tale, more than 1.6 million fans waited to learn Sunday whether they were among the lucky few to win access to Michael Jackson's memorial service Tuesday at Staples Center.

On Sunday evening, fans around the world started posting Twitter messages about receiving tickets.

"OMG OMG OMG OMG i got tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial service!!!"

A few days ago, What Would Tyler Durden Do had a Kornbluthian suggestion about what to do with the lucky winners:
If LA wants to clean itself up, they should wait for all 30,000 people to show up and then just lock the doors. It’s not gonna be the team behind the Large Hadron Collider. It’s gonna be Billy Bush and Mary Hart and Joe Jackson and 800 lawyers and an army of delusional retards who the only thing they had to take time off from was clogging up 911 with calls about “that bitch is crazy, you needa arrest her ass.” They should lock the doors, and then it turns out [the fans had] actually climbed aboard a rocket.

And then just shoot that thing right into the Sun.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 4, 2009

Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire

It's not widely remembered today, but Fred Astaire was a sizable singing star in his day, who introduced such standards as "Night and Day," "Cheek to Cheek," "The Way You Look Tonight," "They Can't Take that Away from Me," "Something's Gotta Give," and even that noir classic "One for My Baby." Although he had a light voice, his perfect timing and professionalism were much appreciated by composers. Today, anthologies of Great American Songs that can't afford the rights to Frank Sinatra's recordings will often choose Astaire's 1952 re-recordings of his work with Oscar Peterson's quintet as the next best thing.

In other words, Astaire's talents were roughly similar to Michael Jackson's: great dancer, pretty good singer.

But, jeez, look at the difference in their careers and lives: Astaire lived to be 88, exemplified the concept of growing old gracefully in how he slowly wound down his show biz career, enjoyed a decorous private life devoted to his family and his grown-man hobbies (horseracing and golf), and left behind an enormous body of creative dance work in his movies. With Astaire, there's no single peak that overwhelms everything else.

Astaire didn't write songs, but Jackson, who couldn't play an instrument, wasn't particularly fertile of melodic invention, either: even "Billie Jean" succeeded because of an enormous amount of production effort -- it was mixed 91 times -- that went into making it sound minimalistically under-produced. Jackson would have benefited from the pre-Dylan assumption that singers didn't have to write their own music.

For Michael as a dancer, what to do we really have? The live "Billie Jean" on the Motown 25th Anniversay show, the "Beat It" video, and a few other peaks, but most everything else is overshadowed in the build-up to or let-down from 1983.

One of Jackson's career problems was that, unlike Astaire, he appeared in only one real feature-length musical movie, The Wiz. Our popular culture had largely lost its ability to make musical movies. In contrast, the lightweight musical comedies of the 1930s provided Astaire with an established genre, routine frameworks within which he could repeatedly exercise his genius without worrying too much about script, acting, the Meaning of It All, etc. The studio system took care of that kind of thing. (Berry Gordy modeled Motown on 1930s Hollywood studios, and had remarkable success that has never been surpassed, but the cult of authenticity makes that impossible to reproduce in pop music today above the teenybopper level.)

Musical comedy movies gave Astaire a reason to get up and put in a hard day's work doing something he knew how to do. He didn't wait around for inspiration to strike him; the inspiration would come during the drudgery. Astaire was by no means psychologically bullet-proof. He was insecure and used his inner nagging voice to push him to constantly revise and improve his dance sequences. But then get up the next day and start on the next one.

The more ambitious genre of musicals that Rodgers and Hammerstein introduced with Oklahoma in 1943 were a great leap forward aesthetically, but perhaps they began to introduce that note of megalomaniacal artistic ambition into American pop music -- notice how, say, Leonard Bernstein was permanently stuck by his inability to top West Side Story -- of which Jackson's later career was a sad exemplar.

Unlike Fred Astaire, Michael Jackson didn't have any kind of framework. Astaire was a craftsman who happened to be a genius. Jackson was a genius for about six months at age 25, and spent the rest of his life having people tell him he was a genius.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 1, 2009

More on Michael Jackson

Over in Taki's Magazine, I write:

The late Michael Jackson was a strange individual, but his various obsessions, such as weight loss, whitening his skin, and expensively designing his children, were hardly unique to him.

They are shared by more than few of his legion of female fans. To become a superstar, you have to embody some of the inner fixations of either the male or female publics. And in popular music in recent decades, the biggest names have had largely feminine audiences because male tastes have fragmented into multitudinous narrow genres, such as, say, Melodic Death Metal.

Read the whole thing there and comment on it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 30, 2009

I think The Who had a song about this

From AOL News:
A Swedish couple's decision to keep their toddler's gender a secret is stirring debate, especially now that the parents are expecting a second child.

"Pop" is 2 ½ years old, but so far only those who change the child's diapers know whether the youngster is a boy or a girl, TheLocal.se, an English-language site for Swedish news, said last week.

Back in March, the parents gave an interview to the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, saying they decided not to reveal their child's sex because they believe gender is a social construction. "We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mold from the outset," said the child’s mother, "Nora." (The paper used fake names for the entire family to protect their privacy.)

"It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead," the mother said.

The parents, both 24 years old, said they never use personal pronouns when referring to the child. They just say "Pop."

The tot wears everything from dresses to pants, and Pop is usually the one who decides what to wear on any given morning. Pop's hairstyle is also changed on a regular basis, so it doesn’t provide any clues.

Swedish gender equality expert Kristina Henkel told The Local that the experiment could make Pop a stronger person, since he or she won’t be subject to gender stereotypes.


By The Who:
I'm A Boy
(Pete Townshend)

One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally Joy
The other was me, and I'm a boy

My name is Bill and I'm a headcase
They practice making up on my face
Yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend ages taking hairpins from my hair

Chorus 1
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am I get it

Put your frock on Jean Marie
Plait your hair Felicity
Paint your nails, little Sally Joy
Put this wig on, little boy

Chorus 1

I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the street
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud

Chorus 2
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm__ a__ boy__

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 26, 2009

The White Michael Jackson ...

... was Donny Osmond of the Osmonds, who was a regular on network television from age five.

The Mormon Osmond Brothers had a Jackson 5 sound-alike #1 hit with "One Bad Apple" released when Donny was 12 going on 13 in late 1970. (An older Osmond, Merrill, does the lead singing, but little Donny's soprano kicks it into overdrive.) Osmond said Michael Jackson later told him that the Jackson 5 had been offered "One Bad Apple" first, but chose to record "ABC" instead. (Neither song has as exciting a chord progression as the Jackson 5's first hit "I Want You Back," but, then, what song does? Now that I think about it, I'm not sure that the Jacksons' version of that song by Berry Gordy and other Motown insiders does full justice to the potential of the material. British pub-rockers Graham Parker and the Rumour used a rather different arrangement of "I Want You Back" as their concert closer, and somebody might do well right now with their own cover.)

At age 18, Donny had a hit Sonny & Cher-type TV series with his sister Marie, which, when you think about it, is pretty weird in a sort of William and Dorothy Wordsworth kind of way.

Osmond always got a lot of grief for not being quite as talented as Michael Jackson, but, then, who was?

In retrospect, you have to give Donny Osmond a lot of credit for staying reasonably sane all these years.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 25, 2009

Michael Jackson, RIP

Here's something I wrote about Michael Jackson in 2005:

We're the same age, and his troubles reminded me than when we were eleven and I was still in my he-man-girl-hating phase (I invited girls to my 6th and 7th birthday parties, but for the next four or five years after that couldn't recall what madness had ever made me like girls), I felt sorry for him because his family wasn't letting him enjoy his "latency period" (as the Freudians called it). I figured, even then, that forcing him to sing love songs to girls at that age would lead to trouble. (In contrast, I highly approved of his hit "Ben," from the movie "Willard," which was a much more age-appropriate love song to a pet rat )

Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, feels the same way today (not about girls, I mean, but about Jackson's upbringing). In "Arrested Development," he writes:

People tend to throw up hands at Michael Jackson's multifarious bizarreness. But is it really so strange? The boy was forced to work by a cruel and physically abusive father starting at the age of 7. (If he'd been sent into a factory or coal mine, instead of onstage, we'd have more compassion for him.) As a boy, he was denied what even most abused and underprivileged children have: school, friends, and play.

Instead, Michael was made into a performing sexualized freak, a boy whose soprano voice kindled passion in grown women. He was made to witness adult sexuality at an age when it can only have been terrifying and incomprehensible to him. By 10, he was performing in strip clubs and hiding under the covers in hotel rooms while his older brothers got it on with groupies. At 11—the age at which his psyche seems frozen—he was a superstar. "My childhood was completely taken away from me," he has said. Almost everything that seems freakish about him can be explained by his poignant, doomed effort to get his stolen childhood back.

P.S., Dennis Dale at Untethered on Michael Jackson.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Me: How Multiculti Closed the Generation Gap

My weekly culture column is up at Taki's Magazine:

Although increasing ethnic diversity is widely assumed to make the arts more “vibrant,” the triumph of the ideology of multiculturalism appears to have instead helped cause pop music to stagnate stylistically.

There’s a fundamental connection between the growth of ethnic pride and the decline of generational rebellion, because to rebel against your forefathers is to rebel against your race. Thus, for a group of young black musicians to issue a manifesto pointing out that 30 years of rap is plenty would be racial treason. Although long exhausted musically, hip-hop has become so emotionally entwined with African-American identity that we’re all stuck with it.


You can read it there and comment on it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 19, 2009

R. J. Stove's "A Student's Guide to Music History"

This handsome 135 page paperback by R.J. Stove, A Student's Guide to Music History, listing on Amazon for only $8.00, is a near perfect introduction or brush-up for anyone interested in Western classical music. Performing miracles of concision, it provides sprightly portraits of several score of the top composers. You can read the book straight through in about four hours. Or you can read it sitting at your computer and call up on Youtube just about any piece mentioned in the book.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 1, 2009

David Brooks on what Mozart and Tiger Woods had going for them

NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks, I have been told on reliable authority, is a regular reader of my stuff. The one time he mentioned me by name, back in 2004, he was subjected to so much sputtering rage from the kommisars that he hasn't dared since. In his recent career change toward Malcolm Gladwell-style political correctness, I seem to have served as his off-stage anti-muse, inspiring Brooks to write columns telling New York Times readers that the things they and everbody they socialize with already publicly endorse are actually daring new scientific breakthroughs.

Here's a Brooks column so Gladwellian that it could be the Reader's Digest condensation of Chapter 2 ("The 10,000-Hour Rule: 'In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours") from Gladwell's recent bestseller Outliers. It's the kind of All-American B.S. that we've heard over and over our whole lives from motivational speakers:
Genius: The Modern View
By DAVID BROOKS

Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe.

We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

Oh, boy ... How much do Gladwell and Brooks actually know about Mozart? The point is not that the symphonies that Mozart wrote as an eight or nine year old boy are derivative and unsophisticated, but that a little boy wrote symphonies that were good enough to be played in public at all.

Would Mozart "not stand out among today’s top child-performers?" Of course he would. He was the most famous child prodigy performer in Europe when he was a little boy.
What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

Right. Because look how many other Tiger Woods have come along in golf since Tiger first became famous around 1991 and showed everybody Earl Woods's cookbook recipe for how to raise a prodigy. All that younger talent that came along in Tiger's wake is why, when Tiger was out for eight months with knee surgery, the PGA Tour barely missed him because of all the charismatic younger superstars who have taken over the golf world, like ... you know, uh ... Anthony Kim! ... And ... that other guy, you know, the one with the shirt. And those middle aged guys from Ireland and Argentina. And, don't forget, there's red hot Kenny Perry. (Oh, wait, he's 48-years-old. Never mind.)

Oh, well, I guess there just hasn't been anybody else like Tiger to come along in the last 13 golf seasons. There must not have been anybody else out there besides Tiger with "the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills." You know, it must be the notorious shortage of Sideline Dads out there. If only more fathers were intent on improving their sons' athletic skills, there'd be Tiger Woodses everywhere.

Look, to say that Mozart wasn't special because he was just like Tiger Woods is the kind of skull-crushingly stupid thing that you can only get away with saying if you're telling everybody what they want to hear.

Tiger Woods is 33 years old. He's been celebrated on national television for his golf skills for over 30 years. Here's a video (starts 0:45 in) of a two and a half year old Tiger being interviewed by Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart on a nationally syndicated TV talk show.

The truth is, unsurprisingly, that Tiger Woods is special. And so was Mozart.
The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

How many people whom you've never ever heard of have also put in 10,000 hours? How many people you've never heard of wanted to put in 10,000 hours of rigorous practice but couldn't find anybody to subsidize them because they lacked potential?

And why did Tiger Woods choose golf to put 10,000+ hours of rigorous practice into golf? Why didn't he choose, say, symphony composing instead? Could it be that he liked golf more than composing? And could it be that the reason he like golf more than composing was because he had more natural talent for golf?

Putting in 10,000 hours at something definitely helps, but it really ought to be the right thing.

How many kids lives get wrecked by this kind of thinking by their parents? When you read about 23-year-old Anthony Kim, who got a prototypical Korean-American maniacal drilling upbringing at the driving range where I hit balls when I was a kid, it's a story that appears now to have a happy ending. But just two or three years ago, Kim looked like he was headed for Skid Row, he was drinking so heavily in rebellion against his domineering parents. His parents now tell other Korean parents who ask how they too can mold a pro golfer: Don't even try.

You only see the stories with a happy ending. The stories you don't see would be about all the Asian kids whose parents thought they could have a Tiger Woods too, and turned their kids' childhood into a hell.

The rest of Brooks's column about effective ways to practice is fine, but the opening is such a load of tripe ...

April 9, 2009

Classical composers: scholarly vs. popular favorites

At GNXP.com, Agnostic has created a spreadsheet of Western classical composers ranked in two manners:

- Their popularity with the classical music-buying public (as determined by the number of recordings of their music offered for sale by Amazon.com--Mozart leads with 13,540, followed by Bach and Beethoven, and then there's a big leap down to Schubert, Brahms, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky, all with 6000-7000 recordings.)

- Versus their prominence in scholarly histories and encyclopedias of music, as tabulated by Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment (Mozart and Beethoven are tied for most eminent, followed by Bach and Wagner).

Counting the number of recordings on sale at Amazon seems like a reasonable metric of marketplace popularity, although at the Mozart v. Beethoven battle of the titans level, Mozart probably has an advantage because he wrote more music than Beethoven (e.g., 41 symphonies v. 9). If you are an obscure musician, you might try to pick up a few bucks from Mozart completists by recording an obscure Mozart piece. So, number of recordings on sale doesn't necessarily match up to sales. But, it seems likely to be good enough.

As you can see, overall, scholars and classical CD-buyers don't disagree all that much. Still, the scholars value early composers (pre-Vivaldi) more than the public. Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel were standing on the shoulders of giants; it's unfair that the public doesn't enjoy the music of their great predecessors as much, but that's just the way it is.

The other main area of disagreement between Amazon's and Murray's rankings is over 20th Century composers, especially atonal ones such as Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. (If you are not familiar with the music of Arnold, Anton, and Alban, this KTEL-like 1977 infomercial for a greatest hits album entitled "Beloved Hits of Arnie Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School" will get you up to speed. [Okay, this video version is even funnier.]) They were very talented at impressing scholars with the idea that they were the Next Big Thing in the History of Music, but the public has been less impressed. (It turned out that, so far, there really hasn't been a Next Big Thing. Western art music, which has been so productively changing styles for a couple of centuries, more or less ran out of gas in the 20th Century just as the cultural world became obsessed with style-changing as the mark of true greatness.)

The only two major composers from the second quarter of the 20th Century to be more popular with the public than with the scholars are Prokofiev and Shostakovitch, both of whom had to worry that if they let their compositions get too avant-garde, the middle-brow (but highly opinionated) Stalin would have them shot. So, the classical music-buying public evidently owes Stalin a debt of gratitude.

The composers who are most popular with the public relative to their importance to music historians tend to be melodic Romantics from the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. The scholars rate opera composer Giacomo Puccini (Madame Butterfly) only 10% as important as Mozart, but Amazon carries 30% as many Puccini titles as Mozart titles. (Puccini's aria "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot has become a staple of television talent shows in the last few years.) Next in line is Bizet (Carmen), then Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker), and Dvorak (The New World Symphony).

Then comes the early 18th Century Baroque composer Vivaldi (The Four Seasons). It's possible that the scholars are underrating Vivaldi's importance in music history because most of his compositions were lost from the late 18th Century until the 1920s. However, he was known to J.S. Bach, and had some influence on him.

Others more popular than their degree of scholarly eminence would suggest include Grieg, Verdi, Gounod, Saint-Saens, and Brahms (although, obviously, Verdi and Brahms are giants by any measure).

I wonder if opera fans are more likely to buy multiple versions of an opera than are symphony fans, which might account for opera composers doing well in terms of number of recordings on sale. To my untrained ear, it's easier to be a fan of a particular singer than a particular conductor or orchestras, so there might be more demand for multiple versions of operas. On the other hand, operas are expensive.

At the other end of the scale--composers more written about than played--we find, besides a lot of early composers and the late 12-tone boys, Cherubini. I had never heard of Cherubini, but Beethoven saw him as his greatest contemporary. Other big names on the Important-but-not-Popular list include Stravinsky, Berlioz, Weber, and Wagner.

Murray's methodology might overrate Berlioz's representation in music reference books because one of Murray's techniques is to look at the index and count the number of pages a composer's name appears on. Berlioz was not only a great composer (Symphonie Fantastique), but also a great music journalist. So, he gets quoted a lot about other people, which inflates the number of times his name appears in indexes relative to a composer who let his music do all the talking for him.

Evidently, the craft of composition had reached maturity in the second half of the 19th Century. By then, most of the tools to appeal to the music-literate public had been created. (Most film score music today sounds like late 19th century orchestral music, stylistically.)

After about 1900, however, the enormous richness of the 19th Century repertoire weighed down composers, driving them into experimentation, most of which has not proven enduringly popular with the CD-buying public. Strikingly, the composer universally believed by musicians to be the greatest genius of the second half of the 19th Century, Wagner, is not particularly popular these days compared to the awe with which he was regarded a century ago. Wagner got there first, and was able to create popular interest in his innovations that lasted for a few generations, but without him around to blow his own horn, public appreciation for Wagner seems to be fading relative to his Italian and Viennese rivals.

My impression is that 18th Century orchestral music has been growing in popularity at the expense of 19th Century orchestral music. We're just not profound enough anymore for the Romantics. Most pre-Beethoven stuff tends to sound like the composer introduced it with the words, "And here, your Archdukeness, is a little something to brighten your day," while post-Beethoven 19th Century music tends to sound like the composer is inviting you to "Come with me on journey to plumb the most profound depths of my infinite soul." Yeah, hey, that sounds great, but first I've got to check my, uh, Twitter account, so can I have a raincheck on the soul-plumbing?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 2, 2009

Do musicians tend to be skinny?

Martin Regnen wonders why musicians tend to be skinny:

I got talked into playing a last-minute sub gig yesterday which much to my surprise turned out to be a battle of the bands. That turned out to be an opportunity to do some amateur anthropological fieldwork. A dozen bands were competing, and I haven't seen that many non-orchestra musicians in one room at the same time. There were over 40 of them there, which suddenly made me realize just how different musicians are from non-musicians. I'm not counting myself as part of the sample, of course. Aside from the high frequency of black clothing (there was no band without at least one black shirt) and lots of hair (apparently 5 cm is very short for a male musician), the most striking thing was how skinny the guys were. The sample of women numbered only seven so there's not really much data there - too bad that I couldn't really test the pretty songbird hypothesis. ...

I have no idea why this is, but it's interesting that so many skinny guys were there. Steve Sailer has proposed that rock musicians might be thin because it's easier on their knees in the long run, but only a few of the bands played rock and just about everyone was much too young to have to deal with wearing their knees down. So the explanation has to lie elsewhere. It can't be just that guys who are no good at sports are attracted to music to boost their social standing - if that were it, there should be plenty of fatasses as well. Maybe young guys who spend money on instruments and amps just don't have much left for food? Then again, symphonies aren't really full of fat guys, either.

Does music somehow attract men with faster metabolisms? Or does anyone else have any ideas?

Was it always like this? Or did it change at some point? Was there some first role model of skinniness? Sinatra? The young Elvis? The British Invasion? Perhaps English lads born in the 1940s were undernourished as youths, so they stayed scrawny as young men, and that set a stereotype that has endured.

Or, perhaps there is something deeper here than mere fashion?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 8, 2008

Chicken or Egg?

A baroque-era harpsichord piece was playing on the car radio tonight, and I got to thinking how nicely the harpsichord, with its calm clockwork-like sound (due to its inability to change volume), symbolizes the spirit of the age of reason, so reminiscent of Newton's clockwork universe, which was such a popular image in the 18th Century. Similarly, the piano (originally, pianoforte or "soft-loud") represents the emotional sturm und drang spirit of the subsequent romantic era, and the electric guitar epitomizes the new thinking of the 1960s.

Isn't it striking how somebody happened to invent the right instrument at the right time?

Yet ... could it be that causation here runs partly backward? That the spirit of the age didn't just call forth particular musical instruments but that the musical instruments also called forth the spirit of the age? That people between the ages of, say, 12-30 imprinted on particular musical instruments, and the musical styles made possible by those instruments, and that this affected the whole flavor of their thinking? If so, the roots of the 1960s would lie more in the workshops of Adolph Rickenbacher, Les Paul, and Leo Fender than in the sources more usually identified.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer