Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 145
September 27, 2014
Pop Questions
What makes a pop song a hit? David Samuels talked to music exec Mike Caren, who maintains there are nine rules:
“First, it starts with an expression of ‘Hey,’ ‘Oops,’ ‘Excuse me,’” he begins. “Second is a personal statement: ‘I’m a hustler, baby,’ ‘I wanna love you,’ ‘I need you tonight.’ Third is telling you what to do: ‘Put your hands up,’ ‘Give me all your love,’ ‘Jump.’ Fourth is asking a question: ‘Will you love me tomorrow,’ ‘Where have you been all my life,’ ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up.’” He takes a deep breath, and rattles off another four rules. “Five is logic,” he says, “which could be counting, or could be spelling or phonetics: ‘1-2-3-4, let the bodies hit the floor,’ or ‘Ca-li-fornia is comp-li-cated,’ those kind of things. Six would be catchphrases that roll off the tip of your tongue because you know them: ‘Never say never,’ ‘Rain on my parade.’ Seven would be what we call stutter, like, ‘D-d-don’t stop the beat,’ but it could also be repetition: ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.’ Eight is going back to logic again, like hot or cold, heaven or hell, head to toe, all those kind of things.”
The ninth rule of hit songwriting is silence. Why?
Because most people who are listening to music are actually doing something else, he explains. They are driving a car, or working out, or dancing, or flirting. Silence gives you time to catch up with the lyrics if you are drunk or stoned. If you are singing along, silence gives you time to breathe. “Michael Jackson, his quote was ‘Silence is the greatest thing an entertainer has,’” Caren continues. “‘I got a feeling,’ space-space-space, ‘Do you believe in life after love,’ space-space-space-space-space.”
Meanwhile, Gillian Turnbull, a music professor, worries that young music fans grow disenchanted when they can find any song they like on YouTube:
For older listeners, we reached a pinnacle in genre fragmentation in the form of satellite radio: if you like rock n’ roll—but not Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard—you can tune in to a station that only features Elvis. Perhaps you’re especially into 1970s proto-metal? There’s a station for that. In many ways, satellite radio is the ultimate expression of the increasingly narrow, and genre-defined, markets that new radio stations had to create through the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, younger listeners mostly go to YouTube, at least to test out any music they might actually buy. They can go on an unexpected journey through related acts and styles, opening their minds to genre diversity far more than any radio station would allow.
Still, while exploration can’t be a bad thing, I’d argue that being unable to zero in on one style of music and dig into it deeply means that music is being treated too superficially. Maybe we’re obsessed with categorization, but I think categorization matters. Genre exists for a reason: we privilege difference; it is the means for personal and collective expression. My students come to class with a catalogue of Bee Gees and The Police swirling in their brains. They have encyclopaedic knowledge of Grateful Dead bootlegs. I hope they start digging more, learning what made genres sound like they did and their practitioners and listeners act like they did. I hope these kids create new genres and music subcultures, encouraging their peers to not treat music like it’s a throwaway product waiting to be replaced, but that it tells us everything about who we are and what matters.
Chart Of The Day
Christopher Ingraham captions:
Do you drink a glass of wine with dinner every night? That puts you in the top 30 percent of American adults in terms of per-capita alcohol consumption. If you drink two glasses, that would put you in the top 20 percent. But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
The View From Your Window
Lansing, Michigan, 9.30 am
Fiction Of The Future
David Mitchell explains how he imagines worlds of what’s to come:
[W]hen you’re writing about the future, you simply try to work out what people in that future point will be taking for granted. In The Bone Clocks, there are two future sections. 2025 one is only about 11 years away—there’s just a few gizmos about the place and we’re basically there already. In the 2040s, however, more dramatic changes have taken place. There’s no more oil—or very little oil left. So you think about what people at that point will be taking for granted about travel, about the ability to hop on airplane and be hundreds of miles away in an hour or two. Or to have a conversation like this one, to speak across a continent—which, in the context of human history, is a profoundly bizarre thing to be doing. Animpossible thing to be doing, an unthinkable thing to be doing! We can take a device out of our pockets and speak to somebody in Auckland on it. And the miracle is that we don’t we see it as a miracle. We’ve only had this skill—to take out a smartphone out and call anywhere on earth—for 10 years, maybe 20. But, already, we take it for granted. It is part of what it means to live in our time.
When there is no more oil to power the system of power stations, which power the electric grid, which we power our devices on—we will no longer take it for granted that we can do it. It will be something that our grandchildren will marvel at—my grandfather lived in a world when you could phone someone in Auckland, my god! So that’s how you project yourself, narratively, into another time. You work out what people will be taking for granted, and what not.
Maternal Ambivalence, Ctd
In an essay recounting her experience volunteering as a Big Sister and then as a court-appointed advocate for foster children, Meghan Daum shares her reasons for wavering on biological motherhood:
They ran the gamut from “Don’t want to be pregnant” to “Don’t want to make someone deal with me when I’m dying.” (And, for the record, I’ve never met a woman of any age and any level of inclination to have children who doesn’t have names picked out.) Chief among them was my belief that I’d be a bad mother. Not in the Joan Crawford mode but in the mode of parents you sometimes see who obviously love their kids but clearly do not love their own lives. For every way I could imagine being a good mother, I could imagine ten ways that I’d botch the job irredeemably.
More than that, I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic. It felt like not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. My contribution to society was not about contributing more people to it but, rather, about doing something for the ones who were already here. Ones like [children in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program] Maricela and Kaylee. I liked the idea of taking the extra time I had because I wasn’t busy raising my own child and using it to help them. It also helped that if anyone, upon learning my feelings about having children, lobbed the predictable “selfish” grenade, I could casually let them know that I was doing my part to shape and enrich the next generation.
September 26, 2014
Where Social Entrepreneurs Fall Short
Bees that can sniff diabetes are great, but we need working governments for sustainable development
—
businessweek.com/articles/2014-…
Charles Kenny (@charlesjkenny) September 23, 2014
Charles Kenny doubts that their brand of business ventures can accomplish much on their own:
The problems with the social enterprise approach start with the challenge of being small. Aspire is currently working in Mexico, where grasshoppers regularly appear on restaurant menus. At the moment, the insects cost six times more per kilogram than beef or chicken. The enterprise hopes that by significantly scaling production – factory-farming the insects – they can dramatically reduce that price.
That’s a significant hurdle. Small startups rarely go global. Not, at least, without governmental buy-in. … Fixing the infrastructure problems and low-quality health and education services takes more, better government – even if the services are contracted out. For all the valuable work they do, social entrepreneurs can’t replace the state’s role, and they can’t function nearly as effectively where governments are poor, incompetent, or corrupt.
Paternity Pays, Ctd
Dish alum Gwynn Guilford argues that Japan especially needs paid paternity leave:
Women in Japan are already paid only 73 percent of what men make for the equivalent jobs; the fact that this gap grows during childbearing years suggests what some call a “motherhood pay penalty.” The work women can find after having a child is often part-time, and usually less well paid, so they have less incentive to go back to work. It’s telling that the better educated a woman is, the more likely she is to stay out of the workforce.
Reasons Female College Grads Leave the Workforce
Oddly enough, men don’t have it so great either. In return for job security, companies expect their male employees to work grueling hours that end in booze-drenched after-hours bonding sessions, week after week for their entire career. Until very recently, to test their commitment companies would deliberately transfer male workers away from their families. This peer pressure is also part of why Japanese men seldom take vacation days.
Gwynn has some hopes for reform but isn’t too optimistic:
To the government’s credit, in 2011 it launched the Ikumen Project (the word is a slangy play on ikemen, which means a “good-looking man,” and iku (育), which means “to raise”), an online community that 2011 encourages fathers to take a more active role in child-rearing.
Another cultural milestone occurred in Aug. 2014, when Masako Mori, the minister then in charge of the declining birthrate and gender equality, declared that she would promote men who take “paternity leave,” by which she probably meant parental leave. Abe now says he wants the number of men taking leave to rise from 1.9 percent to 13 percent by 2020.
However, it’s not clear that this is much more than rhetoric. The salary gap between men and women means it still usually makes more economic sense for fathers to keep working, especially given that they’re likely to get only half their wages during parental leave. So what the Japanese government ought to do is fix this disparity in how men’s and women’s time is valued. Instead, it’s considering making it worse, by extending maternity leave to three years. That would further entrench the traditional divide between men’s and women’s work, worsening Japan’s labor-supply problems and keeping GDP growth anemic at best.
Meanwhile, turning to the maternity front, Michelle Nijhuis reports on the slow road toward better breast pumps:
In the U.S., as Jill Lepore observed in the magazine in 2009, pumps have become a substitute for adequate maternal leave. Today, they provoke a sort of impotent consumer hatred—even high-end breast pumps are noisy, bulky, and awkward to use, and pumping is sometimes painful, often boring, and never dignified. Not surprisingly, many women who attempt to pump at work wean their infants before the six-month mark recommended by pediatricians. Research and investment into postpartum maternal health, including lactation and pumping, lags behind even other aspects of women’s health—perhaps in part because postpartum health lacks its own specialty, and is instead awkwardly partitioned into obstetrics, pediatrics, and general family medicine.
Nijhuis details a “hackathon” that stepped up to the plate. Elsewhere, on the subject of “the maternal-leave problem,” Darlena Cunha explains how women can end up fired for pregnancy, even at companies where that shouldn’t be the case:
A big challenge for women who want to take their claims to court is that discrimination , Colorado attorney Brian Stutheit says. In many states, videotaping inappropriate workplace behavior for evidence goes against privacy laws. And unless there’s a paper trail clearly indicating harassment or discrimination, the evidence is considered circumstantial. In Stutheit’s experience, eyewitnesses are hard to come by because they also work for the company and don’t want to jeopardize their own employment. …
Stutheit calls it the “halo effect”: After a complaint, the employee who filed is treated like an angel for six months or so, then fired for something unrelated. “Employers consider them troublemakers,” he said.
All recent Dish coverage of parental leave here.
The Other Coalition America Is Forming
Clint Watts is concerned that we are bringing ISIS and al Qaeda together:
ISIL’s rejection of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership weakened the latter group’s grasp on foreign fighter flows and donor cash. By striking both ISIL and Al Qaeda’s official arm in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, the United States may be encouraging ISIL and Al Qaeda to return to coordinating rather than competing against each other. There are already hints of this happening elsewhere.
Last week, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, two Al Qaeda affiliates losing manpower and momentum to the hot new kid on the block — ISIL — called for unity among jihadi groups in the fight against America. If Nusra and ISIL, rather than eroding each other’s support and competing for resources, join forces to combine ISIL’s resources and skill at insurgency in Iraq and Syria with Al Qaeda’s international terrorism knowhow, the danger to the United States and its interest around the world could multiply rapidly. In other words, the United States could win some tactical victories by hitting both groups hard in Syria, but might be committing a massive strategic blunder by uniting a jihadi landscape it desperately sought to fracture over the past decade.
Eli Lake heard a version of this argument earlier in the week.
The View From Your Window
Corvallis, Oregon, 4 pm
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