Happy Valentine’s Day

This week every sitcom, column and podcast dutifully released a Valentine’s Day episode. Studio 360’s solicited ideas on resdesigning the holiday and produced this bacon bouquet. Which is awesome.

Romantic and delicious.

If you’re alone this weekend, in lieu of bacon you get a free pass to wallow in self-pity. 30 Rock had a lonely Liz Lemon celebrate with the Lifetime Original, “My Stepson is My Cyberhusband.” All Songs Considered took the opportunity to play breakup songs for a full hour. They missed my favorites, so I’m putting them here (with cheapo YouTube links!). The first is perfect if you’ve been broken up with, and the second is essential if you’re doing the breaking.

Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise (Trembling Blue Stars)

It Ain’t Me, Babe (Bob Dylan)

Whether you celebrate it or not, don’t miss the only great pop song specific to this odd holiday. “Valentine’s Day” by Andre 3000, the best thing behind “Hey Ya” to come out of OutKast’s overflowing double album, is guaranteed to put a smile on your face whether you’re mooning or moping.

Mindful Self Indulgence

Virginia Postrel wrote a wonderful little piece in The Atlantic a while back which clears up something I’d never been able to articulate. If rich people spend their money on things they don’t need to signal their wealth to others, why is so much of the luxury market focused on intimate things like spas, bathrooms, kitchen counters, vacations, and meals consumed in the privacy of one’s own home?

The caricature of the first wealthy Americans, those who gathered their assets as industrialization, modern transportation, and urbanization turned us into an economic powerhouse in the 1880s, has them both stupidly flashy (at the expense of real comforts and useful amenities) and grossly overweight. For these memes we have the writings of Thorstein Veblen and the cartoons of Thomas Nast to thank, as well as the relationship of these simplifications to reality; I’d love to find some real numbers on the subjects, but I have no doubt that members of our first leisure class did weigh more than their parents and did spend a sizable portion of their assets on visible, status enhancing symbols of wealth. The Victorians had the sitting room, a space expensively and impressively decorated to receive visitors, which contrasted with the lack of expense devoted to the interior rooms the family would privately live. In a world where everyone would pretty much fit our description of poverty, those who could afford to spent a good portion of their energies proving to others that they deserved a different status. The contrast of a thin, malnourished working class with a lazy, obese ruling class is also repeated over and over in culture for a reason. Those for whom wealth was no longer a limiting factor on caloric intake overindulged, sometimes in epic ways, not having any models of moderation or culture of sustainable indulgence. Taft, famously our fattest president, actually exemplifies the attempts to learn how to become and remain healthy in a world of temptation. He dieted several times over the course of his life, careening from 243 to 320 pounds, then back down, then back up, then back down.

Since then, the wealthiest Americans, while retaining their love of luxury, glamor, and comfort, have radically shifted their consumption habits. Privacy seems to trump visibility, even in such incredible purchases as islands and multi-million dollar estates tucked away from the world. In a world where the majority of adults can afford a car, many millionaires make themselves inconspicuous on our roadways, choosing luxury sedans indistinguishable from or identical to middle class transportation, unlike their predecessors who set themselves far apart with their carriages. The hidden heart of the luxurious home, the designer kitchen and the custom bathroom, became the destination of more expense than any other rooms. The waistlines of the rich slimmed, and we arrived at the current reality: being overweight is a concern of the poor and lower middle class, and those who live well connected to good food, gyms, a variety of experience and diverse opportunities for outdoor and otherwise physical pursuits, the rich, are fitter overall than the average American.

Simultaneously, we have reinvigorated the conspicuous consumption meme with the coinage of “bling,” a near-ubiquitous shorthand for purchases whose sole purpose is to be seen and to display the wealth of the buyer. Interestingly, those doing this buying, and this displaying, are not the most wealthy, but the recently wealthy, and their imitators in middle America. Our new caricature, of the rapper quickly elevated into the luxury class by an album contract, is strikingly similar to that of our robber barons: obviously expensive cars, jewelery whose lack of beauty just serves to heighten the focus on its cost, and flashy domiciles proudly presented on television.

Postrel reviews the latest research into consumption patterns and unearths a seemingly obvious truth: “The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy – and vice-versa.” Conspicuous consumption is not the degenerate desination of capitalist wealth accumulation, but a stepping stone, a phase, through which cultural groups pass as they seek to solidify in the public mind their distance from their former peers. In this stage, wealth is famously mismanaged, as in the case of MC Hammer or nine out of ten lottery winners. It is spent primarily on things that lose value (cars) as opposed to things that gain in value (investments). Overindulgence, whether of the quaint caloric variety or the more damaging phychotropic kind, is widespread.

This seems to be good news for two reasons. One: conspicuous consumption, in its most damaging, value-destroying form, is largely temporary. It seems to last a generation. The children of the newly rich are the always rich, for whom strategies for managing great wealth and great opportunity are de rigueur. Their worries are not so much how to prove to other that they have wealth, but how to enjoy it and live with it; their peers are not poor. Spending shifts “from goods to services and experiences.” Two: in the 1880s we were really poor! This is fantastic. Those robber barons, those masters of the universe, were recent arrivals to the world of wealth, whose lives starkly contrasted with those of their parents and peers, and must have wasted so much correcting for this. Most middle class Americans have, least in large part, already moved beyond that “bling” culture. We now value economy and luxury in an interesting mix. We’re healthier, too, and it looks like the future will only offer more of the same.

Maybe we will all be so fit someday as to make one piece jumpers a sensible military uniform. Then again, maybe that’s just too much to hope for.

A Brand New Colony

There’s something about labeling something, naming it, that’s silly and glorious and deeply human. I’ll never forget the passages in the Mars trilogy about naming, its insight into how putting a name to something advances the understood and understandable, tames the formerly meaningless, and marks the universe with the human mind’s presence. It is incredible to contemplate the unnamed: the planets before we called them that, the stars without our admiring eyes taking them in, the law of gravity with no such formulation. It is wondrous to observe our voracious appetite for taxonomy: the millions upon millions of named concepts, species, craters on Mercury, comets.

We love to label and name ourselves and our world, aiming to adjust perceptions (including our own) through language. So it is that music – in reality, invisible, weightless, ephemeral – is treated to so many words that seek to describe its look, feel, and significance, the sources of it and the audience for it. Music is categorized, each category assigned emotional and social and cultural meaning, and then we wade through our words, calling some to our side and disassociating from others. Words are forgotten, words are invented, and like our relationship to the planets and the axioms of physics, our understanding of the world of music is shaped by our use and disuse and misuse of these words.

I know I got so much pleasure, a year ago, out of listing all the names for music I had recently learned, proudly displaying not so much my familiarity with the sounds or scenes these words supposedly identify but my knowledge of the words themselves. You may not know, I smirked, but this word now refers to a certain kind of noise made in a certain place, at least when you’re talking to certain people. How exotic, how colorful these words I owned! Hyphy, Baile Funk, Grime. (Highlife, dubstep, garage, snap, favela, bhangra, plena, kwaito, hiplife, bomba, afrobeat, go-go.) This year there’s been the pleasure of “Bloghouse,” one of those deliciously useless words that carries in its DNA the stipulation that once any significant number of people know what it means it is to be decreed hopelessly obsolete, and the use of it will henceforth connotate nothing but your own pitiful inability to stay on top of the world of the hip and with it.

Here’s a new one. Chiptune is music made with the sounds and on the hardware of early video games. Besides being a neat addition to my collection of names for music, what I like about this (and the reason I’m writing about it) is the peek I got through a sample of this documentary into the way musicians and fans use this label, identify as a community. I thought I’d share the feeling of awe that I have at any genesis, biological or technological or sociological; I feel such wonder at how exactly humans form these communities, develop these signals, pool the resources and spread the word to create and distribute and consume something new, something niche, something wonderful.

This group of people, named, is now a scene, something you can chose to belong to or not, something you are either aware or unaware of, something you can admire, or make fun of, or ignore. I’d love to find out – maybe watching the film in its entirety would give me some idea – precisely when and where the word “Chiptune” was coined, but it’s pretty clear that it has created a group of people out of individuals, implying connections between people and sounds and events and also erecting barriers between others. As always, for it to mean something for something to be Chiptune, a lot must be “not Chiptune.”

The size of the scene, its wealth of proprietary knowledge and private signals, and its obvious disinterest in mainstream interest remind me of the hardcore music scene, which has a fantastically dense and terrifically silly internal taxonomy. To the best of my limited knowledge, hardcore ties or possibly surpasses electronic music in this regard: I’m told there exist such distinct things as grindcore, thrashcore, powerviolence, noisegrind, goregrind, deathgrind, metalcore, thrash metal, youth crew, skacore, and screamo. Add to this list hardcore’s fierce geographic identification and all the labeling and signaling that entails, and it begins to look like a music can compensate for having a tiny audience by exuberant naming.

Some of these “sub-genres” must be for all practical purposes linguistic nonsense, trying to differentiate what is really nothing especially different, but then the key is how much you care about minute deviations and how much you identify with the labels. Popular music rarely insists on careful categorization, partly because it embraces cross pollination, partly because it aims for universality rather than insularity, but also because it is rarely a proxy for a lifestyle or a tightly knit community. If the parade of hardcore labels seems laughable to you, consider the Wikipedia article on Tragic City Hardcore of Birmingham, Alabama. We learn, from Tragic City patrons no doubt, that “…the main staple of the Tragic City scene is an attitude… and the community is stressed over all.” Witness the glorious martyrdom of a group of clubgoers “mostly cut off from the national scene” and “overlooked” by the powers that be! This is more than music taxonomy. This is chosen, carefully designed, and fiercely defended social identity. I listen to grindcore; you listen to screamo. Let’s call the whole thing off.

We could invite ourselves to judge communities so eager to define themselves into minority status, or people aching to join only the most exclusive, exclusionary club of music fans, or the whole idea of conflating social choices with the enjoyment of particular sounds. We could just marvel at the industry and inventiveness of niche consumers and their earnest pursuit of art for which there is little widespread interest.

I of course value my own distance from such lifestyle brands as hardcore. I enjoy sampling a little bit of everything and imagining that I determine for myself what each facet of my life holds – that my clothing, friendships, work and music are chosen not according to formula but internal desire. While I collect names that describe the diverse music I enjoy, and hunger for more, I avoid labeling myself a fan of one thing or the other, hoping to escape all the prejudices and assumptions that come lumped with these names. But my aimed at cosmopolitanism is itself a powerful brand, no less the product of labels and dreams than any other, and the egotism of genre-blending pop music is merely another flavor of narcissism, not a different animal.

Whatever its merits as music or a social network or a sense of identity, the path a niche music like Chiptune takes is a joy to behold; the power of a name to create something out of nothing is breathtaking. A scene like Chiptune can, through the magic of cheapening communication and transportation technologies, gather fans with the exclusionary temperament of grindcore devotees in a global network. Naming will become an increasingly large part of the process of creation as geography decreases in importance and we need other ways to make sense of our cultural landscape. We must vigilantly watch our language, as Orwell warned, both to understand what is being said and implied and because the willful manipulation of names and signals can be monstrous (see: enhanced interrogation).

And we can all be grateful that the focused energies of small groups can incubate powerful works of art, the brilliance of which can both feed the egos in the tribe and flavor the popular art enjoyed by the rest of us. Chiptune is much older than my awareness of it, and I’m realizing that it must have informed the 2003 album Give Up by The Postal Service, an album that went gold, selling over 600,000 copies, filled with low bit chirps and tones. “Brand New Colony,” a cherished track in which the game boy blips really shine, comforted me with the insistent, repeated lyric “everything will change” when I felt like my heart had been ripped out, senior year of high school. The relevant passage today is this one:

We’ll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene/Start a brand new colony/Where everything will change/We’ll give ourselves new names…