33 rebellions per minute
"All bets are on for those on a roll"
1999
Smash Mouth, ASTRO LOUNGE
About suffering, they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen,
skating on a pond at the edge of the wood.
-- W.H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts"
Part One: A Digressive Preamble on the Role of Moral Reasoning Under Conditions of Historical Indeterminacy, the Evolution and Definition of the Principle of "Satisficing", Attention Deficit Disorder, and How Come I Hardly Ever Write About Bands Anyone's Ever Heard Of
In a lengthy ramble that I vaguely pretended to offer as a review of Mephisto Waltz's album THALIA('95), I admitted that the time I currently (Sept 99) spend at work is not, of all possible ways I could be saving the world, the most efficient. Well, frankly, neither is writing this column, and sure as hell, neither is reading it. Why aren't both of us, right this second, raising money for Oxfam, or doing medical work in Chiapas, or assisting the scientists who are researching fusion power, or at least scribbling letters and placing phone calls to our congressmen? Why, furthermore, do I not think less of you for taking a break from these tasks, even if I later discover that your break has lasted since at least your birth, and by some estimates back to your earlier birth as Napolean Bonaporte, renowned inventor of a delicious flaked pastry?
Daniel Dennett, philosopher of science, offers in Darwin's Dangerous Idea the following demonstration of the power of the reasoning principle of "satisficing". Suppose, he asks, that you're part of a ten-person committee authorized to hire, for a prestigious and lucrative teaching post, the country's best new graduate in philosophy. Your rules require from each applying student the submission of course transcripts, a cover letter, and a portfolio of philosophical essays. Unfortunately, a month before the hiring decision is to be made, 100,000 applications have been received. How do you pick the "best"? How do you avoid some non-selected applicant making a very strong court-of-law demonstration that his credentials are far better than that of the person you end up choosing? Pause here to decide what selection strategy you would choose.
Most people, including me, come up with a quick multi-part process that starts by establishing some minimum cutoff; for example, only examine the transcripts of people above a 3.3 GPA, and perhaps only those who've kept their submission packet above a too-flimsy word count but below some unmanageably long one. From there, use a lottery to choose, say, 100 applications to consider in detail. Then choose the best of those hundred, feeling secure in having made at worst a _very good_ choice, and pray that none of the other 99,900 wants to sue. It's the kind of process the human mind is well-equipped to deal with; in fact, if we scan closer by one level, we can watch the committee meeting where the selection strategy is determined: where the chairman makes arbitrary decisions about how long to allow for brainstorming, which committee memebers are worth calling on, when to cut off debate, all in the hopes that even if the best idea is thus ignored or dismissed hastily, the one selected will work okay. One level closer, and Dennett notes the individual human mind considering actions in just the same way, wondering for a while whether to speak up but then deciding based on impulse and timing; allocating concentration between the task of formulating one's own speech and listening to the others, or between the meeting itself and the decision about how long to wait before calling for personal privilege and racing for the bathroom. Perfect information is the fantasy assumption of a Republican economics professor. Even after the fact, it's impossible to answer such seemingly basic questions as whether Hitler ought to have been stopped at Munich; without World War II, would we have Israel? The GI Bill and a middle class? Computers? A surviving planet that had never seen more than the first two bombs of a nuclear war?
We can't know; we can only use what information we can grab with the shortcuts that look handy. Maybe the best philosophy student in the country has a GPA of 3.15, but then, maybe hiring philosophy professors was not the maximal, ideal life course of some of the committee members. The problem is simply that every day each of us (you, me, Dennett) make short-term decisions that eliminate another thousand life courses from our realm of possiblity, and 997 of those we never even had a chance to consider before destroying. My current job is probably, the way I perform it, somewhat useful; my intended career of schoolteacher is supposed, I hope, to be quite useful and, for the occasional student at the right time, life-transforming. I also try to be a fun, attentive, provocative boyfriend, a supportive and generous best friend, a keeper of promises, and the sort of guest who washes dishes and mows lawns. With any luck it adds, against my occasional failures, obnoxiousness, tendency to break things, and tendency to only keep promises after several weeks of forgetfulness, to a nonnegative sum. But perhaps I was really supposed to run for president, or heal the sick through the power of George Michael's FAITH, or to teach the world to sing in perfect quantum-structured semi-dissonance. And I'm not really sure when, or even if, those futures went away.
The closest thing I have to a cause right now, not that this would have occurred to me without Dennett's help, is that I'm a nurterer of underprivileged memes. See, just as you, personally, are the product of a continuous line of grandchildren extending back two billion years to the first prokaryotes -- and are so despite the fact that fewer than 5% of all creatures leave grandchildren at all, so the odds against you existing are far beyond mere "astronomical", far beyond the weight of the universe divided by one proton -- any "meme" (genetics-speak for "idea") is, unless evidently and factually important, reliant on a continuous chain of people willing to pass it on. If Principia Mathematica hadn't been written, someone else would've written a similar book a few years later anyway, but the Eiffel Tower, the Canterbury Tales, Led Zeppelin IV, the phrase "gag me with a spoon", all of those were products of specific moments and people, and anyone who glances at/ reads/ listens to/ says them is doing so because the notion of doing so was passed along, again and again, like a chain letter. Memes, essentially, are parasites (often friendly ones, but with their own agendas) that reside in neurons instead of bodies, but die left in the cold. Plato's ideas did not survive simply because his physical books survived; actually, for hundreds of years, his books did _not_ survive, and they were pieced together later from found shards only because the ideas had been passed, in other forms, down dozens of generations. Whereas a Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers CD that no one listens to is not a meme, it's just nonbiodegradable.
Memes themselves are adopted using procedures of satisficing, of course. An idea is proposed by someone obscure, and the rest of us wait for it to be mentioned by the New York Times or Forbes or Women's Wear Daily, or for our friend at the bar to overhear it and rework the punchline, or for its recording to be reviewed in Spin or played on FM 101.4. We wait, of course, because we don't have time to check out every notion that might interest us. We _can_ wait, because life in modern society encourages people in search of life purposes to specialize in knowing a large amount about a tiny and narrow topic. It can work very well for everyone; as long, of course, as the people who do the filtering do a good job, in their initial cuts, of narrowing the field; as long as their equivalent of "pick the best GPA's with the right-sized submission packets" doesn't exclude most everyone we'd care about. The lottery, to make the second cut (the New York Times can't print every suggestion even _after_ it eliminates crackpots and feminists and non-Ivy Leaguers from consideration), is also just great, as long as we can settle for any of a hundred good ideas, not need the best. Generally, we can, exceptions like the Cuban Missile Crisis and global warming notwithstanding.
But I'm a skeptical rascal, and I like to see what the first and second cutoffs eliminated, just to know and share. If I wrote a political column, I'd keep alive (and explain in detail) the notion of eliminating prisons in favor of a high-tech equivalent of public isolation in the Puritan "stocks"; the notion of passing a constitutional amendment in which all elected officers from next election on would take vows of poverty, and all current representatives would awarded $30 million each plus a permanent tax exemption to vote for it and retire; the notion of every major city building busy, rapid train systems that have exciting plunges and loop-de-loops so people would actually want to ride them. The ideas might be terrible, of course, but as long as I advocate them, they're out there, with a theoretical chance to reproduce.
Instead, though, I focus on music. The meme selection processes of music and politics have one similarity to interest me: that right now I think they suck. Sure, in music, they don't have to. I remember that my four favorite records of 1991 (ACHTUNG BABY!, NEVERMIND, OUT OF TIME, and METALLICA) all went to #1 on the album sales chart. But that was one trend, and the current situation where watching 120 Minutes two weeks running was enough to scare me away for at least the next year is another. Right now, if you let the standard selection procedures dictate your listening, the only melodies containing more than two notes that will be available to you are going to be love songs mouthed by Backstreet Boys clones, or id blasts by three-chord Beige Day ripoffs. I'm being cranky and exaggerating, and I know it, but the simple fact is that the grandest pretension to thought on the CMJ Music chart this week goes "life is unfair/ kill yourself, or get over it", and I heard exactly three songs I liked in two weeks of watching a "college rock" show that once consisted almost entirely of good music, back when "college" wasn't being defined by reigning demographers as "fraternities on probation". I would be fascinated by obscure bands anyway, because there was always an element of inevitable coin-flippery in Sheryl Crow being famous and Rachel Sage being unknown (stage two: lottery). That's the grand purpose, if there is one, in what I do: leaving appeal room for luck's verdicts, because far fewer artists can get good luck than the number who deserve it. But now, in music, meme preservation ain't just my cause, it's self-defense.
Part Two: In which Smash Mouth's album ASTRO LOUNGE is mentioned and discussed
To say I liked three songs in two weeks of 120 Minutes is to be generous in the definition of "liked". However, give the show this credit; I'm now $10 poorer for having watched, because of Smash Mouth's "All-Star". I had my doubts about Smash Mouth, now. "Walking On The Sun", from debut FUSH YU MANG, was by my lights a marvelous pop single: slinkily propulsive drum machine beat, sparkling Farfisa organ, an energized spew of sing-speak from a good-naturedly bratty voice proclaiming the sort of skepticism that barely hides the unfashionable hippie idealism beneath, and a chorus designed to undo a dozen ad jingles in a stroke. The album contained twelve other songs for, essentially, the same reason that twelve-step programs have ten other steps besides
- Acknowledge the full depths of your problem publicly, underestimating nothing.
- Cure it.
I hereby proclaim ASTRO LOUNGE to be fifteen more songs kinda like "Walking…" -- and in a good way, where there's enough variety to make each of the fifteen another useful addition to the canon. "Who's There?" adds Moog noises and a misemphasized beat to the relaxed organ/guitar/bass/drums formula. "Diggin' Your Scene"'s hectic Keno-machine beats suggest some listening to "jungle" music, the first major hook sculpts a cheery buzzsaw tune, and Harliwell's voice sets its own percussive hook ("Said! youreplayinwithmy Head! andIcouldsplitin Stead!"). "I Just Wanna See", my choice for follow-up single, brings in xylophone and Hawaiian guitar and emphasizes the pop over the rap aspects of Harliwell's singing. "Satellite"'s version of reggae floats into a spy-movie vamp decorated with tropicalia lite, while "Road Man"'s reggae is roots enough to be Bob Marley and the Wailers in party mood, and "Home" expands on the Wailers' creepier approaches to dub. "Stoned" has reggae bass soundwaves filtered through an isolation tank, but the Farfisa and church organ are playing march tempo. "Radio" races through an improbable and compelling quick-change of major and minor chords. "Come On" brings in chukka-chukka guitars, scratchy dropouts, and brush drums. "Defeat You" brings in absolute simplicity: backbeat plus fingered bass plus a sing-along "Heeee-eeey" equals hit song.
All of these will be useless, frankly, if you don't enjoy the original style of Smash Mouth radio: if cheezy semi-punk semi-earnest semi-tunes can't be your thing no matter how much panache they're delivered with. But for potential converts, only "Then The Morning Comes" genuinely approaches clonedom, and it's outweighed, I think, by the stylistic departures on "Fallen Horses" (like the results of a time-reversed sequence in which Martin Denny's lounge-exotica band covered the Human League's version of XTC's sweetly evasive "Chalkhills and Children") and "Waste" (a blurry acoustic guitar and vibes piece with minor key vocals apparently relayed by cell phone). Greg Camp has clearly decided -- satisficed, unless you assume he spent his formative years visiting career workshops twice a day -- for a current life purpose of enjoying himself, be it "A planet on the go/ it's okay just watching the weeds grow/ and if you listen really hard/ the earth she hums" or "We're all right/ we're just getting high". He's also, as his good deed, enabling others to do the same. "Whatcha gonna do when opportunity knocks/ when success stalks, and along comes fame? Do you open the door, or watch in horror through the peephole/ as they all go away?". Greg Camp writes hit songs and asks, implicitly, why we're doing work instead of joining him. I'm not sure, if he'd scanned all his possible lives, that he'd have found a better one.
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