Thanks to the internets and the wonder of ever-increasing connectivity and what not, everyone can listen to the band that is the best all the time. This means that no one is listening to any of the other bands because they suck. Kanye and Beyonce and Kanye and Beyonce and also, maybe Metallica, I guess, on constant rotation, with Mick Jagger gagging, “Start me up!” as his ancient bony bits spurt ever new shiny new quality product.
Anyway, here’s a graph, showing that the most popular graphs are getting ever more of the clicks.
See? Just looking at that graph makes you hipper and more content-optimized.
But…does it? Just because it is the graph that all the wonks are looking at until other graphs turn green with envy and their trend lines droop with despair — does that mean that it is really the best of all possible graphs?
The answer is, shockingly, no. People look at the graph they look at just because that is the graph people look at. It doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the graph, or the freshness of Mick Jagger’s spurting. Here is a graph showing that that 1 Elvis fans is right only in the sense that he or she has correctly identified the website where the 49 million other Elvis fans hang out.
In short, I could be Andrew Sullivan if I’d just supported the Iraq war at the right time.
Neil Irwin, whose graphs I stole, quotes Alan Krueger who is an economist and therefore has succeeded entirely by merit explaining that he is shocked (in a low-key way that won’t damage his brand) to learn that art is not about quality despite the sterling example of Tom Petty.
“In addition to talent, arbitrary factors can lead to success or failure, like whether another band happens to release a more popular song than your band at the same time,” said Krueger. “The difference between a Sugar Man, a Dylan and a Post Break Tragedy depends a lot more on luck than is commonly acknowledged.”
Mathematically, Dylan’s Dylan not because he’s great but because a bunch of people stochastically tuned in and everyone else dropped on after. We’re all just basically sheep slipping on the hillside and bathing our sheep ears in giant wads of everyone else’s sheep shit.
Or that’s one interpretation. Another possibility, though, is that we’re not quite as dumb as those sheep — or, perhaps, those sheep aren’t as dumb as we are. Or, at least, when we are together with the sheep, we revel in the earthy sheep power of bathing in shit together. We may be sliding down that hill, but it’s by choice.
This is somewhere in the vicinity of what Paul Lauter argues in his essay “Class, Caste, and Canon” (1981/87). Lauter starts his essay by talking about one time he was sitting listening to a feminist literary crit collective, as you end up doing sometimes when you’re a lefty literary critic, and they started to analyze a poem by Adrienne Rich, because all feminist literary crit collectives analyze poems by Adrienne Rich, and/or by Beyonce, depending. Lauter assures us that he likes Adrienne Rich (and/or Beyonce), but, he says, why always this thing? Why always the standard of meritocratic excellence and formal beauty? Why not instead follow in the well-worn boots of the working class, and embrace art that speaks to communal enthusiasms and needs and desires? Working class art, he says, is valuable because of its use [his italics] in the lives of the proletariat. Art is not to loose anarchy or Yeats, but to bind us together so we can overcome and love one another right now. It’s the song, not the singer.
These days, of course, the proletariat is exponentially less likely to be listening to Roll Jordan Roll than to be watching American Idol or the Voice where hopefully they’re not singing Roll, Jordan, Roll. But whose to say that the change is for the worse? After all, if the point of art is the community that it fosters, then it seems like any community will do. What does it matter if you’re singing authentic volk songs or reading Adrienne Rich or watching Mad Men with a billion friends on Twitter? The point is the use as communal totem. People aren’t confused when they choose the most popular graph as the best graph. On the contrary, they’ve got it just right. Art makes a culture a culture, and it does that by being the culture you take as your culture. Who can buck the trend when the trend is the trend?
There are sub-trends of course, and subcultures, whether built around Dr. Who or Foucault or Richard Linklater or (as Lauter would presumably have it) work songs and sea shanties. The polite fiction is that we enter communities of culture because of what we like, but that’s just a way of inserting ourselves into the algorithm whereby our art sells our community back to us as ourselves. “Quality” is a ghost that haunts our skulls; a mirage we worship like a mirror. The Internet’s just given us a bigger frame on which to be somebody, too.
I remember watching this one video with Jay-Z and he heard this beat and he said “Oh, I’m gonna have to break out the young Jay-Z for this one.”
I imagine Noah said something similar when he started writing this post.
I’ve got 99 problems, but an audience isn’t one.
Your sarcasm in the first para is deliberately obtuse, pretending that you don’t understand statistics. If we take the graph just at face value — i.e. we suppose that the graph identifies a genuine empirical trend in the distribution of ticket revenue — and this post gives us zero reason to think otherwise — it shows that the trend has been to concentrate more and more ticket revenue in fewer artists. The facetious fact that you and I don’t spend all our time listening to the top 1% is neither here nor there; it’s as though you responded to similar data showing increasing income inequality by pointing out that you still have some money. Well, duh.
Once again, it turns out that people with whom you disagree believe the dopiest, straw-maniest, most idiotic shit possible. I do wish that from time to time you would grant your opponents even a fraction of the charitability with which you interpret, say, Christian theologians. But maybe it really is the case that the rest of us are total morons — after all, being one such moron myself, I could hardly be expected to recognize my own moronicity.
…and another thing. I don’t understand the last few paras, but it seems to imply that when you tell us that the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman is great (I agree!) and Jaime is mediocre at best (I disagree!), you’re neither responding to the “”Quality”” of the work, nor even expressing what you like, but trying to foster a community, or something? In which case, I’m not sure why anyone should pay your claims any attention if it looks like you’re fostering a community of one? But, as I say, I don’t understand what you’re saying.
If you’d read Berlatsky in any detail you’d understand that there is simply no basis for criticizing Christian theologians, or Christian anything, from outside the Christian tribe.
If pointing out that popularity and quality have no clear relationship, whether posited by Adorno or Milton Friedman, offends the rationalist aesthete so deeply, he may need to double-check his atheism and make sure he hasn’t started worshipping fair Beauty herself.
I have to admit I found this post a bit confusing. If the communal aspect of art is useful in and of itself, isn’t this a repudiation of criticism and running any further reviews on this web site?
And is Noah repudiating his earlier writings blasting Marvel and DC’s modern output? What could be more communal- and thus more inherently fulfilling, than going to the comic book store every Wednesday to see who Wolverine is fighting this week?
Bert, I don’t see how pursuing some kind of standard beyond the likes and dislikes of a community is inherently theist. If I admit the destructive power of a volcano, it doesn’t follow that the logical course of action is to throw virgins down its gullet. Religion = anthropomorphism.
Jones, I feel certain your lack of sarcasm is deliberately obtuse. I say unto you that this is a quality post, rich in ambiguity and nether meanings. Contemplating it should fill you not with one perspective, but with all, like a Shakespeare sonnet wrapped in a Wolverine comic and tied up with Emerson.
Also…I don’t listen to Kanye, really, but I do in fact listen to Beyonce. And even the Rolling Stones and Dylan on occasion. My community is everybody’s community, damn it.
“Religion = anthropomorphism”
Some Buddhists are going to be awfully confused.
Worship is a word which means what it means. Look not into beauty, lest beauty look also into you.
I also appreciate the multi-layered ambiguity whereby the defenders of art feign upset at my multivocal lack of consistency, and/or ambiguity.
What would you call dodging questions by invoking this pantheon of deities?
Re the art of algorithm, I encourage you to study the graphs up above.
Wait, am I to understand that popular music is popular because it captures the popular imagination? Or are we arguing that it captures the popular attention?
If you blame the volcano for being an inconsistent mountain, rather than a glorious spout of magma, the virgins might look at you sideways, is all.
“Once again, it turns out that people with whom you disagree believe the dopiest, straw-maniest, most idiotic shit possible.”
Jones, I should stop…but it’s hard not to appreciate the irony with which you tongue in cheek place the least charitable possible interpretation on my argument by accusing me of putting the least charitable possible interpretation on the arguments of my interlocutors.
Nate; the argument is that it doesn’t capture anything, except insofar as your attention has to be somewhere. There has to be a hit song that people want to listen to because they like listening to songs that are hits. What that song is matters less than that it is.
Reiterate fractally at various levels of hipness.
I…this whole thread makes me feel like Herc in that scene in the wire where’s he all like “oh, so they call him little Kevin even though he’s a big guy?” Who–what–I can’t even tell if my own comment is facetious now. Whose words are these I’m speaking? Am I a rationalist aesthete?* Am I one of the virgins or the spouting magma? Am I a blogger dreaming he is a butterfly, or just a dickhead with a keyboard**?
* Answer: clearly not
** Answer: clearly the latter
Noah’s response materializes my imagined misunderstanding. Having said that, I appreciate the attention.
As to songs that are, none of this will help me cope with hearing “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Margaritaville” in public spaces.
I’m really sorry I missed the Jaime aesthetic essay, Jones. It’s solely because I don’t really give a fig for the Hernandezzes, and so therefore denied myself a delightful disquisition on anthropomorphic ice cream. Parochialism be damned!!!
I think I’ve read this article on Slate.
1. Alarming Chart
2. Long (bonus: confusing) description of Alarming Chart
3. Quotes from experts on ideas the author claims are new and radical even though they are mostly common-sense and obvious
4. The author explains how the Alarming Chart is not Alarming at all, but something we should expect and even something good.
5. With reader egos stroked and reader alarm laid to rest, we all continue happily into a bright future of loving the status quo, which leads us to:
6. Profit
It’s weird to see an article like this about aesthetics though; usually they are pop sociology or biology or psychology.
“I think I’ve read this article on Slate. ”
Irwin’s article? Or mine?
Just some general variation on the format of this article.
Ah, okay.
I think mine has more references to sheep poop than Slate articles usually do though.
The auteur spirit.