A musician friend of mine was once seeing the best friend of a famous heiress and he told me this story: “I had been dating her for a month and one night she invited me out to go meet her whole crew for the first time. I was SUPER nervous. Meeting the group of friends of someone you’re dating for the first time can be nerve-racking anyway, but especially if they are like…. that. I drove there and I was standing outside like, ‘OK… I need to get my shit straight and go in there and own this place.’ All of a sudden it hit me: ‘Channel your inner Tony Stark!’” It worked, he said, “Game over.”

Hearing this story, I wondered, who was my inner spirit superheroine? What clever badass would I conjure for existential ammo in a situation like this? I started searching my mental pop culture database for an acceptable candidate and this is when I realized I could barely think of a single one. The only two vaguely applicable options coming to mind were both from a decade ago: Buffy foremost, and, more hazily, Trinity. But Buffy’s final episode had aired, and Trinity had devolved from enigma to boring love interest saved by her boyfriend at the end of the Matrix trilogy, both back in 2003. As far as contemporary, mainstream, pop culture was concerned, there was a giant void.

I turned to the Internet for help, and found a list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters, compiled by Total Film. While not exactly rigorous in its methodology (fully 6% of the list’s alleged 100 greatest female characters are not actually human; 3 — Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, Lady from Lady and the Tramp, and Dory from Finding Nemo — aren’t even humanoid), the audit is, at the very least… directional. Narrowing the list down to just those heroines who’ve graced the big screen within the past 10 years (minus the non-human entries) the chronological order looks like this:

• #7: Hermine Granger (Harry Potter series – 2001 to 2011)
• #45: Paikea Apirana (Whale Rider – 2002)
• #65: Lee Holloway (Secretary – 2002)
• #8: The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill – 2003 to 2004)
• #44 Charlotte (Lost In Translation – 2003)
• #4 Clementine Kruczynski (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – 2004)
• #43 Ofelia (Pan’s Labyrinth – 2006)
• #99 Cherry Darling (Planet Terror – 2007)
• #11 Eli (Let the Right One In – 2008)
• #30 Kym (Rachel Getting Married – 2008)
• #13 Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – 2009 t0 2011)
• #36 Older Daughter (Dogtooth – 2009)
• #38 Mia Williams (Fish Tank – 2009)
• #26 Nina Sayers (Black Swan – 2010)
• #40 Mindy “Hit Girl” Macready (Kick-Ass – 2010)

Among these 15 possible spirit superhoreine candidates there are 6 victims of sexual abuse, 3 are dealing with some form of depression, 4 haven’t hit puberty, 2 are addicts — including one vampire — and, most notably, a full third who would sooner slaughter a party than charm it. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis observed this trend last year, writing:

It’s no longer enough to be a mean girl, to destroy the enemy with sneers and gossip: you now have to be a murderous one. That, at any rate, seems to be what movies like Hanna, Sucker Punch, Super, Let Me In, Kick-Ass and those flicks with that inked Swedish psycho-chick seem to be saying. One of the first of these tiny terrors was played by the 12-year-old Natalie Portman in Luc Besson’s neo-exploitation flick The Professional (1994). Her character, a cigarette-smoking, wife-beater-wearing Lolita, schooled by a hit man, was a pint-size version of the waif turned assassin in Mr. Besson’s Femme Nikita (1990), which spawned various imitators. Mr. Besson likes little ladies with big weapons. As does Quentin Tarantino and more than a few Japanese directors, including Kinji Fukasaku, whose 2000 freakout, Battle Royale, provided the giggling schoolgirl who fights Uma Thurman’s warrior in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Mr. Tarantino and his celebrated love of the ladies of exploitation has something to do with what’s happening on screens. Yet something else is going on…. The question is why are so many violent girls and women running through movies now.

That question is particularly pointed since this genre is not exactly blockbuster material. Hanna was only slightly profitable. Sucker Punch flopped, as did Haywire and the Besson-produced, Colombiana; both Kick-Ass and Let Me In were “gore-athons that movieplexers don’t want to see,” and, in spite of all its hype, the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a “huge box office disappointment.” And that’s all just in the past two years.

In an April, 2011, New Yorker article titled, “Funny Like A Guy, Anna Faris and Hollywood’s Women Problem,” Tad Friend wrote:

Female-driven comedies such as Juno, Mean Girls, The House Bunny, Julie & Julia, Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and Easy A have all done well at the box office. So why haven’t more of them been made? “Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, observes. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack was in it,’ or ‘We hadn’t had a comedy for older women in forever.”

Amy Pascal, who as Sony’s cochairman put four of the above films into production, points out, “You’re talking about a dozen or so female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view. “Let’s be honest,” one top studio executive said. “The decision to make movies is mostly made by men, and if men don’t have to make movies about women, they won’t.”

Except, it seems, if those women happen to be traumatized, ultra-violent vigilantes of some sort. Perhaps these movies keep getting made because their failure is seen as a one-off every time, too.

“Men just don’t understand the nuance of female dynamics,” Friend quotes an anonymous, prominent producer. Although the conversation is about comedy (why men can’t relate to Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones, for example), it could explain why all these vengeful heroines seem to inevitably wind up defective. This violent femmes sub-genre — which expands the traditional Rape/Revenge archetype to also encompass psychologically violated prepubescents — by default demands female protagonists. But since their creators don’t understand how to make them, they stick to what they know. Consider that the title role in Salt was originally named Edwin, and intended for Tom Cruise before she became Evelyn and went to Angelina Jolie. The emotionally stunted, socially inept, tech savant protagonists of David Fincher’s two latest films — male in The Social Network, female in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — are equally as interchangeable. From Hannah to Hit Girl, all the way back to Matilda in The Professional, it’s always been a father, or father figure who’s trained them. A woman, this narrative suggests, would have nothing to offer in raising a powerful daughter. When a film needs a Violent Femme the solution has become to simply write a man, and then cast a girl. (Failing that, just mix up a cocktail of disorders — Asperger’s, attachment disorder, PTSD; a splash of Stockholm Syndrome — where a character needs to be.) No understanding of female dynamics required.

“What if the person you expect to be the predator is not who you expect it to be? What if it’s the other person,” asks producer, David W. Higgins, on the DVD featurette for his 2005 film, Hard Candy, about a 14-year-old girl, played by Ellen Paige, who blithely brutalizes a child molester. Whereas for 20th century heroines like Princess Leia (#5 on Total Film’s 100 Greatest Female Characters), Sarah Connor (#3), or Ellen Ripley (#1 — of course), not to mention their brethren, overcoming trauma is what made them become heroes, for this new crop, trauma is what excuses them from seeming like villains in their own right. We love to see the underdog triumph, but do we really want to watch a victim become the predator, and a predator become the hero? The ongoing failures of films fetishizing this scenario suggest we’re just not that into this cognitive dissonance.

So much for movies no one wants to see, but what about those those every girl has? On the one hand there’s Twilight, whose Bella Swan is a dishrag of a damsel in distress so useless her massive popularity is a disturbing, cultural atavism. On the other, there’s the Harry Potter series, whose Hermione Granger (#7) might be “The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For,” according to Laura Hibbard in the Huffington Post. “The early books were full of her eagerly answering question after question in class, much to the annoyance of the other characters. In the later books, that unapologetic intelligence very obviously saves Harry Potter’s life on more than one occasion. Essentially, without Hermione, Harry wouldn’t have been ‘the boy who lived.’” Meanwhile, here’s how Total Film describes Leia: “Royalty turned revolutionary, a capital-L Lady with a laser gun in her hand. Cool, even before you know she also has Jedi blood.”

And that is the one, simple, yet infinitely complex element that is consistently missing across the entire spectrum of stiff, 21st century downers: Cool. “Of all the comic books we published at Marvel,” said Stan Lee, the creator of Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and more, “we got more fan mail for Iron Man from women than any other title.” Cool is the platonic ideal Tony Stark represents. It’s what makes him such an effective spirit superhero for the ordeal of party. But while Stark may be special he’s not an anomaly. From James Bond to Tyler Durden, male characters Bogart the cool. And it’s not because they’re somehow uniquely suited for it (see: the femme fatale). It’s because their contemporary female counterparts are consistently forced to be lame.

“You have to defeat her at the beginning,” Tad Friend quotes a successful female screenwriter describing her technique. “It’s a conscious thing I do — abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry fifteen minutes into the movie.” That could just as easily describe Bridesmaids as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Which is totally fucked, first of all. And secondly, it’s boring. You’d think there’d be more narrative to go around — though I suppose I did just see the once female-driven Carrie, and The Craft remade as an all-male superhero origin flick called, Chronicle. Perhaps we really have reached Peak Plot. In which case now would really be the time to be R&Ding some alternatives.

“I love to take reality and change one little aspect of it, and see how reality then shifts.” said director, Jon Favreau. “That was what was fun about Iron Man, you [change] one little thing, and how does that affect the real world?” Favreau’s experiment has yielded a superhero archetype that reflects a slew of Millennial mores, from the intimacy of his relationship with his gadgets, to his eschew of a secret identity in favor of that uniquely post-digital virtue of radical transparency, to his narcissism. “If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’” I wrote in a post titled, Why Iron Man is the First 21st Century Superhero, “Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun. Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.” Breaking with the established conventions of the genre to create a uniquely modern superhero has made Iron Man a success, to the tune of a billion dollar box office between the two movies, and launched Marvel Studios and ensuing Avengers’ franchises in its wake. But there’s one 21st century shift Tony Stark will never be able to embody. And it’s kind of a big one.

From The Atlantic Magazine:

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.

In the wreckage of the Great Recession, three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood.

To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.

Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.

That view makes even comedian (and father of two daughters) Louis C.K.’s pronouncement in a recent Fast Company article that “The next Steve Jobs will  be a chick” not unimaginable. And when she is, who will be her inner superheroine? Any of the girls brandishing medieval weaponry headed, like crusaders, for movie theaters this year?

Considering the cruel, dystopian premise of The Hunger Games, Katniss will likely get to have as fun as an overachiever prepping for the SATs. And while Kristen Stewart as persecuted maiden turned, apparently, warrior in Snow White and the Huntsman (whose producer previously suited up Alice for battle in Wonderland) couldn’t possibly be more joyless and blank than as Bella (….right??), my money’s on Brave‘s Merida to win in the the flat out cool department, here:

Either way, while Tony Stark is an archetype boys grow into, the above are all manifestations of one girls grow out of, and when they do, they will expect their own spirit superheroine to aspire to. Someone who doesn’t have to be brutalized to be a badass, or a predator to be a hero. Someone clever and charming and cool as fuck, whom you’d just as soon want to party with as have saving the world; who’s faced the dark forces that don’t understand her and threaten to break her and strip her of her dignity, and, like the century of superheroes before her, has overcome. The next 21st century superhero will be a chick. The girls coming for the 21st century won’t be satisfied with anything less.

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Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience:

…and making fun of people who don’t already use Macs:

Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, their induced first-person perspective, (the people in the photos always seem to be seated in some awkward position in order to give us, the viewers, the perspective of being the “user” in the image), and above all, the blatantly basic depiction of the product experience — just don’t quite fit with the image of what an Apple ad is supposed to be.

If these ads seem like a departure, it’s because they are.

In the 60′s, Everett Rogers broke down the process by which trends, products, and ideas proliferate through culture. There are five basic types of adopter personas in his diffusion of innovation theory:

Innovators are the first to adopt an innovation. They are, by defualt, risk-takers since being on the front lines means they are likely to adopt a technology or an idea which may ultimately fail. Early Adopters are the second fastest category to adopt an innovation. They’re more discrete in their adoption choice than Innovators, but have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Individuals in the Early Majority adopt an innovation after having let the Innovators and Early adopters do product-testing for them. The Late Majority approaches an innovation with a high degree of skepticism, and after the majority of society has already adopted the innovation first. And finally, Laggards are the last to get on board with a new innovation. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents, tend to be advanced in age, and to be focused on “traditions.”

The thinking in marketing, especially when launching a new product, generally tends to be about aiming at the early adopters over on the left side of the adoption bell-curve. Once the early adopters get into it, the thinking goes, whatever it is will trickle down through all the rest of the early and late majority who make up the vast bulk of the market share. A few years back I wrote about how Nintendo was going for a “late adopter strategy” with its Wii console. At the time (and perhaps still now) the Wii was outselling both Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s X-box combined. The Wii’s uniquely simple controller and intuitive game-play enabled it to appeal to a much broader audience than the more complicated, hardcore-gaming consoles.

From a Time Magazine article on the eve of the Wii release in 2006:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.

The key to the Wii’s success is that it made gaming simple, broadly accessible, and inherently intuitive. Later that year, AdAge wrote that the Wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children.”

Anyone who has bought, or even used, an iPhone at some point during the three years since the first iteration was released, already understands what the iPad is all about without any help from an ad. Indeed, Apple has done such a good  job of making ads aimed at early adopters for the past decade, they no longer need to. An ad is not going to make a difference in whether someone on the left-hand side of Apple’s adopter bell-curve buys an iPad or not. Instead, these ads are targeted straight at the people on the downhill slope.

New results from a Pew Research Center survey tracking 2,252 adults 18 and older show that use of social network sites among older adults has risen dramatically over the past two years:

While overall social networking use by online American adults has grown from 35% in 2008 to 61% in 2010, the increase is even more dramatic among older adults. The rate of online social networking approximately quadrupled among Older Boomers (9% to 43%) and the GI Generation (4% to 16%).

Of course, Millennials still have a healthy lead among all age groups in social network use, with 83% of online adults from 18-33 engaging in social networking, but grandma and grandpa are just catching up. Particularly grandma. Last year, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women over 55.

Unlike the Apple ads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2000′s, these iPad ads are no longer touting the product’s “higher resolution experience” to digital natives. That is, they are not emphasizing the ephemeral or smugly superior subtleties that are inaccessible to anyone who does not intuitively “get it.” These ads are, instead, paring the experience down to be as unintimidating as possible. Not only is the iPad a completely new way to experience personal computing, it is as effortless to use this technology, the ads say to you, the viewer, as if you were, yourself, a digital native.

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You know what, Skyy? I’ve always found your ads amusing in the past. The pineapple one was a study in optical double entendre excellence. And, of course, the twin cherry ad was an instant classic. I may be a Grey Goose, or, failing that, Ketel One girl, myself, but  a preference for understated sophistication when it comes to vodka doesn’t mean I can’t still appreciate a well-done bit of innuendo.

This latest ad, however, just peeped this morning on the subway, of a giant Skyy bottle inserted up a girl’s cooch, has veered straight past entertainingly sexy and into downright rapey territory. This makes your brand seem like the preferred choice for sex offenders. Is that the idea, Skyy? If not….

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Do you like Reggaeton?

This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.

If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:

A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American youth in the early 1990s, and, after mainstream exposure in 2004,  spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton blends the West-Indian music influences of reggae and dancehall with those of Latin America, such as bomba, plena, salsa, merengue, latin pop, cumbia and bachata as well as that of hip hop, contemporary R&B, and electronica, combined with rapping or singing in Spanish. While it takes influences from hip hop and Jamaican dancehall, it would be wrong to define reggaeton as the Hispanic or Latino version of either of these genres; reggaeton has its own specific beat and rhythm, whereas Latino hip hop is simply hip hop recorded by artists of Latino descent. Reggaeton’s origins represent a hybrid of many different musical genres and influences from various countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The genre of reggaeton however is most closely associated with Puerto Rico, as this is where the musical style became most famous, and where the vast majority of its current stars originated.

Here’s an example, Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe”:

I’d heard the term, Reggaeton, out at certain parties in L.A., but I didn’t really know what it was until KXOL-FM relaunched in 2005 as Latino 96.3, bringing the Reggaeton format to the airwaves. After a while, I’d been finding myself stopping the dial scan every so often at 96.3 to catch the end of some song even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics. My answer to my friend at the time was  that I didn’t think I’d heard it enough to fully like it yet, but I probably would.  It didn’t occur to me until my friend pointed it out, that it was a strange way to respond to a question of music taste.

Not too long after I fist started going to raves, back in high school, I discovered Jungle. If you don’t know what Jungle is, it’s a type of electronic dance music which emerged in the mid 1990′s as an offshoot of the UK rave scene. Encompassing drum and bass, oldschool jungle, and ragga,  the genre is characterized by fast breakbeats (typically between 160–190 bpm) and heavy sub-bass lines.

Here’s an example, Aphrodite’s “Bomber Style:”

When I discovered Jungle, I had only just gotten into a relationship with hip hop a few years prior, when I started 9th grade at a public, urban high school, and then fallen into the questionable companionship of entry-level rave trance (a la Paul Oakenfold, etc.), so when I first heard this stuff, it sounded way too fuckin’ cacophanous and chaotic and fast and just plain weird. I distinctly remember a time when I just didn’t get Jungle. I didn’t get how to understand it. I didn’t get how to like it. And I sure as hell didn’t get how to dance to it. Then my best friend at the time, who’d been going to raves before I started, and had once been a ballerina, showed me. You just had to move a different way. You had to get onto a different rhythm. And as soon as I figure it out, I started to really like, and then just completely LOVE Jungle. By the time I’d started hearing Reggaeton, I knew from past experience that if I listened long enough to start to understand the sound, I would come to like it.

It turns out the line between being unfamiliar with something, and not liking it is very slim, indeed. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the Aeron chair, which would eventually redefine the entire office chair category, was originally despised and deemed ugly when it was first market tested. The Aeron was a complete departure from the office chair norm, and didn’t mesh with the prevailing cultural proclivities for seating comfort in general (think: La-Z-Boy recliner). But after two years, the Aeron became the most popular chair in Herman Miller history, and the most widely imitated office chair in general. How did something that was once considered ugly become beautiful?

Gladwell writes:

Office chairs in people’s minds had a certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The Aeron chair of course isn’t. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for “different.” The people reporting their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it…. Buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us time to understand that we actually like them.

The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.

And perhaps nowhere is that nervousness more acute, or that distinction more obscure than when it comes to music.

In his recent New York Times piece about Pandora, the internet radio application based on the Music Genome Project, which decodes the essential components of songs as though they were bits of genetic information and suggests new music users might like based on strictly auditory criteria, author Rob Walker (whose book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, I’ve written about a quite a bit last year) references neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music:

Much depends on culture. Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

By the time I was six years old, 85% of the music I had heard was classical violin. My mother is a violinist, and when I was younger, performed with many orchestras and symphonies, both in the former Soviet Union, and then in Boston, where I grew up after we emigrated. She has also been teaching violin for longer than I’ve been alive, and as a child the sound violins was so constant and ubiquitous around the house that I developed the capacity, which I retain to this day, to sleep right through an afternoon full of violin lessons going on around me. The other 15% of the music of my early childhood consisted of Russian folk-rock music by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky (imagine a  Russian sort of Bob Dylan — in fact, the genre Vysotsky defined is precisely what Gogol Bordello is currently perpetrating as a zany new indie sound, which I gotta say is pretty freakin’ weird to witness.) I didn’t really start hearing ANYTHING even remotely in the vicinity of contemporary popular American music until I got to the U.S. (by that time I was almost 7), in large part due to the efforts of the Soviet government to achieve that goal.

Anyway, the point is, the music that I was acculturated to became wholly irrelevant in the new culture I found myself in just at the moment when I had become an “expert listener.” When everything sounds dissonant, nothing sounds dissonant. Not any more dissonant than anything else, anyway. I suspect, much in the same way new languages become a lot easier to learn if you’d had to learn a new one when you were little, new music sounds and genres, for me anyway, are a lot easier to learn to understand, and ultimately appreciate because of this history. It’s why the question “What kind of music do you like?” has always made me uncomfortable. I have watched as other people draw on instantly accessible answers, but for me, sentences like  “I like hip hop” or “I like electronic music,” have become learned responses, like fragments memorized from a phrase-book for emergencies in a foreign country. The answer to that question is never really about what kind of music you happen to find structurally, acoustically, or thematically appealing, anyway. No, what that question is actually asking is: “What kind of music do your friends like?”

As Walker writes:

It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

One of my co-workers, a married dude, loves the Calvin Harris station on Pandora, which is basically straight up Gay House (that’s Gay House as in the music genre, not the epithet). Were the station defined by its cultural information, as opposed to strictly by sound, it’s much more probable he’d simply assume this wasn’t for him, and not venture any further. Which, as Walker writes, raises some interesting questions:

Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

What Pandora’s system largely ignores is, in a word, taste. The way that [Pandora founder Tim] Westergren might put this is that it minimizes the influence of other people’s taste. Music-liking becomes a matter decided by the listener, and the intrinsic elements of what is heard. Early on, Westergren actually pushed for the idea that Pandora would not even reveal who the artist was until the listener asked. He thought maybe that structure would give users a kind of permission to evaluate music without even the most minimal cultural baggage. “We’re so insecure about our tastes,” he says.

(Or as Gladwell might put it, “nervous.”)

While his partners talked him out of that approach, 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.

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.”

Much as cultural information attaches to music, music attaches information to culture. Piggybacked like parasites onto unwitting sound-waves are all manner of cultural and identity definitions. The “What music do you like?” question is also intended to be responded to as: “What scene are you in?” After all, you don’t just like hip hop or punk or emo, you ARE hip hop or punk or emo.  And even with mainstream artists, saying you’re a fan of Garth Brooks or Adam Lambert or Muse or Jay-Z is more than simply giving an example of the sort of musical style you enjoy, it’s an admission of your cultural affiliation, of your individual and social identity.

As Walker writes:

The cliché that our musical tastes are generally refined in our teens and solidify by our early 20s seems largely to be true. For better or worse, peers frequently have a lot to do with that. Levitin recalled to me having moved at age 14 and falling in with a new set of friends who listened to music he hadn’t heard before. “The reason I like Queen — and I love Queen — is that I was introduced to Queen by my social group,” he says. He’s not saying that the intrinsic qualities of the music are irrelevant, and he says Pandora has done some very clever and impressive things in its approach. But part of what we like is, in fact, based on cultural information. “To some degree we might say that personality characteristics are associated with, or predictive of, the kind of music that people like,” he has written. “But to a large degree it is determined by more or less chance factors: where you went to school, who you hung out with, what music they happened to be listening to.”

Basically, what “scene” you were in. And social groups tend to very easily become self-selecting, especially online. In a recent NPR story, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines,” social media researcher danah boyd talks about the findings she’d first brought to light two years ago on the way the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into self-segregated communities: “The fact is that young people, and for the most part adults as well, don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. And when you have environments in which people are divided by race, they’re divided by class, they’re divided by lifestyle, when they go online, those are also who they’re going to interact with,” says boyd.

As I have long asserted, myself, from my contrasting experiences in the worlds of independent music and corporate marketing, boyd suggests that one of the reasons so many business analysts are writing off Myspace is because THEY don’t belong to the social groups that use it. “Millions of daily users are still logging in [to Myspace],” she says, “and it’s really interesting how many people in very privileged environments know not a single one of them.”

In his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” Nicholas Carr talks about this exact phenomenon, and sees a far darker possible outcome:

Not only will the process of polarization tend to play out in virtual communities in the same way it does in neighborhoods, but it seems likely to proceed much more quickly online. In the real world, with its mortgages and schools and jobs, the mechanical forces of segregation move slowly. There are brakes on the speed with which we pull up stakes and move to a new house. Internet communities have no such constraints. Making a community-defining decision is as simple as clicking a link. Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in a small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. Given the presence of even a slight bias to be connected with people similar to ourselves – ones who share, say, our political views or our cultural preferences –

(or our musical tastes)

we would end up in ever more polarized and homogeneous communities. We would click our way to a fractured society.

As the entire web becomes one ever-expanding, amoebic social application, it becomes increasingly harder and harder to “log out” of this cultural segregation that seems built in to the very nature digital space. In a recent New Yorker article on Google, Ken Auletta, writes:

The more “personalized” [the consumer data that Google collects each day], as [CEO] Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.” [Google co-founders, Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin often say that their ideal is to devise a program that provides a single perfect answer.

This preoccupation with mathematical efficiencies triggers various alarms. In “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr writes that Google would like to store as much information as possible about each individual — what might be referred to as “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible  social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr writes. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity…. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate towards those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing o compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our difference, making it harder to reach agreement.

As much as there is a conservative pull within us to seek out the familiar and the safe, the example of Pandora shows there is an equally as great liberal a pull to discover and explore the new (altho that balance may be different from one individual to another). There are  already so many social sites and applications being developed to enable the former, what we need now are more UNsocial ones. Applications that offer us the opportunity to discover and explore the new and unfamiliar, applications that allow us to confront diversity, and offer us new ways to expand our tastes and define ourselves.

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presented by:

The Alternative Apparel Catalogue

Burner:

(playa dust for your face sold separately)

.
Circus:

ahem.

.

Hippie:

.

Hipster:

also,

Skater, Raver, Goth:

(all separate categories;  you get the idea.)

and here’s a throwback–

Heroin Chic:

Any questions?

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This election process is driving me crazy. I wish we could just pick someone already, and get the fuck on with it. I mean, yes, I do hope a particular someone gets picked, but the longer that keeps not happening, the more disturbing this whole having to root for “my” side, and having to hate the other side, and having to bear witness to an ever increasing enmity widening the divide between the two sides, thing is becoming. Is anyone else feeling worn out, here? And it’s no longer relegated just to the 24-hour news cycle anymore. It’s in, like, everything. Video games, porn, pumpkins! Tried choosing a cup at 7-11 lately?

It’s like Bloods vs. Crips gone wild out there!

Binary battle lines are permeating the atmosphere, and they’ve been seeping into everything I seem to be writing recently, too. From the “sluts” vs. “virgins” pop-culture war, to the schism in conservative vs. liberal moral psychology, to PCs vs. Macs even. That’s all within the past month. It feels like everything is being forced to become a dichotomy. Which is a really dangerous kind of trap to get stuck in, and it’s prompted me to take a step back, and examine this phenomenon itself, rather than end up writing yet another post that would inadvertently fall into the same pattern. What I’ve realized is–surprise surprise!–I have two very powerfully conflicting reactions to this polarization that will be holding our reality hostage officially for 3 more weeks, but whose legacy will linger much, much longer.

Wait, before I get in to that, I just want to say that I realize that it’s not like this election invented the social/cultural/psychological divide between liberals and conservatives that politics has been exploiting since who knows when, but I really do think this particular election season has galvanized it to a degree that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in the United States in my lifetime. A few weeks ago on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart suggested to guest, Bill Clinton, that “This election has apparently taken us all the way back to 1968 and the Nixonian and McGovern culture divide.” So it’s clearly not new, what’s going on today, but its degree of vehemence is not particularly familiar to anyone under 40, either.

Watching the preceding two elections go down, it had become increasingly clear that the left simply wasn’t getting it. It was like the nature of the electoral playing field had changed in some very crucial way, and the Democrats hadn’t gotten the memo. Which is why it feels like Barack Obama has offered a total departure from the kind of democratic nominees we’d gotten used to. People aren’t for Obama just because he’s the non-republican option. They are actually for what HE represents (which is, amazingly, a myriad of things to a broad spectrum of people, which he has, nonetheless, managed to bring together into a miraculously unified concept, and that unto itself is yet another aspect to his appeal), and they are for him in a fervent, decisive way that for the past 8 years has seemed to be the sole province of Republican candidates. So yeah, on the one hand, I can definitely say it’s been pretty gratifying to all of us who’d gotten tired of losing during that time, to watch the Democrats pull their shit together, and run a seriously strategized, legitimately competitive campaign. Booya. Bring it on. Go, team, go!

But here is what I personally find incredibly dismaying–even more than the right’s recent effort to cast Obama as a Muslim terrorist (I’m kind of surprised it took them this long), even more than the prospect of Sarah Palin possibly getting to make decisions about…. anything whatsoever (well, ok, dismaying on par with that)–is it’s precisely because Obama has been so successful at mobilizing the left, and the right has been forced to stake out even more desperately polarizing territory in response, that we’ve now gotten to a point where the cost of an election involves tearing the country limb from limb, first.

I said that this kind of social division that makes the air itself feel dense with tension is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in the U.S., but I have felt it somewhere else before: Jerusalem. There is a word in Hebrew that’s used for how Jerusalem feels–”Lachatz.” It literally translates to “pressure.” And in that city, that’s had contention in the air for millennia, that is, indeed, the right word. Like something intensely volatile, tenuously bottled up. In Jerusalem the binary conflict is ingrained, literally, into the walls, and it demands a constant vigilance of one’s affiliation. There are certain sections of the city where you are not allowed to go if you are Jewish, and others you cannot go to if you are Arab. Making sure you’re staying on your team’s side is not just a matter of politics, it’s how everyday life plays out. That’s what this election season, which has turned even regular, every-day actions into declarations of allegiance, is reminding me of. There’s this incessant perpetuation from all directions, whether it’s the media, or our friends, or slushie cups, of an us-vs.-them mentality, and I feel like it’s affecting how we think about everything right now, political or not.

Obviously, this is more or less inevitable when you’ve got a two-party election, and while it’s not like there’s anything that can be done about that situation now, I think it’s important to be aware, while we’re cheering our team on, of the underlying hazard in enjoying the polarization too much. Our human proclivity for this kind of binary divide is one of the most dangerous social situations that we can–and perpetually do–get ourselves into, and the massive eagerness with which both sides are relishing this particular battle is a little bit freaking me out.

Maybe it’s making me lose my sense of humor, too, cuz I totally can’t seem to find stuff like “McCain Be Old” to be funny… Or useful, for that matter. On that same episode of the Daily Show, Clinton said, “I’m glad [Obama]‘s got people that love him that much. But those are not the people that hold this election.The people that hold this election are the people that think that he is on their side, and he loves them.” In other words, is it really necessary to incite alienation of people who could hold the swing vote, like, oh… you know… old people? Why not take a cue from Sarah Silverman instead, and shlep over to see your grandparents down in make-or-break-an-election state Florida? As Silverman says, “There’s nobody more important or influential over their grandparents than their grand-kids. You. If they vote for Barack Obama, they’re gonna get another visit this year. If not….”

As a marketer, I think one of the most crucial things to understand about people is just how diverse and nuanced the spectrum of identity and culture and personality is. In this long-tailed, custom-tailored, niched-up world we’re living in now, understanding the importance of approaching different groups on their own terms is the difference between success and irrelevance. Less than a month out from what I fully admit is the most important presidential race of my lifetime, may not be the time to start preaching plurality or diversity, or anything that could be undermining to in-group solidarity, but I think even through this process we do need to remember that with people things are not just black and white, or blue and red, or binary at all. One of the things that makes Barack Obama so appealing for me is that, as he himself acknowledges, as the product a Kenyan father, and an American mom, who was born in Hawaii, grew up in Indonesia, and became a Senator in Chicago, his mixed heritage has given him an understanding of America that is informed by a global, and uniquely modern perspective. That’s the kind of perspective that makes sense for the president of the United States when I think about the 21st century future not just of America, but the world.

Now, if we could just get through this election already…..

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I have, and it kinda looked a little bit like this…

That’s a still from the latest ads developed by Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Microsoft’s new campaign to–essentially–regain control of their identity, and it’s a pretty accurate depiction of how I’ve seen that PC-in-a-room-full-of-Macs situation play out. (Clearly, it must not be an isolated incident). In the ad, when the diver flips the white board over, the other side reads, “And I’m Kinda Scared.”

Now, I’m a Mac now, but the computer I had before this one was a PC. I’m just as comfortable using either, and I’ve got Microsoft programs running on this computer right now. I could even get a Mac that comes with the option of running Windows, anyway, if I want, so even though I’m a Mac user, I clearly don’t see my identification with the brand in terms like this–

But many clearly do. And perhaps nothing has helped to articulate the contemporary Mac superiority complex quite like those Mac Vs. PC ads. In the iconic spots created by TBWA/Media Arts Lab, which began in 2006 and new iterations are still being developed now, a casually-dressed, attractive, 20-something guy introduces himself as “Hello, I’m a Mac…” while an older, slightly overweight guy, wearing glasses and a cheap lookin’ suit-and-tie combo introduces himself as “… And I’m a PC.” The two then act out little vignettes against a stark white background in which the capabilities and attributes of “Mac” and “PC” are compared. Often the spots end up presenting various legitimate PC shortcomings in an entertaining, glib way, but just as often the focus is on the two machine-characters’ personalities, and the feature comparison ends up being almost beside the point. Mac is always self-assured and easy-going. PC is resentful and awkward. The great success of these ads,

The subtext of these ads, which has also become the subtext of the Mac user community, is that this isn’t just a tool for enabling a certain kind of lifestyle, it’s a badge of it. A Mac isn’t just about helping you BE creative, it MEANS you are creative. A PC, on the other hand, means you are a stiff, unimaginative, frustrated tool, overly concerned with work, and incapable of doing anything interesting. At least not as good as a Mac can. Oh, and furthermore, if you’re  a PC user, then you may as well know that this is what other people are thinking about you, too.

Personally, I’ve always been completely impressed that Mac has been able to brand a conformist white box into a symbol of creative and individual expression. But the idea is that your white box gives you entry into a whole network of other creative individuals, (just like you), and it’s that community association that bestows identity. A good friend of mine, who is a fashion designer, belly-dancer, serial entrepreneur, and has more tattoos and crazy hairstyles than the majority of the creative class, is a dedicated PC, and one of the major reasons for her choice is that she finds the idea inherent in a Mac–that you need this thing in order to express that you’re “hip”–to be a huge turnoff. A Mac doesn’t just bestow hipness to its users, it kind of subsumes it from them too. Perhaps she’s wary of this kind of  accessory watering down or co-opting her own particular kind of hip. Either way, she says she feels like no one else has this line of thinking. It’s a turnoff  “Only only to me,” She says, “I think PCs are just fine, and a lot more bang for your buck,” but everyone else she knows seems to have no problem with this aspect of their Macs.

It’s to let people like her know that there’s more of their kind out there, and to establish that their computers can, in fact, represent their creative, dynamic, interesting identities, that CPB took the direction they did with the new Microsoft ads.

Here’s one. You should watch it before reading further:

I think what’s really interesting here is that the ads say NOTHING about the product, or the features, or anything technical whatsoever. The sole purpose of the ad is to explore the diversity of PC users. I’m trying to think of another example of an entity trying to redefine its own identity by working to undo the stereotype of its “fans,” and I can’t think of one. (Anyone got one?) It’s pretty intense.

In a post titled, “Huh. Those Mac Ads Aren’t As Funny Any More,” Michael Arrington wrote:

Those Microsoft commercials aren’t particularly engaging, and they don’t make me want to go out and buy a copy of Vista. But what they do is show lots of fascinating people saying that they use PCs. They highlight the fact that many people may be somewhat offended by the idea that they can’t be interesting or cool if they don’t use a Mac.

Suddenly, Apple looks a little elitist. I mean, they were elitist before, but in a way that made you want to be a part of the club. Now, they just seem a little snobby.

If that’s what Microsoft and their pushing clients to the edge advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky were aiming for, it’s brilliant.

According to the New York Times, CPB “Relishes efforts to transform perceived negatives into positives.” (See also announcing the onset of an “SUV Backlash” to help promote the US launch of the Mini Cooper–before any such backlash had yet begun at all, positioning the Mini’s uber-compactness as an alternative to the gas-guzzling hegemony.)

More from the New York Times:

Apple executives have been “using a lot of their money to de-position our brand and tell people what we stand for,” said David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.

“They’ve made a caricature out of the PC,” he added, which was unacceptable because “you always want to own your own story.”

The campaign illustrates “a strong desire” among Microsoft managers “to take back that narrative,” Mr. Webster said, and “have a conversation about the real PC.”

The celebration of PC users is intended to show them “connected to this community,” added [Rob Reilly, partner and co-executive creative director at Crispin Porter], “of people who are creative, who are passionate.”

Every single person featured in this ad is somehow compelling and enigmatic. Perhaps it’s because they’re all so different. You have no idea who is coming next. They challenge not only the expectations of who a PC is, but the assumption that you’re supposed know everything about who someone is just based on the kind of computer brand they use. (Talk about “Think Different,” huh?) If the Mac community is “alternative,” the one depicted in the Microsoft ad is global. If the Mac community is elitist, this one is accepting. Beyond “creative and passionate,” this community has a real sense humanity. It’s worldly and smart and open-minded and profoundly diverse. It’s approachable and philosophical. A community that’s out to change the world, and enjoy the world; a community that’s what the world might look like if everyone in it got along. And regardless of whether you’re a Mac or a PC…what kind of progressive human being (not a human doing, or a human thinking) wouldn’t want to be a part of a community like that?

The next time I need a new computer, maybe it’ll be a Mac, and maybe it’ll be a PC, but either way, I find it comforting and heartening to know that this is the kind of community a company like Microsoft sees–and wants the rest of us to see–as its own ideal.

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