We need a good, old-fashioned argument. No holds barred, with nothing at stake. Like a power trip in a teacher’s lounge, or a coup d’etat at a sewer commission meeting. Let’s argue about the best song about Broadway!
Which Broadway? I suppose it doesn’t matter. I understand that we should surrender early to the New York crowd, and argue about something else. I’m pretty sure Philadelphia has a Broad Street, and could beat up anyone on Broadway in New York, but that’s a hockey game for another time.
On to the contestants!
That’s the Fantastic Johnny C, back in 1967. Great little R&B hit. I hope Johnny kept his day job, because that was it for him.
Next up, Johnny Nash!
If Johnny Nash ever had a day job, he certainly could quit after I Can See Clearly Now hit number one in the seventies. He was the first non-Jamaican to make some real scratch with reggae songs. Bob Marley did Reggae on Broadway first, for instance, but Johnny cashed the check.
On the extreeemely other hand, The Bee Gees:
Their falsetto disco singing always went through my head like a railroad spike, but like what you like, like I always say. You can vote for Nights on Broadway if you don’t mind a little snickering emanating from Maine.
Any prog-rockers out there? Well, I’d be shirking my duties here if I didn’t find some sort of Gentle Giant or Yes song or something. Here’s Genesis, from so long ago Phil Collins didn’t have his hair on inside out yet:
I guess I should have warned you that the last one was almost five minutes long, huh? If you made it past all that, how about some Shaggy, doing a sort of reggae rap song about Broadway? On second thought, let’s not. I’d like some readers to make it all the way through this thing.
But we need fresh material here. We could all mock Broadway Girls from Lil Durk and Morgan Whalen. It’s an autotune, tuneless catastrophe, it’s true, but one can’t help but cast a jaundiced eye on the hit counter. It got 110 million views on YouTube in two years:
One hundred and ten mil. Why yes, I do think the United States is doomed. Why do you ask?
Let’s refresh the palate with Doris Day:
Maybe it’s the dress, but all I can think of is Jiffy Pop.
Well, as you might have guessed, there can be only one. Wilson Pickett can’t even get halfway through it before he’s sexually assaulted. Case closed:
I know I’m supposed to be some kind of impressed with your college degree from Flyover Directional State University, but there must be something wrong with me. I’m not. It’s nothing personal. I don’t have a college degree. Feel free to look down your nose at me, if you can see past your nose ring. Me? I try to take people as I find them.
I guess I should qualify that opening remark a little. I assume there are still future thoracic surgeons floating around out there. People are still graduating with degrees in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, or computer science, aerospace engineering, or something similar. They make things like that tractor in the video and the satellites it’s talking to. But we’ve recently seen exactly how superfluous a PHD at the end of your name is in the soft sciences, never mind a BA. And yet, there’s a pandemic of snootiness from college grads towards guys like you see in the video. Ick. His hands are dirty. He can’t be too bright.
Listen to how intelligent, productive, and articulate this farmer is. He never hesitates, never stumbles, never mumbles. He understands everything going on in that cab, and outside it, too. He is feeding thousands of people with his efforts. He even tracks the decreased yield per acre when the seed placement goes out of tolerance. The video is a 19-minute soliloquy of resourceful, worthwhile activity.
There’s an old joke in Caddyshack, I think, a movie I’ve never seen. A nasty person makes a cutting remark to an average guy, “That’s OK, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” I’ve heard it spoken many, many times. Each and every time I’ve heard it, my eye twitched, because I’ve worked cheek by jowl with plenty of ditch diggers. Even twenty years ago, they were laying out those ditches using a satellite and lasers. I can assure you that no person I’ve heard repeat that remark would be remotely qualified to be a ditch digger, because they weren’t smart enough to start with, never mind physically and mentally tough enough.
People should have some respect for things they don’t understand. The modern college education makes damn sure you don’t understand damn near everything. The fellow in the video might even have a college degree, who knows? If so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him any.
Look, Loki, we’re going to be talking science here. Not “The Science,” like people who are gulled by articles in regular newspapers. I mean honest to goodness science. Hard evidence. Statistics. Here it comes, so to speak: Heavy Metal is for wankers.
Let’s plow right into the data. Wander on over to Psypost.org, and peruse Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success. It’s just a summary of a hardcore paper over at the American Psychological Association, but it’ll save you from having to read one of those pdfs with scatter plots and bar charts and control group flim flam and other assorted massage techniques for statistics. The “Impact Statement” over at the source material is a hoot, though, and drives right to the basket, as it were:
This study explores the idea that heterosexual male metal guitarists are motivated to invest heavily in getting good at guitar to primarily impress other men. The study’s results provide some support for this idea. Additionally, metal guitarists also seem to be somewhat motivated by a desire for casual sex. (link)
Please note that they’re motivated by a desire for casual sex. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna get any. As my friend Shaky Bill might say, it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance, due to a performance that features shredding. Heavy metal guitarists are mostly in store for the most casual kind of sex, the kind with no one else present. It’s science!
This is very old news to anyone who’s actually worked in the regular cover band music business. Once, on a lark, I tried to explain to people why playing guitar hero songs like Sultans of Swing was a bad idea if you wanted a female human still present when you finished up. I had a hard time making myself understood. That isn’t even in the neighborhood of Heavy Metal, but the phenomenon is exactly the same. I’ve gone over this ground before:
“Making myself understood” with people reading on the internet, I mean. We had plenty of luck making ouselves understood back in the day. We played in bands that performed covers of stuff like the following instead of Sultans of Swing. Believe you me, girls understood exactly what we were after:
Now, I’m not claiming you could get Helen Reddy to panty drop just by playing Funky Music. You’d probably have to play Funky Music and get two or three Sloe Gin Fizzes in her, too. But covering a Black Sabbath number is definitely not going to get you home without duct tape, rope, and rohypnol. God, we all knew that back in the day. Did you really think we played disco because we liked it?
There’s no joke so wild that you can make these days that events won’t overtake it. For example, Spinal Tap was a great parody of the genre. Here’s the script:
MARTY: Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience
seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.
D AVID: Well it’s a sexual thing, really isn’t it? Aside from the identifying the boys do with us there’s also a re-reaction
to the female…..of the female to our music. How did you put it?
NIGEL: Really they’re quite fearful—that’s my theory. They see us on stage with tight trousers. We’ve got, you know,
armadillos in our trousers. I mean it’s really quite frightening…
DAVID: Yeah.
NIGEL: …the size…and and they, they run screaming
And here we are, back to THE SCIENCE:
Although there is evidence that playing music increases male attractiveness, the sexual selection explanation may not be mutually exclusive to all types of music. Extreme metal is a genre that is heavily male-biased, not only among the individuals that play this style of music, but also among the fans of the genre.
Do tell. Of course being scienticians or psychomechanics or whatever the capital letters after their names mean, they get the right data and then bollix up the conclusions:
Therefore, it is unlikely that extreme metal musicians are primarily trying to increase their mating success through their music.
There’s wrong, and then there’s the wrong like that sentence. You need a map to travel far enough out into the wrongness to deal with that begged question. The stats and your humble narrator says playing metal guitar doesn’t help you one whit with the ladies, and may actually hurt your chances. Good so far. But they extrapolate that the men who endlessly practice two finger barre chords with the fuzz box on eleven must be doing it for some other reason than getting chicks, because they can’t get any. Says who? Assuming that rational people would discover that metal music checks exactly zero female boxes, which would lead to self-awareness and a change to performing Marvin Gaye covers, has nothing to do with metal players. They’re simply failing, over and over, and never figuring out why.
I’ll give you a much more trenchant example of the phenomenon. I double dog dare you to find any metal band, anywhere, at any time, getting over better with a room full of hot babes than this dude:
You just know what that guy is swimming in, and it ain’t due to Blue Oyster Cult covers.
But there’s one more data point I can let you all in on. In a way, it’s borderline anecdotal, but I gotsa lotta anecdotes at my disposal. Here goes: It doesn’t matter what kind of guitar genre you learn. She always goes home with the bass player anyway. Deal wif it.
Over the years I’ve noticed that people with a steel backbone of talent often have a sense of humor about themselves that others lack. It’s people who are unsure of themselves that are deadly serious about everything. When you doubt your own ability to “get over” with an audience, any distraction, any ad-lib, any hiccup in the proceeding can lead to a total breakdown. The most virulent forms of this phenomenon leads to actors who demand that no one even look them in the eye when passing them in the hall at the movie studio, or maybe demanding that their M&Ms get sorted before they’ll eat them.
I’ve played in bands for money. Lots and lots of bad things have happened during shows. I’ve seen performers literally freak out if a string breaks on their guitar. The audience never would have caught on if they hadn’t pitched a fit in the middle of a song instead of soldiering on. I was very lucky that some of the people I worked with would just use whatever happened during a show as fodder for humor or entertaining seriousness, the best kind of humor.
So here’s Tennessee Ernie Ford, Molly Bee, and Merle Travis singing the hell out of a country standard, Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud Loud Music in 1960. It’s before my time, but I’m familiar with the principals. Ford based his TV career on a kind of offbeat, corn pone humor and good music. Like Dean Martin, who also had a teevee variety show later on in the decade, he seemed to be having fun the whole time, and be self-deprecating and nearly disorganized. Of course nothing was disorganized in the slightest. Both were consummate professionals, and would know what to do if anything from a heckler to a world war broke out during a number. Ford always used to close his show with a hymn, which was a novelty at the time, and since. Everyone loved TEF, or at least his public persona.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the rebel yell halfway through was a put-up job from a stage hand, and planned by Ford well in advance. Seeming spontaneous takes a lot of preparation, generally. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if it was a happy accident, someone in the audience just transported by the singing, and Ford didn’t miss a beat, and simply used it to get a laugh and carry the performance along.
Suits of armor can seem kind of silly to the modern eye. We’ve been weaned on entertainment about the Middle Ages, not a lot of it very flattering, or based in historical fact. Every once in a while you see a fairly accurate depiction of a heavy cavalry charge with knights in armor, and you get a sense of how terrifying it must have been for the average soldier standing facing one, who couldn’t afford much, if any of that stuff.
If you weren’t heavily armed and armored and met up with one of these fellows, I wouldn’t like your chances. Watch the next video, and see what a direct blow from a broadsword does to an armored combatant. And if you’re planning on Jackie Channing them without armor and using light weapons, while they lumber around blind in their iron skinsuit, you might want to rethink it after they demonstrate their mobility in the stuff :
Who says there’s nothing good on YouTube? Oh right, I do. Oops.
Well, even Ivory Soap is only 99 44/100% pure. That ratio sounds about right for the internet as a whole, only reversed. I guess the Royal Armouries are part of the 0.56% remainder of the good parts of the internet.
[Update: Many thanks to Bob for his generous hit on the tip jar. Thanks for supporting Sippican Cottage!]
Month: January 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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