MNEK - If Truth Be Told

He's been around for a while now (and yet somehow only 16 years old), but he's finally entered my radar with his new single, the infectious, hooky "If Truth Be Told," available to download November 7th. Gives a very fine whiff of Jermaine Stewart's 1986 classic "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off," does it not?

I Won't Let Go

Good lord I'm so happy these guys are still around. After their excellent debut album leaked in August of 2010 all has been quiet on the Monarchy front. Wait no longer! Euphoric, pulsating "I Won't Let Go" is here.

I Won't Let Go by Monarchy

I'll Never Stop Following You

Bittersweet, space-opera longing and adventure from the Swedish duo. Lovely in the best possible way.

Born This Way? Yes, if You're American

February 11th saw the long-anticipated release of Lady Gaga's newest single "Born This Way," but as early as the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards the chorus for the new song was revealed: "I'm beautiful in my way / 'Cause God makes no mistakes / I'm on the right track baby / I was born this way." The subsequent release of the full lyrics in late January 2011 confirmed the direction: An equality anthem exclusive to no one. Although the song's net is cast wide, viewed specifically through the lens of attitudes toward LGB (Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual) individuals, the song reveals a specific belief about the origins of homosexuality that is so commonly equated with tolerance in America that it is rarely, if ever, questioned. This is, as the title suggests, that to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual is to be born as such. A belief that homosexuality is in any way environmentally influenced (a "choice") is equated with conservatism, homophobia, and intolerance. 

American gay rights activists as well as liberals in general have aggressively pursued this dichotomy. In October of 2010 President Obama himself said, "I don't think it's a choice. I think people are born with a certain make-up....We're all children of God. We don't make determinations about who we love. That's why I think discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong."

Indeed, there is evidence that, in America at least, beliefs about the immutability of homosexuality, that one is "born gay," are correlated with more tolerant attitudes toward gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Analyzing data from a 1995 Oklahoma City survey, Wood & Bartkowski (2004) found that, among other things (including that contact with gay or lesbians significantly reduced levels of gay stereotyping and homophobia, while increasing support for gay rights--supporting the "contact hypothesis" first proposed by Gordon Allport in 1954's The Nature of Prejudice), belief among heterosexuals that homosexuality was biologically determined significantly predicted support of gay rights initiatives.

In another study, using data from a 2003 survey, Haider-Markel & Joslyn (2008) framed the immutability belief of homosexuality in terms of genetics. The authors found that not only was a belief that homosexuality was genetically determined greatly associated with positive feelings toward gay and lesbians, but that this association was greater than all other variables, including "knowing someone who is gay" (contact hypothesis).

Both of these studies use attribution theory to explain their findings. Originally proposed by the Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider in 1958's The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, Heider described how people make everyday inferences about the causes of other people's behavior, attributing others' behavior to either internal (the person), or external (the situation) causes. Expanding upon Heider's original framework, Bernard Weiner added another, crucial dimension in the 1970s: Perceived controllability. Weiner's additional factor has played a major role in social psychological studies of attribution theory ever since. In the above studies, beliefs that homosexuality is a "choice" is an attribution based on perceived controllability. As the studies reveal, this kind of attribution is consistently related to negative attitudes towards gay and lesbian men and women.

In the sphere of modern American pop music, the last year alone has seen a surprising number of highly successful songs co-opting immutability attributions to advocate messages of tolerance and acceptance. Such songs include Katy Perry's single "Firework," which was released in October 2010 as the third single from her sophomore album, and reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Perry herself described it as an "anthem" with a "fantastic message," and the video to the song featured a potpourri of culturally-appropriate images of outcast youth gathering together to dance to the beat of Perry's presumably empowering message. As if the video didn't make the song's intent any clearer, Perry quickly dedicated the video to America's hottest budding humanitarian crisis: Bullied gay youth, as addressed in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" video campaign.

The same month saw the release of Pink's "Raise Your Glass," the lead single from her first greatest hits package, and it, too, featured not only lyrics explicitly aimed to empower the presumably dis-empowered, but a video featuring a dizzying collection of stereotypes depicting the American "outcast," crossing the boundaries of time, space, sexual orientation, political orientation and ethnicity. Admittedly, this is not new territory for Pink, with social commentary embedded in various of her past videos, perhaps most explicitly in 2006's "Stupid Girls," a critique of feminism's paradoxical mid-2000s incarnation as relevant in the age of Paris Hilton as it is now in the age of Snooki.

It is worth noting how, like Katy Perry's "Firework," Pink's "Raise Your Glass" and its similarly-themed follow-up, "Fuckin' Perfect," have seen considerable success in the United States, with the former reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and the later reaching #2 (so far). Other songs, like Ke$ha's "We R Who We R," also released in October of 2010, found similar success in America, reaching #1. 

However, the beliefs transmitted in these especially popular pop cultural artifacts--beliefs specifically about the etiology of homosexuality--are not unfettered by cultural influences. In a 2002 article, Peter Hegarty critiqued the immutability-tolerance link so often espoused regarding homosexuality. He noted other authors who have criticized such biological determinism as benefiting primarily "economically comfortable White men" (Terry, 1997), as well as excluding bisexual and queer identities. In addition, data gleaned from British and American individuals by the author showed that the link between beliefs in the biological basis of homosexuality and tolerance toward gays and lesbians was significantly correlated in the American sample only. Although the author rejected this as evidence that the immutability-tolerance link is "culture-bound," he argued that it represents instead evidence of a mere "symbolic association" between biological determinism and homosexuality.  Addressing the possible negative consequences of such a view, he noted:

"Presenting biological determinism as a pro-lesbian and gay strategy in the classroom or in an advertisement may well strengthen symbolic associations between tolerance and biological determinism more than it actually produces genuine attitude change" (163).

Another factor closely associated with the immutability-tolerance link, at least in the sphere of pop music, can be observed in the lyrics and video to Pink's "Fuckin' Perfect." With its depictions of probable eating disorders and cutting (self-harm), the video makes a clear argument in its synthesis of image and message: Don't hurt yourself, because you're perfect. It's a message that directly suggests that a perceived lack of self-esteem might be, at least in part, causally related to disordered eating behaviors as well as self-harm. There is evidence to suggest a link between low self-esteem and eating disorders (Mayer et al., 2009), although not as clearly a causal link between media depictions of ideal body sizes and eating disorders (see Levine & Murnen, 2009).

Beyond drawing a causal inference, the "Fuckin' Perfect" video also assumes the seemingly universal importance of self-esteem. In the last decade, however, psychologists have suggested that self-esteem might not be as important as once thought. In a comprehensive review, Baumeister and colleagues (2003) found that although high self-esteem was associated with persistence in the face of possible failure, it was not significantly associated with anything else, including delinquency, antisocial behavior, smoking, safe-sex behaviors, relationship satisfaction or outcome, or better interpersonal interactions in general. In fact, the opposite was sometimes true: Individuals with higher self-esteem, when faced with an "ego threat" condition (receiving esteem-threatening feedback after an intellectually difficult test, for example), received lower ratings in a subsequent interview than individuals with lower self-esteem, with the high self-esteem individuals frequently appearing antagonistic.

In addition, cross-cultural comparisons between Western and Japanese individuals have repeatedly revealed that, in Japan, self-esteem is found to be lower than in Western countries like the United States and Canada (both explicitly--see Campbell et al., 1996; and implicitly--see Szeto et al., 2009). Using data comparing the United States to Japan, psychologist Shinobu Kitayama (2006) has argued that, indeed, the assumption that self-esteem may be equally important across all cultures is questionable.

Lady Gaga may proclaim that she's "born this way" in her new single, and she may even claim that such a sentiment is meant to be empowering to all those oppressed minorities of the world (especially the ones dogged by pesky debates of biological determinism). But, at least when it comes to "the gays," the group Lady Gaga most aggressively courts and the group--especially given her recent forays into political activism with the push to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell--that is unarguably most directed at by this new single, there are pitfalls to such a biologically determinist view, no matter how synonymous it may now be with LGBT tolerance in America. The politicization of debates about the origins of homosexuality--although arguably necessary and unarguably related to favorable attitudes toward sexual minorities among heterosexuals--nonetheless exerts a degree of harm on LGBT individuals, constraining the discourse to those (frequently men) who identify as exclusively homosexual, denying the possibility of social (environmental) contributions to human sexual orientation, and ultimately obfuscating the truth.

The possibility that these debates are themselves culturally influenced does not detract from the veracity of the claims generated from them, but they should alert LGBT activists especially to their potential pitfalls.

To Be Old Is to Be Loved: New Order - "True Faith"

Okay, so I'm a tad late to the game on this one, having discovered New Order's "True Faith" (from the Substance 1987 compilation) only in the last year. So I'm young, okay?

But good god, it's absolutely unbelievable magic. Wikipedia claims that the original lyrics included the lines "Now that we've grown up together/They're taking drugs with me," but in fact it's the finalized version (allegedly changed out of fear of being ostracized by radio), "Now that we've grown up together/They're afraid of what they see" that I find the most affecting.

Quickly rocketing up to the same rarefied Tree of Hearts echelon that currently houses Björk's "Hyperballad", Pet Shop Boys' "What Have I Done To Deserve This?", and Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love", would it be gushing to say I love this song? 

Below is the unforgettable video. Seriously, why don't they make all videos like this anymore? 



...And an amazing remix by the legend that is Shep Pettibone:


True Faith (Shep Pettibone Remix) by djrightonbeat

Enter Japan

Gaspar Noé's visually terrifying, frequently exasperating new film Enter the Void is many things. It is a trying, baldly shocking film that is the closest approximation to a nightmare I have ever seen in a movie theater. It is also a harrowing depiction of the cost of chemically-induced euphoria, of the ruin of ceding the body to goalless indirection. Looking past the LSD, the "Tibetan Book of the Dead," the menacing flirtations with incest and trauma, however, is also a tale of the experience of being a foreigner in Japan.

With its numerous lingering shots of an endless neon Tokyo, it seems hard to believe that the setting of this movie could ever be overlooked. Yet the light and noise of the Tokyo of Enter the Void is so overwhelming, so ubiquitous, that at some point in the roughly two-and-a-half hour extravaganza one indeed begins to lose sight of it. Perhaps this is due to the hypnotic, numbing effect of the camera's cyclical swinging shots, the narrative repetition, or the near-total lack of major Japanese characters.

Perhaps, as a viewer who is fond of Japan, the setting fades as a sort of defensive mechanism against the noxious, self-destructive behavior of the movie's Western protagonists, content as they are to let their Japanese friends read their pregnancy tests and have sex with them but never, you know, actually have meaningful conversation with them.

All throughout this film full of artful, balletic self-destruction, all I could think was: Who is the victim here? Who is to blame? Are these clueless white people viewing Japan as nothing more than their own hedonistic, neon-washed playground? Or are they being swallowed whole by a culture that is relentlessly homogeneous? (Japan is 98.5% Japanese). Where notions of ingroup and outgroup are embedded within the very language? Where the youth population is growing smaller, killing themselves in greater numbers, and increasingly retreating into online worlds?

Or is their self-destruction really no different than self-destruction anywhere else in the world?

Some have called this film "pure cinema," a "mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead." Indeed, its visual ingenuity and frequently disturbing aura lingers long after the film's ludicrous ending.

But all I could think about as I watched it was of being a foreigner in Japan.

A Frantic Search: Finding Meaning After Tragedy

The recent shooting outside Tuscon, Arizona has unleashed a flood of impassioned rhetoric, unsurprising given the extent of the violence and the status of the gunman's target (congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). The question at the center of the debate has been whether or not the rhetoric that preceded the shooting, often violent in its tone, contributed to this tragedy.

Prominent psychologist Drew Westen at Emory University cited a "culture of hate" permitted in Arizona and in other parts of the country as at least partial explanation for the event. His point is that we (and the violently mentally ill among us), do not live in a vacuum. Regardless of whether shooter Jared L. Loughner was ideologically a member of the Tea Party or not, addicted to marijuana or videogames, regardless of the endless explanations we will search for in the effort to make sense of this tragedy, he did not live in a vacuum.  He, and others like him, live in a culture. A culture where apocalyptic, frequently violent rhetoric permeates freely.

Paul Krugman was not surprised by the effects of what he called this "climate of hate," writing that "something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence." Indeed, there seems to be an intuitive link between individuals with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and violent rhetoric in the culture at large. (The media has been quick to regard Loughner as schizophrenic without evidence of an official diagnosis, although he has been labeled by a psychiatrist as a "textbook case"). This intuition is likely bolstered by the pervasive attitude that the majority of schizophrenics, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, are violent. This attitude, however, is misinformed. In but one study, from 2002, Jeffrey W. Swanson and colleagues found a 1-year prevalence rate of violence in just 13% of their more than 800 patients diagnosed with serious mental illness ("The social-environmental context of violent behavior in persons treated for severe mental illness"). This figure, they noted, is higher than that of the general population, but nevertheless reveals that the vast majority of individuals with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, are not violent. Nevertheless, a real or suspected diagnosis of schizophrenia is a common theme of the media coverage of many of these tragedies (see the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting for merely one recent example).

Previous debates surrounding the effect of violent videogames is evidence of this frantic search for meaning after tragedy, such as those that followed the 1999 Columbine shooting, which frequently focused on the role of games such as id Software's seminal Doom on the mentally unstable minds of the shooters. The quest to identify that important cultural piece that explains a killer's motivation, that dispels the frightening specter of meaningless loss, whether it be Doom in the Columbine shooting, the Columbine-inspired Gus Vant Sant movie Elephant in the 2005 Red Lake High School shooting, or the South Korean movie Oldboy in the Virginia Tech shooting, is unending, particularly when the perpetrators are young.

Yet finding that meaning often involves disentangling an individual's mental illness from the vast web of cultural influences that an individual is constantly immersed in, which can be nearly impossible. Furthermore, a number of cognitive biases are at work when we make such dubious connections. The hindsight bias leads us to retrospectively interpret events as predictable, and in this case leads us to link events that are, in fact, unconnected (itself an example of an illusory correlation). This is especially true when the event of interest is emotionally charged, as the recent shooting in Tuscon could certainly be qualified. That is not to say that marijuana, videogames, or political ideology had no effect on the mind of this mentally unstable individual. But it does raise questions about our--and by "our" I also mean the media's--ability to dispassionately assess the situation.

Regardless of where our blame eventually falls, we must be cognizant of not only why we're searching for an explanation, but who we might damage in the process. Ending Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions or dismantling the Tea Party may be a favorable outcome; increasing the stigma of the thousands of individuals living with serious mental illness is not. David Brooks recently called the coverage of the event the result of a news media that is "psychological ill informed but politically inflamed." His point rightly brings the role of the media into play, but ultimately the media merely reacts to our own desires. In our frantic, emotionally-charged quest for meaning in loss, we only magnify the tragedy by engulfing dubiously related targets in the maelstrom, clouding the truth in the process.

Do You Need Someone To Talk To?

Gossip's Beth Ditto has recorded an EP with Simian Mobile Disco, available to purchase here. It's like Yazoo for 2011. It's very, very good.

Preview:

Beth Ditto EP preview by Deconstruction Records

You Feel Like Paradise

Yes, the new Britney Spears single is amazing. Ludicrous dubstep middle eights will own 2011.

Listen:

Britney Spears - Hold It Against Me by djraize

Today I Feel the Mood

Stunning video to Clare Maguire's  first official single, "The Last Dance," due for release in the UK on February 20th.

The Sound of Hype: What Does It Mean To Be #1?

The BBC has once again solicited the opinions of the UK music industry to create a list of individuals considered most "promising" for the coming year. This year, Essex native Jessie J was crowned #1. In the words of the BBC, Jessie J is ready to ascend to the "next level of quality and recognition" in 2011.

However, perusing previous winners since the list's inception nine years ago reveals fascinating disparities that challenge that proclamation, as well as raise questions about the value of topping this list. For one point of comparison, let's look at the Metacritic scores of the debut albums of each year's #1 pick with that year's #5 pick. (Note: For the 2007 list, #3 pick Klaxons was used because neither the #4 nor the #5 pick had their debuts listed on Metacritic). Averaging the scores of each of the eight years' #1 picks and the #5 picks reveal that the average score for the #5 picks' debut was eleven points higher (77/100) than the #1 picks' (66/100) (a statistically significant difference, by the way, with p=.002).  

In every single year the #5 pick received a higher Metacritic score on their debut album than the #1 pick. Fascinatingly, when the same comparison is made between each year's #2 pick with that year's #1 pick, the #2 picks had debut albums with a Metacritic score on average eight points higher (74/100). (Note: In what is perhaps a telling mark of a particularly unpromising year, 2007's #3 pick Klaxon's debut was again used for this comparison because the #2 pick, The Twang, did not have their debut listed on Metacritic. On a side note, 2007 also had the lowest Metacritic-scored debut of a #1 pick (55/100 by Mika) in the list's history).

So why the surprising inverse relationship? If those polled are indeed picking their "favourite" new artists, why are the acts everyone seems the most excited about, the ones that get the top spot, ultimately viewed less favorably than the other picks?

Perhaps a look at another variable--chart position--can illuminate why coming first in the BBC poll does not put an artist at a critical advantage. Even though they are instructed not to base their decisions on "hype or size of record deal," but rather on "quality," choosing the "best, most exciting" upcoming acts, it is possible that the individuals polled tend to gravitate toward acts they deem the most likely to succeed in terms of sales, and not in critical acclaim. Indeed, when one compares the average peak UK Album Chart position of the debut album of each year's #1 pick with each year's #5 pick, one sees an average seven chart placement difference between the top picks' debuts (#2) and the #5 picks' debuts (#9). 

Perhaps it is worth looking at who is doing the picking, instead. Although it is worth noting that music critics alone do not comprise the selectors for each year's list (with presenters, producers, editors and bloggers also included), one might assume that their opinions would not deviate dramatically from those of the others, seeing as how they are all included under the "tastemaker" umbrella by the BBC. However, "quality" and "promising" are vague--an act likely to succeed in the mind of a critic might naturally involve receiving higher review scores, whereas sales might be the marker of success for a producer or editor. If less critics than insiders are polled, acts more likely to succeed commercially, but not necessarily critically, would chart higher (however there are wrinkles: Consider Lady Gaga's #6 placing in 2009). Indeed, in this year's poll, only 25 out of the 161 solicited (about 15%) were labeled "Writers and Critics."

Of course, one must also consider the role of the poll results themselves on the buying public. The poll is as much about prediction as it is influence. Even still, artists like Little Boots and The Bravery are proof that coming in first in the poll does not equal huge chart success, as both their debut albums peaked at number five in the charts (compared to the mass of #1 debuts by the other top picks).

So what can be learned from all of this? Despite occasional exceptions, based on averages in the poll's (albeit brief) history, bet on Jessie J getting the sales while Clare Maguire gets the accolades. Yes, getting #1 in the poll does mean something, but maybe not quite what it claims to mean.

The Beauty of Madness: Pop Psychology in Black Swan

In her New York Times review of Darren Aronofsky's latest film, Black Swan, Manohla Dargis warns against "pop-psychological interpretations" that "flatten" this unabashedly manipulative, maddening extravaganza of high and low impulses. Indeed, such an interpretation risks giving the director more credit than he perhaps deserves, more interested in beautifully destroying his female subject than he is psychoanalyzing her. But ignoring all psychological interpretations of any artwork drains the very life from it, rendering the piece impotent and ultimately drawing a dangerous line, especially for a movie one could credibly classify as a "psychological thriller."

In its continued effort throughout the 20th century to foster credibility and reduce damaging misconceptions, the oft-lamented, frequently indestructible field of "pop psychology" has been something of an anathema to the rest of the field of psychology. Modern psychologists strive for both precision and complexity, demystifying the once impenetrable recesses of the mind, often with rigorous scientific methodology and the latest in technology. Pop psychology continually threatens to destroy all of that effort with over-simplified generalizations and outright misinformation. In the new self-help world, everyone is an expert. Or should I say "expert"? There within the sarcastically negating quotation marks lies the rub. Is there value to the work of the indefatigable pop psychologist? That is, can an individual not formally trained in psychology espouse any psychological truth? If the answer is no, then what implications does such a belief have on how we interpret artwork? Should a piece of art ever be psychologically interpreted? Does it matter if the piece seems to invite such an interpretation, or resist it? In short, when does such an interpretation "flatten," say, a movie?

To return to Manohla Dargis' original quote, I suspect that what she means is that, like most criticism leveled at pop psychology, a pop psychological interpretation simplifies the artistic credibility of the piece by seeming to have all the answers. Good art, in Dargis's view, resists the kind of easy interpretations that pop psychology invites, unsettling the viewer's preconceptions and demanding novel thoughts.

To argue for value in such an interpretation one must turn to the related, less derided cousin field of "folk psychology," often conceptualized as "mindreading" in social psychology or "theory of mind" in developmental psychology. Folk psychology, as originally conceived, concerns itself with the psychological insights that people make on an everyday basis. How do lay people think about the mind? This is a question with significant implications, because we are all folk psychologists. Every one of us, as human beings, must think about the minds of others in order to navigate our social world, and judgments and decisions are made every single day based on this supremely unscientific form of knowledge.

With the wealth of knowledge available to us now from decades of work on the ways in which individuals think about others' minds, it would seem that pop psychology, which is essentially folk psychological interpretations magnified and disseminated (to often misinforming ends), must have some value, despite its frequent dissociation from science. And ultimately that is what that the battle is all about: Science versus willful ignorance of science. Pop psychology purports truth without (or with dubious) evidence, training, and knowledge. Yet it is also a product of the mind, and is thus worth studying and taking seriously, as long as one understands it for what it truly is.

What, in fact, is the purpose of flirting with mental illness (delusions, paranoia, compulsions) in any piece of work while resisting psychological interpretations? Is it to upend our conceptions of what can be interpreted in art? Does a psychological interpretation somehow render the piece mundane, neutralizing the mysterious fog of madness with DSM-approved diagnoses?

A resistance to pop-psychological interpretations of art would seem to ironically perpetuate the kind of misinformation and willful ignorance that gives the field its bad name. In other words, resisting psychological interpretations maintains the kind of vaguely romanticized haze of indefinable madness, bereft of knowledge and hopelessly antiquated, that pop psychology frequently and unwittingly dabbles in.

To return to the issue of art criticism, claiming that a pop psychological interpretation "flattens" a piece effectively denies the role of the psychological in the piece outright. It drains the piece of meaningful interpretation and misses the point of criticism of any artwork entirely.