A Modest Proposal For The Hopester

I want The Hopester to appear at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate for next week's Euro debut wearing either (his choice) a U.S. flag dashiki or (remember, it's his choice) a Muslim costume inspired by the infamous New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt. Personally, I like the Muslim option.

Copyright © 2008 Barry Blitt/The New Yorker

And complete the whole tableau with Mrs. Hopester dressed in camo with a huge, Angela Davis afro. That would give The Bombastard (John McLaughlin) something to talk about rather than calling The Hopester an Oreo cookie. Let all of the bloviating Righties choke on the sight of The Hopester engaging in a little satiric theater. The good volk of Berlin would get something that would make them forget JFK calling them jelly doughnuts. If the people who walk on their knuckles in this land of the free and home of the brave want to believe that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, The Hopester should give it to the ignorant bastards in prime time! If Dutch could pay his respects at the Kolmeshöhe Cemetery in Bitburg (the Waffen SS-equivalent of the Arlington National Cemetery) in 1985, The Hopester can wear sandals, a robe and a turban. Let The Hopester cry, "Ich bin ein Gläubiger!" while wearing Muslim gear. If this is (fair & balanced) guerrilla communication, so be it.


[x Miami Fishwrap]
When Hysteria And Satire Meet
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled . . .

-- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, 1729

Satire is tricky. It makes its point by exaggerating wildly with a straight face. In inflating a thing beyond all common sense or propriety, it seeks to render inconsistencies and hypocrisies glaringly apparent. Satire seeks truth in the ridiculous. For illustration, see any given episode of "The Colbert Report."

What makes satire difficult is that sometimes, people don't realize they are being had. Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal, for instance, had some convinced he wanted to eat babies; they didn't realize he was actually attacking people's blithe unconcern with the plight of the poor. For that matter, when "All In the Family" came along 2-½ centuries later, some folks saw Archie as the soul of reason.

I have experience in this. Some years back, I satirized a study that said many Americans feel news media routinely get the facts wrong. In a column "defending" media accuracy, I made misstatements so grandiose — Bob Hope was host of the Tonight Show; Quincy Jones was his bandleader — I thought no one could miss my point.

Silly me. I got hundreds of e-mails "correcting" my supposed errors.

So I feel the New Yorker's pain. The magazine is under fire for a cover illustration depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office wearing a turban, bumping fists with his wife, Michelle, who wears an Afro, fatigues and has an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Osama bin Laden watches from a portrait on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace.

A touch of ridiculousness

The Obama and McCain campaigns have pronounced the cover offensive. There have been calls for a boycott.

Me, I like the cover. It strikes me as an incisive comment on the fear mongering that has attended Obama's run for the presidency. Still, I understand why it is incendiary: some of us will take it seriously.

To be effective, satire needs a situation it can inflate into ridiculousness. But the hysteria surrounding Obama has nowhere to go; it is already ridiculous. In just the last few days, we've had Jesse Jackson threatening to castrate him and John McLaughlin calling him an "Oreo."

Add to that the whispers about Obama's supposed Muslim heritage (not that there's anything wrong with that), the "terrorist" implications of bumping fists, and Michelle Obama's purported use of the term "whitey" (a word no black person has uttered since "The Jeffersons" went off the air in 1985), and it's clear that "ridiculous" has become our default status. What once were punchlines now are headlines.

So, as absurd, as over the top, as utterly outlandish as the New Yorker image strikes the more sophisticated among us, there is a large fringe out there for whom it will represent nothing more or less than the sum of their fears.

Indeed, as I sat down to write these words, there beeped into my mailbox an e-mail with this subject line: "WOW, The New Yorker got it exactly right, for once." Said without a trace of irony.

But increasingly, that's who we are in this country: ignorant, irony-impaired and petrified. So maybe we should just cancel the campaign and ask that the last intelligent person turn off the lights when he or she leaves. And bring the last book with you. Nobody here will need it.

Somewhere between the stained blue dress and the vice president shooting a guy in the face, between Swift Boat lies and "war on terra" alibis, the absurd became the ordinary, facts became optional and satire became superfluous.

We are beyond satire, my friends. These days, there's nothing more ridiculous than the truth.

[Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004. A former writer for Casey Kasem's radio program "American Top 40," Leonard Pitts, Jr. was hired by the Herald as a pop music critic in 1991. By 1994 he was writing about race and current affairs in his own column. His column was syndicated nationally, and his 1999 book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood was a bestseller. After the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, Pitts wrote an impassioned column headlined "We'll Go Forward From This Moment" that was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press. In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance and resolve to an unnamed evil terrorist: "You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard."]

Copyright © 2008 Miami Herald Media Company

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How Do You Know When A Song Is Good?

The film version of "Mamma Mia" opens nationally tomorrow and the film marks Meryl Streep's debut in a Broadway goes to Hollywood musical. Streep is a national treasure and there's nothing she can't do in front of a camera. In the under-appreciated "The River Wild" (1995), I believed that Streep was former white water rafting guide turned suburban mom. In "Sophie's Choice" (1982), I believed that she was a WWII survivor with a terrible secret (and burden). On and on it goes until we have Meryl Streep singing ABBA? I watched Streep in "Prairie Home Companion" (2006) and the girl can sing! Why not ABBA? Beats the hell out of "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina." All of this begs the question, though: why are ABBA songs so infectious? Watch the video clip in this (Dare I say it?) vlog and keep your foot from tappin' or keep from singin' along. In this summer of our discontent, we need something akin to 1932's "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" If Woodie Guthrie could sing during the worst damn dust storm of the Dust Bowl era, I guess we can tap our foot or sing along today with a quartet of Swedish youngsters who couldn't speak English (other than the memorized lyrics). If this is (fair & balanced) music appreciation, so be it.

[x YouTube/ccarolallday Channel]
ABBA — "Waterloo" (Eurovision Song Contest Winner, 1974)

[x Boston Fishwrap]
Can Science Explain Why ABBA Is So Catchy?
By Sarah Rodman

It only takes a single exposure, and in an instant, your whole day can change. The infection is rapid and feels potentially unending. One minute you're minding your own business and the next you find that you can't stop thinking, humming, or singing "Dancing Queen."

"Friday night and the lights are low. . ."

No matter what you try, you can't shake it. In fact, once you start thinking about ABBA, you're a goner. Next thing you know, you've moved to this: "If you change your mind/ I'm the first in line. . ."

And like the lyrics to "Waterloo" remind us, you couldn't escape if you wanted to.

What triggers this phenomenon isn't always obvious, but it's no doubt about to happen on a widespread scale.

"Mamma Mia!" the film based on the Broadway musical built around ABBA songs, opens in theaters Friday. As people leave the cineplex belting out the tunes sung by stars Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth, the ABBA invasion will begin anew.

"Mamma Mia, here I go again/ My, my, how can I resist you?"

ABBA's songs continue to endure as what scientists have dubbed "earworms" 35 years after the band's first album was released. Like those little bugs, the tunes burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.

With all this renewed interest, we wondered if it was possible to break down scientifically why the music is so irresistible. Because even those who profess to dislike the cheery pop of the Swedish masterminds can't block its infiltration into their inner jukebox.

Of course, what makes ABBA songs catchy is to an extent what makes most music memorable, from Bach to the Beatles to the Bernie & Phyl's jingle. But, says Daniel Levitin, author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" and associate professor at McGill University, there are some individual factors.

"For one thing, the way their songs are performed and produced, quite apart from the underlying composition, gives them an overall catchy sound," says Levitin, a musician and former producer whose forthcoming book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature," further explores the music-mind connection.

The multitracked harmonies of singers Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad awaken the part of our brains in which our inner caveman is still enjoying a Paleolithic hootenanny with the rest of his clan.

"If you look at the evolutionary biology of the species and the chemical reactions we have to events in the world, for tens of thousands of years when we as a species heard music we heard groups singing it, not an individual and not an individual standing on a stage," says Levitin. "So the ABBA model of the multiple voices or the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing 'Oh Happy Day' is much closer to stimulating these evolutionary echoes of what music really is, fundamentally - closer than, say, Frank Sinatra or Miley Cyrus."

In other words, if a caveman encased in ice were to be thawed out, revived, and immediately given a full iPod, he would respond more immediately to ABBA or a gospel choir than, say, free jazz. He might eventually dig Ornette Coleman, too, but the presentation of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" would sound more familiar.

The glossy production and compositional patterns of Sweden's fab four (or shall we say "fabelns fyra"?) also set off different neurological reactions that have medicinal powers. In the most upbeat of the group's songs, like "Money, Money, Money," the simplicity of ABBA's lyrics makes them easy to sing along to. In addition to the fizzy melodies, that participation, says Levitin, gives listeners "an even more powerful hit of happy juice in the brain from dopamine."

With sad songs in general, and in ABBA's case specifically with tracks like the more contemplative "The Winner Takes It All," listeners' brains produce an opposite but equally enjoyable reaction.

"You get the comfort hormone of prolactin when you hear sad music," says Levitin. "That's the same hormone that's released when mothers nurse their babies. It's soothing. And sometimes it's lyrics and sometimes it's music. I think it's most powerful when the two are well matched and you get what I would call an emergent property where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Structurally, ABBA's songs, like most enduring pop songs, generally offer a straightforward verse-chorus format that satisfies our need for order.

"Whether they sat down and counted and said, 'This can't be nine measures; it has to be eight,' they probably didn't, but they probably wrote eight because in Western music we are used to that balance," says Jon Aldrich, associate professor and founder of the songwriting department at Berklee College of Music. To illustrate, Aldrich hums the melody of the sing-songy "shave and a haircut," leaving out the "two bits" conclusion. "Don't you want to hear the rest of it? You want to finish it, so with an eight measure or a 16 measure or even a 12 or a 24, the listeners feel balance and resolution."

And the main piece of the brain puzzle is the simplest of all: repetition, repetition, repetition. In the grand tradition of everyone from Beethoven (and his hook-filled Fifth Symphony) to the dude who wrote "Who Let the Dogs Out?," ABBA songwriters Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus recognized the power of telling us something as often as possible. Like the Beatles before them - think "She loves you/ Yeah, yeah, yeah" - they also recognized the importance of making that something not so complicated: "Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight. . ."

"If you really want to know what makes a song powerful, I would say look at how the memory works," says physiologist Harry Witchel, a senior research fellow at the Medical School of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who ranked "Waterloo" as the all-time No. 1 Eurovision song contest winner for the BBC. "Memory works either through strong emotions or through repetition - that's how we normally teach. And ABBA songs allow for both of those things to occur."

We hear the words repeatedly, start to sing along, relate to the words and tunes emotionally with either a happy or sad reaction, and thus an earworm is born. He adds that the simplicity of the lyrics, the small number of syllables in the hooks, and the consistent backbeat all factor into the insidious nature of the tunes. That's how they extend their tentacles into a large swath of the public.

In "Musicophilia," his new book about music and the brain, Oliver Sacks supports this claim. "There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself," he writes. "Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it."

All of these elements are in no way unique to ABBA says Levitin. Berklee's Aldrich, who's written or sung such regionally memorable jingles as "It's time to Stop & Shop" and "Tweeter, for times like these," agrees. "If you study it intimately, you will find there's a tremendous amount of repetition in song style and form that really hasn't changed much at all in 70 years," says Aldrich, citing Tin Pan Alley scribes like Cole Porter and even classical composers like Handel as using similar approaches.

Phyllida Lloyd, director of "Mamma Mia!" and a veteran opera director, doesn't need a scientist to explain why ABBA songs are so infectious.

"I think it's a combination of things," says Lloyd. "I think it's genius melodies by Benny Andersson and really quite deceptively complex and intricate orchestration. They were sort of masters of studio production, and they used every gizmo in the book at that time available to man, including a very ornate use of vocal harmony and words used partly as orchestration."

Lloyd is living proof that an inability to shake ABBA has no long-term side effects. Having had one or another of the songs in her head for the past 10 years as she shepherded "Mamma Mia!" onto both Broadway and the big screen, Lloyd says her sanity is perfectly intact.

"You wouldn't think so, would you? Questions ought to be asked," she says with a laugh. "I find that you just don't tire of them."

[Sarah Rodman is one of two pop music critics for the Boston Globe, a position she has held since May 2006. For thirteen years prior to that, she worked as both the pop music and television critic for the Boston Herald, where she also wrote about books, theater, travel and film. Her interest in music and and the arts began early as a child growing up in Natick thanks to her parents' eclectic tastes and through working at the late, lamented record store, Good Vibrations. Rodman received her degree in arts criticism, a major of her own design, from Ithaca College.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company (owners of the Boston Fishwrap, aka Globe)

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