RIP, Jimmy Buffett
Yesterday, after I got back from a short 4-mile hike at the Guilford County Farm, I drank a couple of shandies while a selection of Jimmy’s hits played on the Pig Pounder’s PA.
I am not a true Parrothead. I have a boxed set on a shelf somewhere. I went to at least two or three of the big concerts outside Cincinnati in the late 80s - early 90s. The tailgating before the concert was easily as big an event as the show itself, and it went on for longer. Six hours of food and drink and cameraderie with complete strangers before the gates even opened. One year we met a fifteen-year-old named Pistol, who clearly had a future as a Girl Gone Wild.
Another year we were escorted off the premises by the rent-a-cops, despite the fact that we had already stopped drinking. The problem was that we were resting in the shade of the car, which apparently made us a drunk driving risk (melanoma be damned). My freckled friend bailed and took a ride home, while I snuck back in with the after-work crowd. Danced with a cute girl wearing a cast on one arm (her, not me).
Though Jimmy definitely encouraged excess in some of his fans, he always seemed (to me) to wear his celebrity rather lightly (in the Chesterson sense). In later years he wrote books, ran restaurants (and casinos?), opened multiple RV parks, and bought Berkshire Hathaway stock. Apparently died a billionaire.
"Who knew people wanted to live in Margaritaville?" Buffett said in an interview with The New Yorker. "I thought for a while it was a myth."
Rest in prosperity, Pharoah James I.
Long Live Yankovic
I appreciate people who can do that, dance across the hot coals of fame without burning their feet off, like Weird Al Yankovic. His recent Roku biopic was wildly and deliberately inaccurate, but in the opposite way of most narcissists. He didn’t clean up his life story; he schmutzed it up even more, making himself look like a drug-addled womanizer. Given what happens to the records of long-gone empires, I can imagine a future where that one movie is ironically the only record of his existence. I can also imagine a world where through donated sperm he has millions of descendants like Genghis Khan.
I imagine a lot.
Webb Wilder, Last of the Full-Grown Men
If I have an actual musical hero, it’s probably Webb. He has similarly cultivated a larger-than-life persona that may have nothing to do with his real personality. I probably first heard of him through the amateur DJs and hangers-on at the campus radio station WRFL (“88.1, all the way to the left”). And then there was his one Top 40 hit, “Human Cannonball,” and the Webb Wilder Credo.
Actually, I take that back. HC supposedly topped out at #68, and it was a different song, “Tough It Out,” that made it to #16.
Over the years, I have attempted to share my love of this sci-fi psychobilly treasure with the various up-and-comers of my acquaintance, the academic hoop-jumpers of the millenium, as well as the ambitious young fire-eaters of GenZ. At this late date, I think it’s safe to say they don’t get it.
Speaking of Ambition . . .
Not a programmer, but enjoyed this.
and this.
Hey Man, Where’s Some Science?
OK. You asked for it.
If you’ve ever felt the need to punk-ture the fashion posse (as Webb used to call them), this set of three papers shows experimentally that while we do have individual musical taste, we generally don’t listen to our own tastes because what other people say they like is more salient to us.
What they did was divide an online marketplace where people could download free music into multiple “worlds.” When there was no social feedback (no star ratings, no download rankings, nothing), people tried different things and only downloaded what they actually liked. Oddly, they often agreed with one another, across worlds.
Like an old restaurant ad I used to hear on the radio in Rochester during grad school, “Quality predominates.”
(I never actually went there, by the way.)
However, as soon as you turn on social feedback, the system goes chaotic. Crap songs are just as likely to go viral as great ones, and the winner-take-all results in one social world are pretty much irrelevant to the other social worlds. That one variable (social feedback) is the difference between a functioning meritocracy and an online casino.
While it’s easy to turn off the social feedback behind the scenes, or manipulate it, as Cory Doctorow describes in a really excellent 3-part On the Media interview,
it’s very hard to consciously turn it off in your own head. If the information is there, your brain will probably find a way to use it.
(a good writer like Dr O can use the word twiddling and make it sound sinister)
These are some of my favorite social science papers of the last decade, and I can’t believe more people don’t know about them.
Enjoy the holiday!
My wife did the music logging for this group on Sunday afternoon at the NC Folk Festival while I was at home sick with a cold. https://www.zoeandcloyd.com/