I’ve been thinking a lot about two mostly-unrelated articles I read recently. The first, titled Everything Is Interpolated, discusses music licensing. My takeaway is that there are few enough arrangements of common notes that any new melody has decent odds of sounding a bit like someone else’s song. And if it’s close, you better license a sample or at least the tune to avoid getting sued. And at that point, why even try to create a new melody when you can just buy one and remix it? So today, we get a lot of remixes, samples, and interpolations (that is, quotations). For example, I recently heard a new track from Lil’ Uzi Vert and Nicki Minaj and thought I recognized something familiar about the tune. We looked it up on Genius: it’s the piano hook from “Blue (Da Ba Dee)“, a bit of late-90s europop known for… well, that hook and nothing else. But that hook is popular. Rapper Flo Rida used it in 2009, a slowed-down version anchors “Tus Celos” by Puerto Rican trap artist Anuel AA, Bebe Rexha and David Guetta featured it in a club track in 2022, and so on for dozens and dozens of variations. And just like this one, any remotely catchy tune is likely to be licensed and slotted into a new location, each new song just a fresh coat of paint on an existing tune.
The second article, The Banality of Conspiracy Theories, begins with what used to be a convent in what is now my city of Somerville, MA. Specifically, it begins with Protestant rioters burning it to the ground in August 1834 because they believed the nuns were being forced into sexual depravity, and that their resulting children were being murdered and buried in the basement.
The Ursuline convent was targeted because of conspiracy theories that, in many ways, were the 1830s version of the contemporary panic on the right regarding child sexual abuse… Although it is tempting to see these moral panics as something new, they have been part of American culture for nearly two centuries, and they recur at key moments in history for specific, identifiable reasons. Combating them requires first understanding that they are not only not novel, but in fact rote—almost to the point of banality. In other words, like a remix of an old tune, conspiracy theories just keep cropping back up, serving the same purpose. Only instead of something to dance to, these remixed vibes are something to riot about, a substitute for engaging with change or understanding the actual nuances of the actual world.
Car Brain
Let’s take another visit to The Atlantic, this time for the article Everyone has Car Brain, about a new study of “motonormativity:”
Should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.
Meanwhile, Education
- A highly-regarded teacher picked up a highly-regarded children’s book about accepting each other’s differences during her school’s book fair, and read it with her 5th grade class. She got fired for it.
- If you didn’t want your child to be punished for reporting sexual assault, why would you send them to a Christian school?
- Conservatives now want to ban scholarships for minority students.
Joy
- Last week a glamorous dog rolled up next to me with the radio on playing “Dripping in Finesse” and it was pretty great.
- A really cool tree.
- This kitten is not a stellar hair stylist.
- A rather elegant iguana named Steven.
- Kitten notices reflection.
Secretly Ironic 