Category Archives: Entertainment

The rise of “Seven Nation Army” to sports folk song

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Deadspin has the story of how the song “Seven Nation Army” became ubiquitous at sporting events around the world. Here are a few of the important steps in the rise of the song:

The march toward musical empire began on Oct. 22, 2003, in a bar in Milan, Italy, 4,300 miles away from Detroit. Fans of Club Brugge K.V., in town for their team’s group-stage UEFA Champions League clash against European giant A.C. Milan, gathered to knock back some pre-match beers. Over a stereo blared seven notes: Da…da-DA-da da DAAH DAAH, the signature riff of a minor American hit song…

But in Milan, at the beginning, it was purely spontaneous and local. Kickoff was coming. The visiting Belgians moved out into the city center, still singing. They kept chanting it in the stands of the San Siro—Oh…oh-OH-oh oh OHH OHH—as Peruvian striker Andres Mendoza stunned Milan with a goal in the 33rd minute and Brugge made it hold up for a shocking 1-0 upset. Filing out of the stadium, they continued to belt it out.

The song traveled back to Belgium with them, and the Brugge crowd began singing it at home games. The club itself eventually started blasting “Seven Nation Army” through the stadium speakers after goals.

Then, on Feb. 15, 2006, Club Brugge hosted A.S. Roma in a UEFA Cup match. The visitors won, 2-1, and the Roma supporters apparently picked up the song from their hosts…

“Seven Nation Army” made a beachhead in American sports in State College, Penn. According to a 2006 story in the Harrisburg Patriot-News, Penn State spokesperson Guido D’Elia—who is still the director of communications and branding for the embattled football program—was inspired by hearing a Public Radio International story about A.S. Roma’s use of the song. D’Elia, who also introduced the now unavoidable German techno track “Kernkraft 400” to Nittany Lions fans, had found something new…

By the middle of the 2006 season, “Seven Nation Army” was a Beaver Stadium staple. (This year, as Penn State students gathered on Nov. 8 outside the university administration building, they began singing Joe Paterno’s first name over the riff.)

Is this what globalization looks like? The song was recorded by Americans, found its way into bars and soccer stadiums in Belgium and Italy, and then back to the United States as a marching band piece. Along the way, the song crossed national and language boundaries as well as musical instruments.

I bet there could be some interesting musical analysis regarding why this song has become so popular. It doesn’t require words to be sung, particularly helpful for large crowds of (rowdy?) people at sporting events. It only includes seven notes. It has a particular minor edge to it, described in this story as a sound of “doom” which is no doubt helpful in celebrations as the scoring team’s fans want to celebrate as well as taunt the other side.

I would be interested to know how much in royalties Jack White is getting from all of these plays…

Argument: fake “House Hunters” does a disservice to the realities of American homeownership

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Responding to the recent news that the HGTV show House Hunters may be fake, one writer suggests this does a disservice to the realities of American homeownership:

So what’s the problem? By now, the onus is on the viewer to consume all “reality television” with a chuckle and a grain of salt. The genre’s underlying appeal is often rooted in its escapist, aspirational qualities (or, at other end of the spectrum, its indulgence of our basest schadenfreude). But House Hunters was always much more about showing us an attainable reality than a fantasy. The show (and its many iterations), in which people just like us (juggling budgets, worried about school districts, pulled between city and suburb), go shopping for the best home their money can buy, not only glorifies the dream of home ownership, but makes it seem achievable. (If that IT guy and his elementary school teacher wife can successfully get out of their dingy apartment and into a new home with the requisite granite countertops, “marriage-saving” double vanities, and bedroom-sized walk-in closets, so can I!) This plays right into our inexplicably unwavering attachment to home ownership: Despite the collapse of the housing market, polling continues to demonstrate that we regard owning a home as the cornerstone of the American Dream—a perception that undoubtedly played a role in the home-buying craze prior to the bubble’s burst.

Showing houses that aren’t even for sale at prices divined by its producers, House Hunters is presenting dangerous misinformation about the home-buying process and deleting all of the accompanying complications and consequences. It’s turned what is actually a messy, frustrating, often dead-end process into a seamless (and perhaps necessary) path toward fulfillment. What’s more, it seems likely that viewers use the prices, locations, and home criteria discussed on the show as barometers for their own house hunts because the information is presented as fact. No, House Hunters does not explicitly condone selling one’s soul for a white picket fence, and other HGTV shows like My First Place and Property Virgins do delve into money and home-inspection woes from time to time. But doesn’t HGTV have some obligation to portray the housing market as it is, or, at the very least, offer a pronounced disclaimer about the producers’ creative and logistical liberties?

Maybe they could fix this whole mess and wipe the slate clean with a good old fashioned “where are they now” episode, showing us the truth after those mortgage payments start taking a toll.

So the main worry here is that House Hunters makes homeownership seem too easy and could lead too many people into more decisions? Perhaps we need an extra paragraph here extolling the virtues of renting…

I’m not sure what to make of this argument. Homeownership is indeed an American value. One could argue that HGTV itself stands as a giant beacon for homeownership and a consumerist lifestyle. Is this necessarily bad? Does HGTV simply reflect the interests Americans have or does it insidiously push people toward too much homeownership and consumption? Are impressionable kids and adults watching this channel and then going out and spending beyond their means? I don’t think we have the public data to examine this (though some marketing company may have this information).

In the end, I suppose it comes down to this: do you think HGTV has a moral/ethical/social obligation to also show the downsides of homeownership?

Sociological study of sitcom fathers from the 1950s to today: men portrayed similarly

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It is a common complaint that television sitcoms make fathers out to be buffoons or at least incompetent parents. One PhD student in sociology looked at sitcoms from the 1950s to today to see how the fathers compare:

Miller found that while family structures in sitcoms has kept up with real social change — there are more single and divorced men in the recent sitcoms, for example — the men in both eras are more likely to be similar than different.

There is almost no difference in how often men express anger or emotional attachment. And men in the 1950s were almost as likely to say they were being victimized by someone else, such as their boss, as they do in the recent sitcoms.

Men in both sets of sitcoms also show almost equal amounts of self-deprecating behaviour…

Probably the greatest difference Miller noted is that men in the recent sitcoms make fewer imperative statements, are less likely to be respectful to others, and less likely to be respected by others. It might signal a decline in male authority, but it’s also a sign of all-around lower standards of decorum and politeness, she says.

Men in the recent sitcoms are also more likely to be immature. In Miller’s recent sample, there were about five times as many incidents of immaturity as in the 1950s series. But sitcom women have also become increasingly immature.

Perhaps the real story here is the consistency of television formats: the sitcoms of the past may not really be that different from the sitcoms of today even as the characters and situations have changed slightly.

Another possible takeaway is that television probably isn’t the best place to look for examples of good behavior. I assume most Americans would readily agree with this but considering the number of hours people watch plus the cultural power shows can have, television characters end up establishing certain behaviors.

Civilization II a good “sociological simulator”? I say no

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I was amused earlier this week to see a report from a guy who has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten years. Here is a little bit of his report on the state of the Civ II world:

  • The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
  • There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

While I loved playing Civ II (and I think the gameplay was superior to later versions of the game), I’m scratching my head at how much attention this report has received in the media. Does it really tell us anything about the world’s possible future? Here is one overview from the BBC that I think goes too far:

A man who has been playing the computer game Civilisation II for ten years describes the year 3991 AD as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

Daniel Knowles, from the Telegraph and a fan of the game, says the game has certain assumptions built in to it about what will happen if there is a nuclear war or if you stop producing green technology.

“It’s a kind of sociological simulator… a giant economical model” he told the Today programme.

He believes gamer James Moore “would not still be playing it if he had reached an Utopia”.

Civilization II is a “sociological simulator”? I doubt it. Granted, the game is intended to replicate real-world nation-building and interaction. As you build your society, you have to make decisions like what kind of government to have (for example, in latter stages of the game fundamentalism is quite effective when waging all-out war), what to build and produce in individual cities, how to move certain units (military and otherwise) around, and pursue scientific and technological advancements. But, all of these types of games (and I’ve also been a fan in recent years of Age of Empires III) are only as good as what they account for. In other words, this is a low-level simulator of anything. The real world is far more complicated and many more moving pieces that games like this can allow. Indeed, these sorts of games seem geared toward all-out war between nations even as some would argue the international scene is getting more peaceful.

We are still far from a true “sociological simulator” that could account for all of the human variability in real life. This hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying – there was news recently of a group trying to put together a “Living Earth Simulator.” But, we need to remember what Civ II really is: it is a fun game with some modeling of human behavior but it really tells us very little or nothing about what the world might look like in 3991 AD.

“House Hunters” not so real

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Several former participants in HGTV’s House Hunters say the story shown on TV isn’t exactly reality:

The premise of ‘House Hunters’ is that viewers follow a buyer as they anxiously decide between three different houses. Jensen says that, in fact, one house has already been purchased–the producers wouldn’t even finalize her as a subject until after the closing. “When I watch other episodes of the show now I can usually pick out the house they were getting based on hair-dos alone,” says Jensen. Houses are sometimes shot months apart. While the two rejected properties may be on the market, in Jensen’s case, “They were just our two friends’ houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!”

A former subject of the spin-off “House Hunters International” confirms that one house on the program has already been bought before filming begins. Ted Prosser, who did his real estate search in the Virgin Islands, said in an interview with a St. John blog: “The show is not really a reality show. You have to already own the house that gets picked at the end of the show. But the other houses in [my] show are actually the other houses we considered buying.”…

When confronted with Jensen’s allegations, a publicist for ‘House Hunters’ told Entertainment Weekly in a statement:

“We’ve learned that the pursuit of the perfect home involves big decisions that usually take place over a prolonged period of time – more time than we can capture in 30 minutes of television…. We’re making a television show, so we manage certain production and time constraints, while honoring the home buying process…. Showcasing three homes makes it easier for our audience to “play along” and guess which one the family will select. It’s part of the joy of the ‘House Hunters’ viewing experience. Through the lens of television, we can offer a uniquely satisfying and fun viewing experience that fulfills a universal need to occasionally step into someone else’s shoes.”

Is there any reality in reality TV? Seriously though, the “reality” shown on House Hunters would be cost prohibitive: how could a network afford (or justify) following a couple around as they see sometimes dozens of houses. I’m also a little surprised this information hasn’t come up before -participants must sign quite a contract.

I’ve noted before the popularity of HGTV shows. While the story of the couple on some of these shows is important, I wonder how much it really matters. Don’t people really want to see the different houses and options? You can’t have completely boring people on the show who like everything but at the same time, the real focus of these shows is the houses.

Changing sets in “Clybourne Park” from a nice 1959 house to a home ready to be knocked down for a McMansion

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The play Clyboune Park is on Broadway and just won a 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. In going from Act 1 to Act 2, the play shifts from a house in 1959 to the same home 50 years later that is ripe for a McMansion teardown:

That’s because Clybourne Park is a biting, funny riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play A Raisin in the Sun, one that takes place in the house that Hansberry’s African-American characters purchase in an otherwise all-white neighborhood. It’s talked about, but never seen, in her play, but it’s the fulcrum of the conversations in Clybourne Park.

“The first act is in 1959, in sort of an Eisenhower-era middle class/working class household,” Ostling explains. “The people are packing up to move. And in the second act, it’s 2009. The neighborhood sort of went down, the house is trashed, and they’re preparing to raze it and build a McMansion. So it’s really two completely different sets.”

In the first act, the set has a cozy, lived-in feel — from the flowery 1950s wallpaper to the period doorknobs. When the curtain rises for Act 2, most of the details have changed significantly.

“All the woodwork is painted over,” Ostling says. “The front door has been replaced — because we were thinking, you know, they probably wanted more security, so that nice wood-and-glass front door is replaced with a security door that has some serious bolts in it.”

During intermission, the set has to be changed very, very quickly; a crew of five swings walls in a highly coordinated intermission ballet. When they first rehearsed the changeover, it took 30 or 40 minutes. Now, Ostling says, “We’re not waiting for the crew at all. We’re waiting for people to go to the bathroom!”

The home may be the same but much has changed between 1959 and 2009, both in American neighborhoods as in what Americans expect in their interiors. I would be interested to see what the “ready to be razed for a McMansion” interior look is these days – probably not much granite and stainless steel.

I’ve always been intrigued by how homes are portrayed on TV, in movies, and in plays. On one hand, they are typically depicted as “average” places. Of course, this look is very staged and I’m not sure these homes really look like typical homes. Yet, they always feel a little strange already as you know they are often cutaway all along one angle to allow for cameras. You know what this is like if you have seen a play or gone on a TV set where the interior looks a little familiar but is completely open with plenty of room for cameras and lights.

Media looks for ways to better measure fragmented audience

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As media platforms proliferate, media companies are looking for better ways to measure their audience:

“We have Omniture data, comScore, Nielsen, some of our internal metrics that we look at — they don’t match,” Wert said.

Hampering the effort are audiences splintering into ever smaller shards as they use an array of outlets and platforms — including websites, mobile devices, print and broadcast…

The tinier the pieces the more precious each becomes. It’s more important than ever for traditional media looking to cover the costs of producing content to deliver to marketers as much information as possible about who’s watching, reading and listening.

Arguably, technology has made the measurement systems better than ever. But the result is counterintuitive: Consumers are followed more closely but the numbers don’t always add up, and it’s not clear how to put a value on those numbers…

Nielsen’s Patrick Dineen, senior vice president of local television audience measurement, said it’s “wildly inappropriate” to try to track audiences through one medium. Kevin Gallagher, executive vice president and local director at Starcom, said his firm has replaced talk of traditional media planning with something that tracks targeted consumers’ daily interaction with media.

Getting the right numbers means media companies will be able to more accurately gauge advertising, particularly target audiences, and then make more money. Solving these issues and appropriately valuing these media interactions will be a huge issue moving forward and whoever can do it first or do it best could have an advantage.

Portraying fear and multiculturalism in the Australian suburbs

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An Australian playwright talks about what he saw in the suburbs that prompted him to write his first play titled Little Borders:

Several years ago, my family home in Adelaide was knocked down and rebuilt. The suburb was once a new development, built onto what had originally been swampland. Over the years, the house had begun to sink; the kitchen was slightly lower than the adjacent rooms, and a crack ran through the length of the ceiling. Despite the suburb’s swampy foundations, our street was pristine. It was quiet, lined with trees, and curved alongside a man-made lake. People jogged. They walked their dogs. They smiled at strangers.

While our family home was being rebuilt, we moved to a rental property in a nearby suburb. The house was on a main road. We woke up at night to the sound of motorists loudly hammering their horns. My brother and I started walking to the corner store barefoot, in board shorts, to buy frozen peas and schnitzels.

We came home one day to find the house across the street sealed off by police tape, with hazmat-suited officers wandering in and out. The same prostitute kept making conversation with me at the bus stop. She was very friendly-and liked that I was half-Maltese, as she herself was born in Greece and was planning to return there later that year – but it was still a bizarre culture shock.

When we finally moved back to our rebuilt home, I remained fascinated with the idea of suburbs that are geographically close, but socioeconomically divided. I overheard our smiling, jogging, dog-walking neighbours talking in racially incensed language about the new residents of the housing commission homes down the road, reminding each other to lock their cars at night.

At the same time, both major political parties were battling it out over the issue of asylum seekers, with each leader attempting to court votes by promising a stronger brand of xenophobia than their opponent. From both sides, the message was clear: Boat People are approaching fast, they pose a threat to our national security, and the only rational response is mass panic.

I became interested in exploring how these notions of class difference and fear of outsiders clashed with the image of Australia as an egalitarian nation that celebrates its multiculturalism. At some point in my research, I struck upon the idea of setting the play in a gated community, which gave these issues potency, etching them into the physical world of the play. It was from this point that Little Borders really started to take shape.

This sounds like it could be an interesting play. I wonder how much it will be able to escape common cliches about suburban life that have been bandied about around in the United States since the 1950s.

The description of the suburbs quoted above does hint at the changes that American (and apparently Australian?) suburbs have experienced in recent years: they are becoming more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity as well as social class. Of course, there has been an uptick in gated communities as some suburban residents don’t look on these changes fondly and there are still profound divisions between certain suburbs.

A question: are there any plays that see suburbs as good places? For example, you could flip the above story a bit and suggest that suburbs that were once closed off to “others” are now slowly opening up which means new opportunities for some. The suburbs will likely never be ideal but there have been some notable changes in recent years.

Quick Review: Living in the Material World (film)

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I recently watched the Martin Scorsese film about George Harrison’s life titled Living in the Material World. Here are a few observations and thoughts about the roughly 3 hour documentary:

1. I think this would interest a lot of Beatles fans. Indeed, 1/3rd of the film is about the Beatles and the rest of the film has a lot of references to the group and other band members. I was actually surprised by the big emphasis on the group as well as the music of Lennon and McCartney. Both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr gave recent interviews for the film.

2. The other 2/3rd of the film deals with Harrison’s career after the Beatles. The best sections include more rare concert and home movies footage to show George in his element. I wish the film used more of the home movies as they would help us get further insights beyond the rock star image.

2a. There is a lot in this section about Harrison’s spirituality. Beyond the music, I think this film wants us to know how important spirituality was to Harrison and how he tried to follow spiritual principles. This reminded me that both John Lennon and George Harrison were both openly spiritual seekers throughout their adult lives.  From what I’ve read and seen about both of them, I’m not sure either really found what they were looking for.

2b. Another big portion of the solo career section deals with the #1 album All Things Have To Pass Away. This makes some sense: this 1970 release showed that Harrison really was a songwriter and musician in his own right. While the Beatles were breaking apart in the late 1960s, Harrison was stockpiling songs. At the same time, the film downplays Harrison’s subsequent releases. They may not have been as good but Harrison made music for three more decades.

3. The music all sounds really good. While Harrison doesn’t have the big back catalog of music that other music legends have, many of his songs still sound fresh and relevant.

Overall, I’m not quite sure what to make of this film. One goal seems to be to try cement Harrison’s musical and spiritual legacy. However, the movie glosses over some rougher patches (such as Eric Clapton falling in love with Harrison’s then-wife) and doesn’t explicitly try to assess where Harrison fits within the field of rock music. Should we see Harrison more of a spiritual seeker than a true music legend? How much did Harrison really do on his own outside the Beatles? These questions aren’t fully answered but there is enough interesting footage here to keep fans interested.

(Of the 18 reviews counted by RottenTomatoes.com, 16 were positive. Another note: this site says the film is 1 hr, 34 minutes so I’m not quite sure what the critics saw.)

The increasing sadness in pop music songs

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A psychologist and sociologist looked at Billboard pop music hits since 1965 and found that the songs have become more sad:

“As the lyrics of popular music became more self-focused and negative over time, the music itself became sadder-sounding and more emotionally ambiguous,” according to psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg and sociologist Christian von Scheve.

Analyzing Top 40 hits from the mid-1960s through the first decade of the 2000s, they find an increasing percentage of pop songs are written using minor modes, which most listeners—including children—associate with gloom and despair. In what may or may not be a coincidence, they also found the percentage of female artists at the top of the charts rose steadily through the 1990s before retreating a bit in the 2000s…

Strikingly, they found “the proportion of minor songs doubled over five decades.” In the second half of the 1960s, 85 percent of songs that made it to the top of the pop charts were written in a major mode. By the second half of the 2000s, that figure was down to 43.5 percent…

“The present findings have striking parallels to the evolution of classical music from 1600 to 1900,” Schellenberg and von Scheve write. “Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries …. Pieces tended to sound unambiguously happy or sad. By the 1800s, and the middle of the Romantic era, tempo and mode cues were more likely to conflict,” which allowed composers to express a wide range of emotions within a single piece.

I would be interested to hear how they relate these changes to larger social forces: does this line up with a greater sadness in society or perhaps the ability or proclivity to express negative emotions? I also wonder if the data is skewed at all by only looking at Top 40 songs – does all music reflect this or only the most popular songs (which then reflect the influence of musical gatekeepers such as radio stations, journalists, critics, and music labels)?

Also: could we have a period where we return to more major mode music? Can a musical genre, whether classical or pop music, recover from an extended period of “sadness”?