Attachment to Music

It is not uncommon for friends on Facebook or other social media to post links to music videos for the sake of nostalgia, or because the artist is in the news (possibly deceased), or just to express the poster’s current state of mind. Unless I have some history with or personal connection to the song or artist (such as my Bobby Darin story), I seldom comment on the post whether I like the song or not. It means something to the poster, and that is enough: de gustibus and all that. However, it is well known (and a subject of recurrent research) that our musical tastes say much about our personalities, so perhaps we reveal more than we intend when we post music vids.
 
An acquaintance (the actual face-to-face kind) who is also is a frequenter of my posts on this blogsite (and thereby one of a smallish but I like to think discerning readership) asked me the other day whether the music videos attached to most of them reflect my personal taste. (I sensed a bit of judgment in the question, but didn’t pursue that aspect of it.) The answer is by-and-large yes. Not always. Sometimes the title or lyrics of a song are just apt for the topic of the blog, so I’ll attach it even if I personally don’t like it much. But 9 times out of 10 I like the attachment at least a little. Occasionally a lot. I’m not sure what that reveals, but an online test purports to do so.
 
Research over the past 30 years (confirming what was already obvious to casual observers) has shown that the overwhelming majority of people form their musical tastes between the ages of 10 and 30, with 14 being the peak year. People remember notes and lyrics of songs from this stage of life better than any they heard before or hear later. The songs typically remain a core preference for life with ever deepening nostalgia value. Our tastes as we grow older and more experienced may well expand far beyond what we liked in youth, of course, (mine did) but usually in ways that are unsurprising if you know the core. For example, heavy metal enthusiasts if and when they explore classical tend to like Wagner. I get this completely. Wagner is definitely the most metal of the classical composers.
 
For this reason the most recent studies on musical preferences and personality traits have focused less on broad genres per se (e.g. country, rap, folk, classical, etc.) and more on musical attributes within and across genres, such as arousal, valence and depth. David M. Greenberg at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Cambridge in a 2021 study, also found that listeners tended to like artists who appeared to express in their music personality traits similar to their own according to the Big 5 model. (The Big Five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN). “The match between the [personality of the] listener and the artist was predictive of the musical preferences for the artist beyond just the attributes from the music,” Greenberg said according to the Washington Post.
 
Anyway, I took his 35-question test on personality and musical taste. It can be found at https://musicaluniverse.io/ – if you take it, note the warning to save the results manually. My first page results:
 
Score Summary
 
Below is a summary of your scores based on comparisons to 350,000 people worldwide. To learn details and get personalized recommendations based on your scores, download your 15-page eReport on the next page.
 
Personality Traits:
Openness | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Conscientiousness | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Extraversion | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Agreeableness | High (76 to 91st Percentile)
Emotional Stability | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
 
Musical Preferences:
Mellow | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Unpretentious | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Sophisticated | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Intense | Average (25 to 75th Percentile)
Contemporary | Low (9 to 24th percentile)
 
Those are disturbingly normal results. So much for being eccentric. An agreeable average Joe who doesn’t get newfangled stuff? I’ve been called worse.
 
I’m not sure how any of that relates to the musical attachments on this site – well OK, you’d be hard-pressed to find much newfangled pop, I suppose. You’ll find new rock (e.g. Dorothy, Rival Sons, The Pretty Reckless), though admittedly the style of these groups is much like the rock of my 10-30 youth.
 
When I started blogging on this site on a whim in 2009 (Yikes! That’s 15 years ago) the posts were just prose – even photos were rare. The videos came along later to add a bit more… well… pretension – and perhaps to inspire in the reader the question “Why THAT song? My pick would have been much better.” You’re probably right, too. Hey, what do you expect? I’m just an agreeable average Joe who doesn’t get newfangled stuff.
 

Nostalgia Post: I first heard this number by Janis (when she was with Big Brother and the Holding Company) on the radio in 1968 at age 15 – right in that 10-30 sweet spot. I like several of her other numbers better but the first counts for something. It ultimately prompted me to buy 4 albums between 1968 and 1971 including the posthumous Pearl. Janis Joplin – Piece of My Heart

Brrr

It is cold outside. In NJ in late January that is no surprise, but it is cold outside… and snowing. As a kid I rather liked living in a region with four distinct seasons: each one had its own opportunities for play. (There was also a comfortable home to which to retreat, for which I didn’t have to pay.) Each season brought its own labors too, but my parents didn’t drive me and sister too hard on those. Nowadays the winter labors far outweigh the joys. Winter sports are not my thing: skiing is physically dangerous for me at this point in life, skating is plausible but at my skill level will result in some thumps on my butt, while the appeal of snowmobiling (icy particles blasting one’s face at 60kph) always has escaped me. I am left with snow shovels and snowblowers, which are not nearly so fun. I understand more with each passing year why so many retirees relocate to places like Sarasota or Tucson: let the sunshine in. I won’t be joining them, but only because I am too rooted to where I live. All my stuff is here – and I don’t mean just material possessions.
 
My own personal inertia aside, humans, like all great apes, evolved as tropical creatures. All the ones besides humans had the good sense to remain in warm environments. (I’ll modify that statement if a Yeti specimen ever turns up.) Our direct ancestors lacked that level of sanity. 500,000 years ago Homo heidelbergensis (a species predating both Neanderthal and modern humans) lived in an England far colder than the one of today. There is no evidence they had clothes and no physical evidence (such as ancient hearths) they had fire. (I suspect they did, but only because of the difficulties of being so far north without it.) They must have been cold. By 30,000 years ago migrating anatomically modern humans occupied pretty much every environment up to the arctic. Why go so far north? Riches – at least by the standards of hunter-gatherers. While not ideal environments for vegans the cold North hosts abundant wildlife, including fish and herds of caribou and reindeer. Scoring a meal was easy – but damn it was still cold.
 
There are numerous health benefits to living in colder regions. Despite annual flu season, cold weather actually reduces exposure to communicable diseases overall. (You’re not likely to be bit by a malaria-carrying mosquito when it’s -20C.) It reduces common infections. It rejuvenates skin. It improves sleep. It reduces inflammations and allergies. It even boosts brain function: people in cool rooms do better on cognitive tests than when in warm rooms. Nor are humans the only beneficiaries. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences latitude and lifespan were correlated in 85% of examined animal species.

 
All that may be so, but I’d rather be warm. If I cannot bring myself to the heat, I’ll bring the heat to me. That’s what fireplaces are for.
 

The Rolling Stones – Winter

The Fall of the House of Bell-Usher

Simplified, the first two laws of thermodynamics are 1) you can’t win and 2) you can’t break even. Said Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, “The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” Though he was not the first to notice the effect, Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) is credited with formalizing the concept of entropy (ΔS=∫[dq/T]) in the 1850s. In a closed system spontaneous change is always in the direction of a reduction of energy available for useful work. This is another way of saying net disorder always increases overall; an increase of order in some corner of the system is always bought with a greater decrease in the system as a whole. Things decay. We decay. We can fight decay selectively, but we use up limited resources in the process. Our ability to combat decay decays. Entropy wins in the end.

 
This doesn’t happen right away. We have our glory days when we exploit our surroundings effectively to make our particular corner of the system splendid and strong. As Roderick Usher sings in allusion to his family home in Poe’s story,
 
“Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)...”
 
But of course the good times don’t last forever for either his estate or his family. (He and his twin sister Madeline are the last of the family lineage.) So,
 
“And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed...”
 
Like Roderick, I (also the last of a lineage) feel somehow connected almost physically to my home (built decades ago by my dad in sunnier times), and both of us are falling apart. The roof leaks, my teeth rot. The plumbing has problems, so does mine. The house visibly ages, so do I. Its furnaces cough, so do my lungs. Its minor systems (e.g. garage door openers) wear out, my physical abilities wane. Carpets fray, hair thins. The house more easily suffers damage from use, my stamina is much diminished. Both of us have become very expensive to maintain even in far less than ideal condition.

Back when order was still increasing on what is now my plot of land. The
house was not yet built, I had a Donny Osmund haircut, and area codes were 
unnecessary on local calls.

 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not giving up on either of us quite yet. I’ll continue to invest time, energy, and money to keep us both functional, but in both our cases some realism is in order about what effects of entropy are reversible and what are not. Unlike a human being, a house in principle can be rebuilt totally of course, but that usually is not a pragmatic course of action for owners with limited funds – it is not a pragmatic course of action for me. Still, I’ll not yet let either the house or me just split in two and sink into the tarn.
 
Nonetheless, I’m acutely aware that neither of my parents lived past 74. Entropy caught up with them. My intention is to exceed that benchmark (not a very high bar nowadays), but entropy might play the prankster with me by then, too. One never knows.
 
I don’t hold a grudge, though of course I miss being 18, at least in terms of youthful vigor. (It and youthful foolishness were a package deal.) Entropy is a condition of existence. Without it there could be no life at all. Better some than none. So on balance I’d call it a positive. Meanwhile, there even may remain time to float yet another yellow, glorious, golden banner or two on the roof. I’ll get on that.
 

Kelly Osborne – Entropy

Giving Vice Its Due

This being the first week of 2024, some readers might have had some experience with alcohol sometime in the past seven days. Some may regret it. Others not. Some might even be participating in Dry January, though I suspect most of those doing so are non-drinkers anyway. We all know the health risks of alcohol overindulgence. I blogged on this not long ago: The Booze Bin. Those affected directly and indirectly by alcohol abuse are not few. As many as 1 in 8 drinkers may qualify as alcoholics and (according to the CDC) as many as 1 in 3 (while not necessarily meeting criteria for alcoholism) drink excessively. Nonetheless, these are still minorities – sizable ones, but minorities. For the moderate majority of drinkers are there benefits besides (possibly dubious) health ones? They obviously think so or they wouldn’t do it. First let’s first dabble in statistics, some of which are counterintuitive.

Per capita consumption of alcohol in the U.S. (counting only alcohol content itself, whether in beer, wine, cider, or spirits) peaked in the 1970s, which is pretty much as I remember the decade. It declined through the 1980s and 1990s and then started to rise again after 2000. It spiked in 2020. Though it fell back a little in 2021, it remained higher than pre-pandemic levels. In 2022-23 it again trended slowly upward. 62% of adults (over 18) say they drink at least sometimes; the number is 65% of those over 21, the legal age in the U.S. This compares to 71% back in the 1970s. The average annual per capita consumption for Americans over 21 (abstainers included in the total) currently is 2.83 gallons [10.71 liters] of pure alcohol or 603 standard drinks. Oddly, alcohol consumption is positively correlated with income: 79% of those with incomes over $100,000 are regular drinkers, 58% of those earning over $40,000 but less than $100,000 are drinkers, and 53% of those earning under $40,000 are drinkers. College graduates are more likely to drink (74%) than non-grads (56%). Unsurprisingly, weekly attendees of religious services are less likely to drink (48%) than non-attendees (67%). Non-Hispanic whites are more likely to drink (68%) than either Hispanics (59%) or non-Hispanic blacks (50%) according to the Pew Research Center. The differences among adult age groups are significant but not massive, though there is considerable variance by age of beverage choices, with older Americans preferring more traditional spirits, beers, and wines; the percentage of drinkers 18-34 is 58%, 35-54 is 66%, and over 55 is 61%. Among older Americans, health issues might affect the percentages.
 
Getting back to the matter of non-health benefits, are there any? For moderate – and only for moderate – consumers of alcohol the answer is a qualified yes. (“Moderate” according to the CDC is no more than 2 drinks per day for a man, 1, for a woman, and no more than 14 in any one week; “binge drinking” is more than 4 in a day. I haven’t had 14 in any one week in at least a decade… maybe 2 decades… maybe 3.) An article on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health site states, “The social and psychological benefits of alcohol can’t be ignored. A drink before a meal can improve digestion or offer a soothing respite at the end of a stressful day; the occasional drink with friends can be a social tonic. These physical and social effects may also contribute to health and well-being.” Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford’s Experimental Psychology department agrees. He says, “Our social networks provide us with the single most important buffer against mental and physical illness. While pubs traditionally have a role as a place for community socialising, alcohol’s role appears to be in triggering the endorphin system, which promotes social bonding.” A more detailed analysis can be found in the study Functional Benefits of (Modest) Alcohol Consumption, which states in the Abstract, “We combine data from a national survey with data from more detailed behavioural and observational studies to show that social drinkers have more friends on whom they can depend for emotional and other support, and feel more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community."

It turns out that even just bending the long-suffering bartender's ear can be as therapeutic as cliché would have it.
 
Note, however, the social aspect of the tippling mentioned above. Drinking alone, with all due respect to GeorgeThorogood, misses much of the point. Maybe one to unwind upon arriving home alone is OK, but think twice before pouring a second. Skip the third, and maybe join the sober minority if you find that hard to do. They have a point to make, too.
 

Ida Lupino - One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)

[One trusts that it’s the metaphorical road back to happiness]