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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2647 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been getting really into youtube music dives lately.

The artist Dax has stuck out to me: https://youtube.com/channel/UCvvVOIyaYu2l4jiH9L8_eRw

Its a mix of lyrical rap, themes of religion and struggle, and a tortured soul.

His long one-take raps are actually insane. It implies a level of talent I can barely conceive.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hZGTYMzlwC4?si=wuGyZACqpSu6Coo6

Yes! Those were really awesome. Very physical singer, and it takes advantage of the YouTube medium.

Anyone know the story I'm thinking of? It was a world where every wall is dominated by porn, and people know nothing but that. People have fleeting memories of life beforehand (just dreams IIRC) but other than that this is all they've ever known.

Hard to google for obvious reasons.

The idea was that some civilization really liked porn, so they'd send somulated versions of themselves in to experience hundreds of years of it, not aware they were basically creating hell.

On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

A shitty life is hard to solve, being poor and sick are real hurdles, being bored is another matter.

If you have a range of options going from fulfilling but difficult to unfulfilling but easy it's hard not to say that going with the latter is the cause and not just the effect of your life being unfulfilling.

And people do have options. Opportunity costs aside books are basically free, volunteering in a totally new type of work and dealing with new types of people is free, travel is expensive but if you've already got a shitty job you won't be sacrificing much in terms of material conditions. There is a whole lot of challenge in these options and they might not provide ultimate fulfillment (though there's something to be learned from the search), but they're surely more fulfilling than being stuck in a rut of heavy gaming and porn addiction.

Books are literally free if you have a computer or a phone. I mostly use annas-archive.org now, it has libgen and zlib's contents

I don’t think that’s right. Gambling has been a problem in every culture where it was permitted. If it is available it will trap men, as it did to important men of history like Tesla and Mozart. It’s a superstimuli, So it will be inherently addictive regardless of what is going on in a culture. Video games are a hyper-extension of gambling, involving all the same cognition but with added superstimuli.

Porn, like gambling, is also a superstimuli. No matter how healthy your culture is, superstimuli activity will always be more desirable by definition. It doesn’t matter how hot your wife is if you can see a variety of the world’s most attractive women by clicking a few buttons.

I would say these things are definitively in the category of “causes”, just like the availability of opiates and alcohol are also causes. If every human had the ability to click a button and be administered an opiate, probably half the world would be addicted, because human nature involves occasional lapses in judgment and willpower.

It’s a bit odd how gambling is hardly mentioned in the Bible. Was the addictive technology that makes it so dangerous not invented yet?

I think gambling preys on what makes people successful in more modern societies.

When people get into trouble it's often best to ignore negative setbacks, focus on the positive, knuckle down and work hard.

In more primitive societies people are at the mercy of the elements. If you're a peasant and there's a major crop failure right before winter, working hard won't make anything better. Starvation is coming and you just have to curl up and endure until spring.

Invasions are similar, hide until the problem goes away.

That is odd.

I wonder when gambling really gains traction in the West. Wikipedia is pretty barren. You’ve got 5,000-year-old dice from the Middle East, then nothing until the Renaissance. Except further down it says that Aquinas and friends were debating the subject.

Ah, here we go. The Romans were, of course, really into gambling.

Maybe it’s an urban thing. The biggest cities, and the most developed economies, were the ones which saw gambling as a larger phenomenon?

The conflict in the Mahabarata, which could be loosely described as a Hindu holy book, is instigated when the evil uncle and cousin lure the emperor into a dice game with weighted dice. The way it's described (at least in the translation I've read) paints the emperor as fairly blame-free as he bets successively more and more on the dice game trying to chase his losses to the point where he loses his kingdom. The responsibility lies chiefly with the uncle and cousin who made the gambling available.

That’s interesting. I did some googling and don’t see a lot of mentions of gambling from Ancient Israel. It would be a sin by consequence though, falling under foolishness / love of money

With gambling I think back to when I was a kid, and it was perfectly possible for a middle class American to gamble any time they wanted, you just had to take a trip to Atlantic City, Vegas, or one of the Indian reservations. Because it was in a designated area, and most people need to take an overnight trip to get there, there was a romance and occasion to it.

There's something miserable about video poker machines in gas stations that I just can't get behind. About windowless off track betting parlors. And gambling on your phone removes all the positives you might be paying for at a casino: the atmosphere, the occasion, the trip, the social conviviality and adventure. It replaces it all with the bare fact of pissing money away.

And maybe I'm just glorifying my childhood, addicts still fucked things up, but it seems like we had a good compromise and fucked it up.

A funny modern development is gambling streamers. Twitch, the incumbent in streaming, banned gambling a while ago, but it draws enough users to gambling that Stake, an online gambling company, funded an entire twitch competitor - Kick - just to bring back gambling streams. They also pay popular streamers to gamble on kick. The streams themselves are apparently entertaining enough to draw tens of thousands of viewers per stream, which is comparable to e.g. many millions of youtube views. To me, it's strange - you're just sitting there as slots, tiles stream by and sometimes match up, and someone else's finances do a random walk. (While the losses the streamer makes are real in one sense, it's more than compensated for by their pay). And the streamer isn't even pulling a 'lever' with their finger, it's fully automated. (As this vod demonstrates - letters and colors fall for a full hour next to an empty chair). I understand the appeal of watching the talented play sports and esports. I understand the thrill of gambling. But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

I found a few years ago that I enjoy watching gacha pull streams and videos on Twitch and YouTube, much to my surprise. Gacha pulls being video game slot machines where in-game currency (purchasable with real currency, of course) is exchanged for a chance at acquiring an in-game character or item. I had expected to have no interest given the purely random nature of it, but that was not my experience at all.

One big thing I noticed was that there was a lot of fun in the vicarious thrill of both the high highs and the low lows. IRL and in video games, I hate gambling. The last time I went to a casino, I stuck to the $1 tables, and I don't spend money for pulls in gacha games. The streamers and YouTubers whose pull videos I watch tend to be whales who regularly spend $hundreds in a sitting just for a chance at getting some video game characters (and sometimes just for minor buffs for characters they already have), and it's fun to vicarious experience someone else's thrill of winning big or their despair of an extended losing streak without actually putting my money on the line.

Another big thing is the streamer or YouTuber themselves. Creating reaction content is a skill, and the way these people react to their randomly-generated victories and defeats can be quite entertaining to watch. I imagine these are factors that provide appeal for streams involving actual gambling.

But when you've taken out both the skill and the risk, what's even left?

Distraction? Sort of association with money?

100% There's a already lot of good evidence already backing the idea that gambling in a convenience store, or even worse, on a phone, is uniquely addicting in a way destination gambling is not. I actually turned down a job with DraftKings earlier this year because I think their business model is hugely predatory.

No I agree, unfortunately it became an arms race between the states and municipalities for tax revenue until most restrictions on gambling location were removed.

They are both the effect and the cause, as are most things. Those underlying causes have their own underlying causes too; is it thus illegitimate to truly blame anything but the boundary conditions of the universe?

If we legislated that everyone carry around syringes of morphine in their pockets at all times, a lot more people would get addicted to morphine. From a consequentialist standpoint I see no issue with blaming porn, which is actually fairly low-level, e.g. closer to cause and farther from effect than most things we villify.

This is a longstanding problem on the American right, Moldbug discussed it back in the day (and he was far from the first). American conservatism (since 1776) is essentially saying “👉👈what if we just stopped liberalism right here?”, where ‘here’ is Current Year Minus 10/20/50/100. Admitting that 1776 leads pretty inexorably to 2023 is beyond the pale for the American right (even the far right) outside of hardcore tradcaths and NrX types like Yarvin.

Because of this, it’s always about the symptom rather than the cause. Soyfacing about abolishing Drag Queen Story Hour makes them feel good, even though to a child raised in modern American culture its presence or absence will make exactly 0 difference to their own political or cultural (or sexual/gender) identity when everything else is saying the same message, even on the right (“be who you want to be”, individualism, freedom, personal liberty prioritized above community and society). As perhaps the English-speaking world’s most famous late 20th century conservative said, “there is no such thing as society”. US ‘conservatives’ take this to heart and so are incapable of diagnosing the root causes you describe.

And while hypocrisy is universal, it’s very important to remember that the young men cheering on porn band or whatever are usually current or former hardcore gooners themselves and so are really talking about themselves and their issues with self control more than the grand arc of liberal modernity.

The library of Slaanesh by Qiaochu Yuan.

I get the sense the author has consumed a rather lot of porn.

What did I just read?

Thanks!

One of the top google results for the author: "What happened to math prodigy Qiaochu Yuan, has he lost his mind?"

Sounds like he got into the Berkeley rationalist scene in grad school and it destroyed him. And now he lives in Bellevue watching pokemon videos all day?

For better or for worse he's basically a typical TPOT/Vibecamp-sphere guy.

I thought TPOT guys were supposed to be a light-hearted and happy crew of post-rational surrealists or something. Are they really all depressed layabouts who hang out on twitter too much?

I would imagine that his 40k tweets and 5th most active user status on stackoverflow contributed more than some IRL social experiences

That's definitely familiar. Were there only men in the world, and they lived in a world that was only empty rooms, each other, and those porn walls?

Yep, @Incanto had it, it's called The Library of Slaanesh

That sounds like Zero hp Lovecraft's God Shaped Hole?

It's not that one, though that is a pretty good story

Federal Register for 2023-09-19:

The Board of Tea Experts was established on March 2, 1897, by the Tea Importation Act of 1897. The Board was responsible for making recommendations to the Secretary of the Treasury to fix and establish uniform standards of purity, quality, and fitness for consumption of all kinds of teas imported into the United States. The Board was terminated by the Federal Tea Tasters Repeal Act of 1996. This document aligns FDA's list of standing advisory committees [in the Code of Federal Regulations] with existing law by removing the Board of Tea Experts.

It only took 27 years.

I think "aligns" is the key word here.

Perhaps there was a document or three floating around that was still binding, or some other contractual obligation.

Probably wanted to wait until the last board member retired?

I have a little blog post milling around in my head about one of my favourite lyrical/poetical "tricks" – using e.g. the refrain as a framing device, but having the meaning of the refrain changed by the context of the verses so that it implies something else in the end. I'm probably never going to get around to writing it, so I'll give you the abridged version of some examples I've had in mind that may be of interest. It's pretty common for European folk songs to use it:

"Son Ar Chistr/The song of the cider", a traditional song from Brittany (YT: Alan Stivell, 1970).
It begins as a drinking song – "Drink cider, Laou, for cider is good! A penny, a penny a glass!" – but the verses quickly descend into telling how the singer is an alcoholic womanizer and was kicked out of his house by his wife, so when the same refrain comes back it's clearly about him drowning his sorrows in cheap alcohol instead.

"Hej Sokoły", a Polish/Ukrainian folk song (YT).
It begins with an uhlan cavalryman sent out to fight in a foreign land, saying goodbye to his girl. The refrain is then about falcons flying past the mountains and forests, seemingly symbolizing his untetheredness from his home. However, in the last verse he gets killed, so now the falcons in the same refrain are instead his last thread back to home. (I also like the turn in the "Wine, wine, give me wine!" line, as the first obvious interpretation is quickly turned around to mean that he wants alcohol as an anesthetic).

"Jag hade en gång en båt" Swedish/Dutch singer-songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk is also a rather good but more advanced example. (YT, and Lyrics), set to the same (originally Bahamian folk) melody as Sloop John B by the Beach Boys.
The first verse is about the narrator reminiscing about an old boat he once owned and then lost. In the second, he sings about an old dream he had and lost also, and so on. In the final verse it's a city park, gone due to a nuclear bomb. The song then quickly unwraps back, so you can have a new interpretation to each verse – from the figurative (the hopes and dreams of the narrator dying in the blast) to the concrete (the boat was lost due to everything being obliterated). Reexamining the first verse where the narrator states that he had a boat "so, so long ago", one can interpret that not as a nuclear war survivor or anything but rather humanity as a whole, implying the second verse means that all the hopes and dreams of humanity is gone.

As @ulyssesword suggests, this is a common trope in country music of the 20th century, with a few new entries still popping up from time to time. From the oldest songs like “Knoxville Girl,” “Long Black Veil,” and “Under the Weeping Willow” to relatively modern entries like “You Can Let Go Now, Daddy,” “Wasted,” and even Taylor Swift’s “Love Story;” I imagine that country, as America’s only commercial genre with direct ties to folk song, produced these “twist” ballads in a continued tradition of the European songs you mention.

As an aside, Contemporary Christian Music (as a frequent imitator and proximate neighbor of country music) also produces twist ballads with songs like Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Cinderella,” Michael W. Smith’s “This Is Your Time,” and the mega-hit “Butterfly Kisses” (which contains the common “daughter song” trope of Verse 1 - Birth/Childhood, Verse 2 - Adulthood/College, Verse 3 - Wedding… the trope occasionally branches into Verse 4 - Death).

How about Margaritaville? First verse, lazy beach blues. Second, mounting frustration. Third, my God, this is all my fault. Conveyed by a single line change in the chorus.

I love Robert Earl Keen for similar reasons. It's the little things.

Another one: Tim McGraw- Don't take the girl TL;DR: Don't take the girl fishing with us. Don't kidnap my girlfriend. Don't let my wife die in childbirth.

Also, tvtropes is a fantastic resource. I followed the trail from that song to the artist then to Dual Meaning Chorus which contains dozens of examples.

I bought some dichloromethane to use as paint stripper because I thought I was smarter than the US government, which banned its sale for that purpose. However, it turned out to be far too runny to use directly for anything except submerging small objects. I still have a lot left, I don't know how to thicken it, and I don't like to have it just sitting in my home. What should I do with it? I'm willing to give it away but I would rather not just dispose of it - that feels wasteful, especially since it wasn't cheap.

What is the most credit hours people here had in ug. This is a place where I believe people like learning things. To graduate I believe you need around 120. I had a lot of AP credit, took 6 courses a few times, did a few summer programs, and a few spring break programs. I did back off senior year and took 4 courses for more bar time. I forget the exact number but I was over 150 credit hours.

One thing I remember is taking coursework in writing specifically because I have bad grammar. I got a C+ my worse grade. Which is one thing I find wrong with college where you want to maximize gpa but as far as skills go you should be taking coursework on your weaknesses.

How can one have "the most credit hours" ? You have what you have.

I had like 142 I think. Electrical Engineering with an Economics minor.

Also as the other guy said, Imagine going to college lol.

Imagine going to college.

Usually 6 classes a semester, in addition to AP credits and 1-2 summer classes. I graduated in three years, which was bittersweet since college was a ton of fun and it took a while to get over missing that last year. On the other hand... tuition is expensive, and I'm glad to not have that year's worth of debt hanging over me.

No idea. For the first couple years, all my electives were going towards my minor. At the end, I did a program where I got to put credit towards my Master's, so my last couple semesters were slammed.

I sure didn't pick classes to shore up weaknesses. I took them to learn more about subfields of my specialization. It's a complicated world; once you have basic competence in the 3 Rs, you need all the comparative advantage you can get.

I had a ton. I went into college with 8 AP tests and ended up taking 5 years to complete my EE degree (dicked around with different low div courses before settling on engineering my junior year).

I was on the quarter system so I don’t know how that compares to semesters. But EE required something like 180 units, and I had something like 250.

I don't remember the credit hours, but I basically did the bare minimum to graduate with a history degree and then bail the fuck out. By the time I was in my fourth year I had realized that the academic world is so corrupt it's pointless to try and 'learn' anything there, at least in the humanities.

I think the only reason to do a humanities subject is either if you want to learn from a specific professor who you believe has more knowledge than they’ve put on paper/in articles, or if you’re extremely lazy at self-directed learning and need the structure of regular essays, submissions, tests etc to learn anything. Or if you want to do your own thing and get paid for it and it’s a stepping stone to a PhD and then independent research/teaching for money

Agreed, and there are some genuinely brilliant people doing research in the humanities. Unfortunately trying to get to those specific professors typically requires a massive amount of networking and knowing very early on in your college career that you need to angle for that sort of thing, because the competition is massive.

Either that, or you are able to spend an extra year or two in undergrad building your network due to family money etc etc.

In terms of being extremely lazy at self-directed learning... I don't know. I think autodidacts, the type of person these discussion spaces typically attracts, are extremely rare and abnormal in the grand scheme of things. It's good that modern society gives us opportunities, but I hesitate to call people that need the structure of a college curriculum "extremely lazy." I think there's maybe 1% of adults in the West that can legitimately learn a significant amount about serious topics on their own, and I wouldn't be surprised if the distribution were even smaller than that.

I'll throw in though that a large part of the issues is the way our schooling works. Standardized public education in the US at least is pretty brutally effective at shutting down the curiosity of passionate young children.

I think I graduated with 150 some? It was far more than necessary (I started in EE and ended in Econ and Finance and needed to take 16-18 hours per period and an extra year to fulfill the new degree requirements).

My wife asked one of her typical "Long drive stuck in traffic" questions the other day, and I want to pose it to theMotte: What pop song written this century would you propose as the new national anthem for the United States of America?

I settled on Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me. It perfectly captures the modern American middle-class self-conceit. It's got a little twang to it without being Morgan Wallen, a dash of country but not too much, reflecting a people that still thinks of themselves as descendants of frontier farmers but really drive a lawn tractor around a suburban three-quarters of an acre; a driving rock beat but not heavy metal, a cultural artifact that honors rock music's past but neither pushes it forward into avant garde strangeness nor slavishly imitates what went before.

The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ("She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers") is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves. We Americans all think of ourselves like that, we're all middle-class or working class underdogs striving against the "system" and its head honchos. We think that about ourselves, even when we're billionaires who have been elected president, superstar athletes who pushed other superstar athletes out of the sport that we already dominated, or the literal richest man in the world. Americans picture themselves as the underdog when they fight wars against impoverished tribesmen across the globe, when they play sports we barely care about against tiny countries. How better to capture that than a song by a thin, young, rich blonde about how she just can't get a guy to notice her. The video presentation adds to the hilarity: she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team, they're the most conventionally attractive high school couple imaginable, but they're so unique because she unlike his current girlfriend "listen[s] to the kind of music she doesn't like, And she'll never know your story like I do."

The conclusion of the song ("Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find, That what you're looking for has been here the whole time, If you could see that I'm the one, Who understands you, Been here all along, So, why can't you see?, You belong with me") reflects America's inherent hopefulness and future-orientation. We all think that one day the world will wake up and realize what we have. If we just stay in Iraq long enough, if we just really make the case for democracy in China, if we get antidiscrimination right this time, if we create a path to good jobs for the working class...Americans believe in so many impossible plans it is hard to keep track.

What's your pick and your justification?

A lot of people here apparently don’t know what a “pop song” is! I’ll go with “Fuckin’ Perfect” by P!nk. It has a few things going for it that make it extremely appropriate for this moment in American history.

Made a wrong turn, once or twice Dug my way out, blood and fire

This is a country which is just now starting to really come to grips with what the last twenty-plus years of catastrophic foreign policy mistakes have meant for the prestige of the country and the plummeting levels of trust between the government and its people. The once-unstoppable giant, the shining city on the hill, has lost a lot of its former luster - first with the misadventure in Vietnam, and then with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya… “Blood and fire”, indeed!

Bad decisions, that’s alright Welcome to my silly life

That doesn’t mean we need to sit around and feel regretful about it, though! Who among us hasn’t destabilized a country or two?! Everyone makes mistakes, and the important thing is to always look forward and step over the past. Frankly, it’s good that we made a couple mistakes, because it humanized us in the eyes of the world and showed that we’re just silly old humans like the rest of them!

Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood Miss knowing it’s all good, it didn’t slow me down Mistaken, always second-guessing, underestimated Look, I’m still around

Yup, there’s that cherished scrappy-underdog mentality you talked about.

And the chorus:

Pretty pretty please, don’t you ever ever feel Like you’re less than, fuckin’ perfect Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel like you’re nothing You’re fucking perfect to me

And here’s where the song is truly fuckin’ perfect for our particular cultural moment. The single overriding theme of our hyper-feminized cultural zeitgeist is “there is nothing wrong with you at all - you just think there’s something wrong with you because they have filled your head with oppressive and hurtful perfectionist standards designed to make you ignore the fact that you’re absolutely perfect and blameless exactly the way you are.” Any sort of objective standard which would identify some people as better than others, or some qualities and behaviors as better than others, is inherently unjust and immoral, because that makes some people feel bad about themselves. And the only people who are supposed to feel bad about themselves are people with privilege - relics of the OLD America - and not us marginalized folx that represent the NEW America. (This new anthem also has a swear word in it, and that’s great, because the new America is sassy and uses salty language because it’s rebellious and challenges previous hegemonic norms of decorum.)

There’s a second verse, equally as you-go-girl as the first, in which P!nk admonishes the addressee that if she ever feels any doubts or shame or guilt or regret, that’s stinkin’ thinkin’, and you need to banish those negative thoughts. But also embrace them? But in like, a defiant way that’s projected outward instead of inward. Very, very appropriate for our cultural moment, in which masses of people who are failing to live up to the standards set by the Old America rebel violently against those standards and tear down the totems of that order in order to scrub away anything that would challenge the mantra, “Nothing is wrong with me, and everything bad in my life is someone else’s fault.”

And then, absolutely perfectly, we have a rap break! In the New America, black/hip-hop culture is ascendant and must be represented, but in a sanitized way that sands off all the rough edges of most of the lyrical themes of actual hip-hop.

The whole world’s scared, so I swallow the fear The only thing I should be drinking is an ice cold beer

Consumerism, bread-and-circuses, drowning self-doubt in hedonistic alcoholism, etc. Imagine as the anthem singer bleats out this line before a whole stadium of sports fans just before the game, as the arena erupts with the cheers of people downing their beers in sync with the line.

So cool in line, and we try try try But we try too hard and it’s a waste of my time Done looking for the critics ‘cause they’re everywhere They don’t like my jeans, they don’t get my hair Exchange ourselves and we do it all the time Why do we do that, why do I do that? Why do I do that?

Another commenter complained that “You Belong With Me” lacks a defined moment where the fighter jet fly-over or the pyrotechnic blast or the fireworks explosion can happen. Well, this is the moment in “Fuckin’ Perfect” that’s tailor-made for precisely such a moment. The music actually drops out completely for a brief moment, then comes soaring back with a high vocal note. Very anthemic.

I think this song has many things going for it which make it a more appropriate national anthem in general, and for 21st-century America specifically, than “You Belong With Me” - both on a purely musical level, and also in terms of lyrical and meta-cultural content.

Valhallleluja. Consumerism always wins.

You get credit, I really just didn't want to get into the classic rock era. I feel like there's too many boring picks there.

I was going to go with Bowie's I'm Afraid of Americans, is that classic rock?

It's a very catchy tune, and even children can sing along with it (even the very young ones can join in on the na na na na nanana bit).

As someone that came of age in the 90s, it really bothers me that 90s music not 70s music is now classic rock.

The sad part to me is that the station that used to be "classic hits without the hard rock" now plays AC/DC. Sad because both/either

A: we no longer have a totally inoffensive easy listening station, even the most milquetoast stuff on the radio still features TNT and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

B: AC/DC is now too lame to offend anyone, it is easy listening.

I feel like the radio is missing gears it used to have. There used to be light stations, jazz stations, classical. Now there's rock from 1960-2005, pop from 1960-2005, pop of today, LATIN, and assorted country potpourri on the commercial stations. I only listen to college radio in my own car.

It is 100% missing some gears. Radio stations got heavily consolidated in...I think the 90s, but it could have been a bit later.

My go-to is our local KERA branch, which runs a good bit of local programming. There's a segment on Sunday where a local jazz musician plays user submissions. It's folk-heavy until it suddenly isn't. Hearing Deep Ellum industrial metal in between blues standards and classical was...surreal.

Though I do miss my college town radio. I remember one time hearing a station play some vaguely familiar rock, but it just kept going. It was all nine parts of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond."

Pop music is not compatible with a national anthem in the same way that a hip-hop artist will never be appointed US poet laureate. It doesn't matter how fitting or incisive the content; the tone is off. An anthem is supposed to symbolize unadulterated national pride! It is ingroup incarnate, and adding bitter irony is missing the whole point. Even the Soviets weren't cynical enough to make their anthem sarcastic.

More importantly, your choice is completely unsuitable for practical reasons. How are you going to schedule a flyover? We're already struggling to recruit fresh-faced farmboys into the military, and you need something that will appeal to the pro gamer in all of them. In all of us.

That's right, there's one obvious choice.

Its not American, but the song 'We throw parties you throw knives' by Los Campesinos mainly for the lyrics.

"We throw parties, you throw knives, its all the same if the fizzy drinks are nice"

"There's red stains all over the place, it's not blood it's cherryaid"

Mainly I feel it captures how charmed American life is and unconcerned with problems that don't immediately affect us, with a superiority complex towards outsiders.

Party in the USA seems like an obvious choice.

  1. It has USA in the title
  2. It's at least somewhat positive about the USA in the lyrics
  3. It's singable and upbeat
  4. The other major theme is parties, which are also popular

That was my wife's pick. Similar underdog vibes, very Americana. I went with early Swift because it ought to be at least a little country.

Notably in the Swift video she plays both the current brunette-presumably-selfish girlfriend as well as the protagonist/singer blonde version pining misunderstood friend. That poor footballer.

Man, can you imagine the psychological torture inflicted by having to have sex with Two Taylor Swifts?. Few men will know such horrors, and fewer could hope to endure them.

Optimistically, Air Traffic Controller's Blame. We had great plans, great hopes, and great dreams; put our future on the line, and instead:

Now the road laid out before me is in flames

And the bridges that I've crossed have collapsed

And the vultures they are circling overhead

They're reminding me of choices from my past

It's not just misfortune or bad luck or our moral faults, as much as pride plays a repeated place: the song isn't a Tragedy. Our choices were bad, our plans faulty, our hard work not enough. Our 'home' wasn't our place, our lessons wasted. The rules we followed brought us to this.

And in the process:

This time you're free

I know it's hard to believe

After them days and nights awake and feeling lost, you're losing it

Well, if everything you learned before today was just a waste

Think of everyone you met along the way and all you've faced

Boy, you've won

Yeah

The shallow read for the title is "Don't Blame" yourself for your own failures, and as selfish as that seems it's a useful rejoinder to depressive tendencies, but I think that misses the deeper answer:

Don't blame

Get on your feet

Enough "poor me"

If you got time to bitch and whine

Well, there's still time to try again

That is, there's more to this country than The Politics of Grievance; picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and trying again matters more than pointing fingers at who is at fault. You're not dead yet. It's not the best description of the current politics of this country, but then again I'm not sure the Star-Spangled Banner was a great description of the politics of 1812.

As what the country wants to be, should be, though... there's a reason that this theme's been resonant in a lot of recent works: I point to FFXIV or Chuubo's for doing it especially well, but they're far from unusual in touching it.

It's that nature of Americans to strive and struggle even when everything is handed to them that makes them such a force to be reckoned with. Isn't that amazing? The ability to never be happy, to be so totally indifferent to success AND failure, to possess such an invincible armor of narcissism.

she's the only one who really understands the (checks notes) star wide receiver on the football team

As Gone Girl (a contender for National Book of 21st Century America) put it - what's the point of being together if you're not the happiest?

The ability to never be happy, to be so totally indifferent to success AND failure, to possess such an invincible armor of narcissism.

Lmao this is beautifully put. Never been more simultaneously proud of and disgusted with my own country. We truly are a rare breed.

Agree, it’s a great summation. No people on earth care as much, as individuals, about being ‘the best’. Others may have collective ambitions of greatness, but only in America is collective ambition really just individual ambition added together, unmoderated and unbolstered by any communal identity. It’s why Obama really was the most European American president in a very long time: “you didn’t build that” was both completely true and absolutely, stunningly, fundamentally un-American in a total sense.

Just to be clear, I like Americans a lot.

I don't have a well thought out justification, but I have to put in the inevitable vote for Rich Men North of Richmond. It's blatantly political!

It certainly captures the down on your luck rural underdog vibe you mention, but is admittedly less optimistic.

Very La Marseillaise. "We will water our fields with an impure blood."

Hah you're way over my head with your fancy talk bud. Gonna have to break that one down for me.

if you've seen Casablanca (and if you haven't, you should) you've heard it.

The bitter protest song as anthem might seem odd, but it's very much in the vein of one of the single most famous national anthems.

𝄆 Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons! 𝄇

"Such that impure blood
waters our fields!"

It's the French national anthem, and the inspiration for countless others.

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