A while back I had this idea, which was that the modern psyche had a split between what I metaphorically called the hallway and the classroom. In the hallway, we talk to and about each other (so, we flirt, we fight, we gossip, we joke); in the classroom we’re supposed to talk about some third thing: the subject matter. I’m not going to elaborate on that metaphor today, just a particular response to it: A rock-critic friend of mine really liked my idea and wanted to use it in a piece of his own, but in his first couple of attempts he got it wrong. He believed that I’d said that in the classroom we talk about a subject matter while in the hallway we express our feelings. I had to point out several times that “to talk to and about each other” doesn’t necessarily mean that we show our feelings. My main point had been that the “hallway” stuff requires as much intellect as the classroom, since the hallway is where we do a good deal of working out who we are in relation to others.
My friend came into the interchange with a different story in place: in the classroom you use your mind and suppress emotions, so in the hallway you express your feelings. That’s what he saw, even though that’s not what I wrote. My point here isn’t the relative merits of my metaphor, but that my friend did something special, which isn’t that he initially misread me -- I’ll bet that most of my readers made the very same mistake -- but that he was willing to look a second time and a third time to see whether or not the story on my page matched the one in his head. People rarely give a second look to anything. This is why even slightly novel ideas rarely catch hold. They’re often unseen, even when they’re in plain view.
So, to apply this to Britney Spears … Well, what’s been striking me ever since the head-shave incident is that no one quite knows what story to tell about her. (Interestingly, the first tab headline I saw after the VMAs was Britney supposedly being quoted as saying “I looked like fat pig” -- which is ridiculous; she does not look fat; jeez. But then, Celeb Struggling With Weight Or Anorexia, or anything body related, is familiar ground for the gossip rags.)
A number of stories “explain” Britney, and these stories preceded Britney into the world: the bad mother, the party girl, the wild woman, the fat pig, the alky, the damsel in distress. Probably some of them are true. But they don’t need to be true for us to believe them, because the stories are in us already. My first reaction on seeing the VMA clip was “She’s wasted,” because the tabs had implanted the story in me, even though I know full well that the tabs are full of shit and that there are alternative explanations (the day before the VMAs a friend of mine looked just as blank and listless: it was 85 degrees, she was pregnant, and she’d been throwing up all morning). Of course, subsequent news stories seem to support my and the tabs’ judgment, that Britney was wasted, but I hadn’t seen them, and I don’t know why I should trust them anyway, other than that they support my judgment. If you check the comment box on last week’s column you’ll see that I heard from my ex-girlfriend who heard it from her daughter who heard it from her own boyfriend who heard it from his sister who was one of Britney’s backup dancers that Britney was already drinking heavily on the flight in. I don’t think my testimony in this regard would be admissible in court, however. Oh wait. I just checked, and see that the word “heavily” is my invention. Which kind of proves my point.
Classic experiments in social psychology show how vulnerable we are to suggestion. For example, students who were given a description of a teacher that was identically worded except that one described him as “warm” and the other as “cold” experienced the subsequent class totally differently, the teacher’s actual performance unable to counteract the effect of a single word. And such judgments can be self-fulfilling: if I expect someone to be cold, I’ll probably be cold myself, creating the other person’s chill. The New York Times recently reported a study that showed people’s behavior changing solely on the basis of whether or not a briefcase is in the room.
Such behavior can be functional. Often people do conform to type, and our stereotypes are accurate. We have to make snap judgments, often unconscious, just to get through the day. Without routines and habits and prejudices we wouldn’t have time to live. I’ve never had my astrological chart done, and I’ve never read a book on the seven habits of highly successful people. (I’m guessing that spending time rethinking their ideas about Britney Spears isn’t one of the seven.) I’ve never read a mystery story that had a cat as a main character, either, and I’m never likely to. I assume that such charts and books have nothing to say to my soul. Of course, how can my soul know this, if I don’t read them? There probably is something to be found in them, whatever it is, information about the culture, at a minimum, who knows what else? But I’ve got other priorities, and I’m making a smart guess on how best to spend my time. Only on the basis of being conventional and nonexploratory in a whole bunch of other areas do I have the stamina to go looking for surprise in music.
But conventionality can sometimes go dysfunctional and leave dark areas of bigotry and ignorance. Suppose I really should be reading cat mysteries? How would I know? Well, if someone else reads them and finds his or her way to the surprise in them, and lets me know. And the way to learn something about Britney Spears, to rethink your ideas, if that’s what you want to do, is to notice the anomalies, the things that don’t compute. And Britney doesn’t compute. Especially what doesn’t compute is the funny, slashing, dead accurate and smart smart smart shots she took at Hilary Duff and the media on her Webpage. And the lack of platitudes. (See Rules Of The Game #4: Britney Shows Brain.) These make her recent story one of more than immaturity and alcohol (not that smarts and immaturity and alcohol can’t coexist; presumably the coexistence will be uneasy). But then this is how you get to know anything, from your best friend’s sister to quantum mechanics. You see a bit of it in action here, more of it in action there, you notice similarities, surprises, the surprises getting you to rethink what you’d “known” earlier.
What I want out of Britney is for her to be like a rock ’n’ roll hero of my youth, someone who unexpectedly turns into savagely funny Grace Slick. This is not going to happen, except maybe Britney will veer close enough to this occasionally so as to confute all alternative explanations I have of her.
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Over the next few weeks I’m going to circle back to some of the questions I asked in the first few columns last June but informed by what I’ve written subsequently. In doing so I’m going to draw on a book I recommend, Six Degrees by Duncan Watts. He’s a sociologist who’s written articles showing why he thinks there’s always going to be a random element in what gets popular; his basic argument is that for something to get really popular it usually has to already be somewhat popular in the first place (this original popularity can be very random); and once something is popular, people congregate towards it, because they congregate towards each other. One can talk about this in relation to music, one can talk about it in relation to cereal, one can talk about it in relation to the hero stories we tell about musicians.
A Watts idea I particularly like says that the way a song or a fad or an innovation catches on can be compared to the way an electrical grid overloads and causes blackouts, or can be compared to how a disease breaks into an epidemic in the general population. Watts is not being metaphoric. He creates mathematical models, and he contends that the same pattern holds for all these and anything else that’s similar. The basic principle is that you have songs or ideas or viruses of varying potency, but you also have people with differing susceptibilities depending on how much resistance they can mount against an idea or a disease. So if a potent idea or virus lands where there is plenty of resistance or immunity, then the idea or the virus doesn’t take hold, whereas if a somewhat less potent idea or virus lands where lots of people are susceptible, then you have your innovation or epidemic anyway. What makes people susceptible to a new idea is if they have no ideas that run counter to it. Whereas if people have other ideas or information on the subject, these are like antibodies. Of course, if the new idea is appealing enough, it can overcome the resistance. But it has a rougher time than it would if people had no contrary ideas.
This explains why I’m not famous.