I love to laugh. I enjoy having fun. I like mainstream popular culture, especially anything on the teevee. I enjoy corporate sporting leagues. I have an average physique (5'3", 270 lbs.). And, lest you forget, music is my life. Despite the fact that I don't play an instrument, can't read notation, am ignorant of even the most basic theory and don't really listen to anything that hasn't been auto-tuned six ways from Sunday. Obviously, taking this deep and abiding love for the auditory arts into the workplace just makes good sense and we've even deployed some lying scientists to prove it.
Companies have done a lot of work to optimize music in retail shops to encourage customers to buy more stuff — think of the smooth, just-quirky-enough tunes quietly playing at any given Starbucks, or whatever sonic garbage the Abercrombie store at the mall is always blasting when you walk by.
Wow and I thought I was a heartless elitist. I've got nothin' on this writer. You hear that "Abercrombie?" You're playing "sonic garbage." What do you mean you can't hear me over the ringing of the cash register?
But there has been less research done on the effect these soundscapes have on employees.
How does it impact the expendable warm bodies and hand-pairs responsible for folding the sweaters and stuffing the register we already mentioned? What do you mean you don't care?
So a group of Cornell PhDs got together and ran an experiment to see how different music types affected the collaborative behavior of different groups of people.
We were, like, just hangin' round at the Big Red and figured we'd, you know, get together and examine music and collaborative behavior or whatevs.
They recruited 188 undergrads to take part in a "voluntary contribution mechanism" (VCM) experiment, a well-established tool that researchers use to measure and manipulate cooperative behavior among research subjects.
Please watch this video of World War 2 atrocities while we play Beethoven and inject you with sickness chemicals.
Here's where things get interesting: Different types of music were randomly assigned to play for different groups of students. A third of the groups listened to a playlist of "happy" music while the experiment ran: "Yellow Submarine," "Walking on Sunshine," "Brown-Eyed Girl" and the theme from "Happy Days."
It's a sin! You can't use Vanny Morr in this! A sin! *vomits*
Another third listened to a playlist of two "unhappy" songs by relatively obscure metal groups: "Smokahontas" by Attack Attack and "You Ain't No Family" by Iwrestledabearonce.
Sorry Attack Squared, you're an obscure group making "unhappy" music.
"We found significantly and persistently higher levels of cooperative behavior by participants who were played Happy music when compared with the other two conditions," the researchers wrote.
It's appears you fragile and disgusting humans have so-called "emotions" that influence your ability to work with your fellow flesh sacks.
No, this isn't a shampoo commercial for Generation Sissy.
The people listening to thrash metal, on the other hand, were only contributing 40 percent to the group.
Yeah, trash metal. I honestly thought it was "Exodus" in that hair-care picture above.
It's worth pointing out that the task the students were performing was a fairly abstract one.
So let's not start burning Beatles records just yet.
Is it better to optimize for playlists that can get customers to buy more, or that can get employees to sell better? For that, more research is needed.
When times are tough I just remind myself that things could be worse. I could be writing concert reviews. This thought is the cerebral equivalent of a Hollywood hand-job. Yes, I can enjoy the false superiority of looking down on the poor devil who uses an well-worn thesaurus to try to come up with fresh ways to say the same things over and over: "The sound wasn't good (cuz it's live)," "The crowd covered in rain/mud/sewage/agent orange had a subdued reaction," and, of course, "the entire band was shit-faced." No, I don't envy this lost soul, but I will use them to slap together a weekend update.
If Friday was the day that Glastonbury 2014 sparked and fizzed to a solid opening, then Saturday was the day that Worthy Farm struggled to dry out from the subsequent deluge, offered a daytime line-up that tried hard but failed to excite, before finally handing proceedings over to rock in the evening.
See, this is what I'm talking about. "The Boeing 747 that was the Glastonbury 2014 fair struggled with lift-off, dropping those oxygen masks, losing fuel and threatening to crash back down to earth as Worthy Fair wrung the heavy rain from tired bones for a line-up that gave it a go but fell short of creating a Maslow-style peak experience before passing the ball to various garbage metal acts." Now just rewrite that a few thousand times and the dream of reporting on "music fairs" can come true for you!
It started well at the Pyramid stage where Nick Mulvey opened with a sweet set, the ideal remedy for the bleary-eyed campers, who had trudged through the mud to see him.
Look mom, I'm WRITING!!!!
And mud there was; in vast quantities. Thankfully not enough to dampen the trademark positive Glastonbury spirit
Yes, that famous "Glastonbury" spirit that no one who lives west of East Port or south of Hastings has ever heard of. Stiff upper lip lads, the "Lana" should be over soon and then we're all going home.
but enough for many to ask the question, why has the English language only got one word to describe the huge varieties of the slippery brown stuff?
It's the English language that has failed, not me.
But some of the best “Glastonbury moments” where to be found further afield, including at the John Peel Tent where hectic Brighton duo Royal Blood staked an early claim on 'festival highlight' status with a frantically aggressive rock-metal set.
Good old "rock-metal," not to be confused with "metal-rock" or "it's kind of like late era Metallica, but somehow even worse, something that, scientifically speaking shouldn't even be possible."
Elsewhere though the complaint that Saturday line-up was disappointing was widely heard.
"Right, it's a bloody outrage, it is!"
Perhaps explaining why the site seemed to convulse with rumours upon rumours about secret gigs.
Sadly the "Young M.C. double-secret comeback gig" did not occur.
And just like last year, it spread like anti-bacterial hand wash at a Glastonbury long drop that Prince would appear, though at the time of writing he had yet to be even spotted on site.
Maybe you're just too demanding.
It was down to Lana Del Ray to fill the late afternoon slot on the Pyramid Stage. She drew a big crowd, but it started growing smaller well before thunder roared and rain dumped down.
How does something "grow smaller?" It's like saying it started to increase in lack of size.
Sadly the singer, who smoked a cigarette on stage, was a big disappointment, even to some or her loyal fans.
We have very high standards for live performances by soon-to-be-forgotten Top 40 fodder, after all.
Her usual stand-out track “Blue Jeans” failed to muster a reaction with hard-to-define vocals and lacklustre delivery, while new track “Ultraviolence” went largely unnoticed by a distracted crowd.
The distracted crowd failed to viddy well, my brother, viddy well.
Just the thing to sharpen you up and get you ready for a bit of the old hard-to-define vocals and lackluster delivery.
Meanwhile on the Other Stage it was the duty of Imagine Dragons to up the pace, which they did with a mud battle in front of their stage, leaving them covered in ooze, presumably in sympathy with their fans.
It's on the "Other Stage." I can see how that could become confusing.
In was “Radioactive” that really a sort of trance-like communal act of swaying worship.
It was like a Catholic Mass, but maybe 4% as entertaining and unpredictable.
Soon after Jacked White opened his set on the Pyramid Stage with two White Stripes numbers to keep the crowd warm, before meandering into a country-music style interlude and then a self-indulgent rock out.
Well, who doesn't enjoy a good "jazz odyssey" before the headlining puppet show begins?
It was a touching tribute and left the crowd whistling the tune into the night, with the Pixies, Jake Bugg and Metallica still to play.
Today's subject is nice and topical: a police video from 1986. You're probably thinking that's sarcasm, but in reality it's the opposite of sarcasm, whatever the hell that is. Unsarcasm? Non-snark? Sincerity? Who knows. Anyway, this gem of a video came to light when some minor civil servant rose to the heights of "Interim Police Chief" only for footage of this worthy and his fellow officers making fun of the homeless twenty seven years ago to suddenly surface and with it calls for his firing. For future reference so that this doesn't happen to you here's a list of people you can still mock without any fear of getting into hot water three decades from now: White heterosexual rural Christians. End of list.
As if to hammer home just how ungood everything we're about to see is, we open with a full disclaimer, warning of the "inappropriateness" to follow. Basically the message is "What you are about to witness contains ideas that are not approved by your rulers. Should you find yourself agreeing with them, please close the video and spend several hours on MSNBC."
Are you bad enough to handle something that "commanders" couldn't?
As if this warning wasn't enough we now get the 1986 version of the same, which features a man whose general appearance and demeanor suggests a grade school principal more than a police officer. As if somehow anticipating the butt-hurt of people who hadn't even been born when this was originally filmed he says it's "an attempt at some humor" and invites us to go under the viaduct. Well, I'm in.
"I'll be safely retired and dead by the time anyone cares about this."
The familiar catchy beat of The Drifters 1964 classic "Under the Boardwalk" plays as we slowly focus in on the "attempt at some humor." Officers have created less than fully convincing "person currently without a home" disguises. Basically it's a Red Skelton routine. Man, the fresh and up-to-the-minute references just keep coming. In that spirit I should mention they've also gone to the joint for some giggle water and are nice and spifflicated. And how! Let's get on the trolley and watch.
Cutting-edge police department comedy.
Someone sings modified lyrics, blaming the sun for waking them up. Yeah, that sun is trouble, no doubt about it. I will concede that the singer is decent and since this was before they had the billion dollar technology that makes our current crop of sissy-boys and junk-in-trunk sluts somewhat listenable it's all just pure talent. The fact that this solid performance is in an ill-conceived skit for a police training video underlines how common singing talent really is, as opposed to writing which is, like, all hard and stuff and so on.
The central conflict is quickly introduced when the People of Disadvantage are promptly "herded like sheep" by The Man. We cut away from this developing morality play to explain that "T-Birds" are the drink of choice and "all day" is the preferred time to consume them for the people under the viaduct. We even get an unconvincing scene of said drinking, featuring bottles that are clearly empty. Bad production values in a 1986 cop video? It's more likely than you'd think.
When "Night Train" is out of your price range.
The praises of life under the viaduct are, literally, sung. Dirt floors. Booze consumption. Loving close-ups of what I'm hoping is a simulated "oozing sore." They couldn't be bothered to fill the bottles with some sort of liquid, but when it comes to a disgusting open wound suddenly we get all big budget. With the general virtues of living beneath an overpass established, it's back to the storyline, such as it is, of being taken off to jail. Of course this process is fully simulated and as a veteran viewer of the shows "Cops" and "Bait Car"I can vouch for the rigorous accuracy.
Let me wave goodbye to a promotion in the distant future.
Anyone who loves 80s action films can guess the next scene. That's right, a "sympathetic judge" releases them back to go commit more crimes like public drunkenness, loitering, and, um, danger of living a derelict or debased lifestyle. Sharp-eyed viewers, or really any viewer who hasn't been tucking into their own "T-Bird" will note the liberal judge is the same man from the introduction and that this role is also much more believable for him than police officer. Maybe it's just me, but everything about this guy just screams wimpy and ineffectual petty authority figure.
Anyway, back to the viaduct for more drinking! Oh, and breaking into parked cars. Always even-handed and sympathetic, 1986 Seattle police. We get some weak footage of said breaking in, limited by the fact that the department for some reason wouldn't let them break a real car window for a mildly amusing, offensive as all outdoors video that probably never should have made it past the "wouldn't it be funny if we did this" stage.
"They're coming to get you, Barbara!"
We get some special effects suggestive of eighties MTV and then a line about how "the cops are kicking our ass." Yup, let's add "approving attitude toward police brutality" to all the other things that are deeply wrong with this. Maybe what seemed like a good idea at eleven at night in a bar actually isn't.
A rare literal depiction of kicking someone's ass.
We repeat the chorus and cycle through the general themes that have already been established, such as "sleeping in trash," the drinking, battling police and a system too cowardly to actually punish them in an eternal war that can not be won and more drinking. All of this is accompanied by more music video effects and general silliness. At least the officers look like they're having fun, I hope it was worth it.
One singular sensation.
The video concludes with two officers receiving a radio report of "transients under the viaduct" and I guess this brings everything full circle. When dealing with art of this quality it's easy to miss the finer points and it probably would take several hundred viewings to do everything justice. The suspects are described as "drinking wine" and one of the officers balls up a fist and slams it into his hand repeatedly while leering menacingly in anticipation, presumably, of beating up on society's most sad and helpless individuals. I knew making those "Clockwork Orange" kids into cops was a bad idea.
The video ends and we wrap things up with the actor who so ably depicted the "sympathetic judge" character. He discusses some sort of cutting edge 1986 technology that can now be found in a museum near you as well as the dream of a "video library." He offers up a thirty-eight minute video on a shooting as an example of the wonders of this new, cutting-edge idea. See it all on Beta tape, my friends. We get some holiday wishes, roll credits.
Suspect is described as a filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between.
Komment Korner
Sorry America don't mean to hurt your precious feelings.
Best cop humor I've seen in a long time!!! Why are the lib-tards upset.
The homeless are mostly vermin, and continue to accost decent citizens.
6 people live under the viaduct
This is majestic, this is beautiful... this... is... art.
Aaron Zehner's first novel The Foolchild Invention is available in e-book format at Amazon.comand Barnes & Noble.
