Anthems & Antithets

You Are Not Your Brain

February 19, 2021 · Leave a Comment

— Scroll down to watch the video for “The Brain.” —

We’ve grown accustomed to headlines breathlessly intoning the latest claptrap from neuroscience: “Brain study shows grandmaster chess players think differently than amateurs do.” “Your brain is like 100 billion mini-computers all working together.” “Scared of the dentist? This is why, say neuroscientists.”

Of course, neuroscience has made amazing discoveries. But the popular ideas drawn from it are often foolish and, I think, dangerous.

Sure, it’s neat that an fMRI of your brain lights up in a certain way when you order Chinese takeout. But when your “ordering Chinese takeout” neuron is isolated, will that really give us any better understanding of how and why you order Chinese takeout?

There’s no disputing that when you do stuff, your brain is involved. But the fact that your brain is involved doesn’t mean your brain is the proper focus for understanding that behavior, nor that your brain is the “cause” of that behavior.

To say that some process in your brain makes you order Chinese takeout so that it can activate the brain’s pleasure centers sounds foolish because it doesn’t explain anything. It posits a theoretical something – yet to be observed – to explain a subjective experience we all are familiar with.

In the Pixar movie Inside Out, the mind is portrayed as a sensory input – behavior output device. The data from the character’s senses combine with a small number of discrete emotions to somehow control the character’s actions. This is the rugged individualist concept of mind. Mind as an autonomous internal organ.

But the mind is neither completely internal nor completely autonomous. The mind exists in the context of the environment. You know about Chinese takeout because there is such a thing as Chinese takeout to be known. You’ve learned of it, you’ve eaten it. Your mind is also something that happens in the environment of other minds. You come to consciousness through recognizing other consciousnesses.

The problem of subjectivity and objectivity is a longstanding one in philosophy. Simply because advancements have been made in studying the brain doesn’t mean subjectivity – the experience of consciousness – can be discounted. Objectivity itself is a concept conveyed and grasped subjectively.

The neurocentric perspective is a mechanistic and, ultimately, a solipsistic view of the world, where human agency is immaterial, and consciousness is an inconvenience explained away as a byproduct of biological processes, or, worse, as an “illusion” (illusion to whom?).

With all that in mind, I wrote this song. It’s a comedic reductio ad absurdum, each verse portraying a different straw man in the argument. It’s also an homage to the great comic songwriter Tom Lehrer, who was my teacher in college, and remains an inspiration to this day. Peter Lurye made and played the piano arrangement, in his most Lehreran manner.

To give the song even more levity, for the video, I worked with animator Matt Lintschinger, who created another layer of absurdity with personified brains as foils to my Mr. Science character.

Let me know what you think.

Further reading: William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads; Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Let’s Build a Future, While Supplies Last

February 6, 2021 · 2 Comments

A going-out-of-business sale for all time.

The degradation of the natural world began at a time we were more beholden to nature than it was to us. I won’t call it an innocent time, because man’s innocence has long been in question, and was anyway always placed at a time before now. But, working against the elements, and sometimes against our fellow humans, we brought homes, townships, cities, and a new civilization to this new-to-us old world.

Our vaunted frontier spirit became a national creed. Through these simple, natural, rural, down-home, out-in-the-country, back-to-the-land impulses and exploits, amid our seemingly endless bounty, we have slowly and inexorably taken much of the non-human world to the brink of extinction.

I had two realization a few years ago: First, that to end our destruction of nature, we’re going to have to abandon a lot of it, to not live in it. To not build a house in the middle of a forest and a fire zone, or lay a road through a wildlife sanctuary. Let alone tear it up for mining, or put a pipeline through it. It became clear that living in nature was not always congruent with honoring and worshipping it.

Second, I saw that to transition quickly off fossil fuels is ironically going to take a lot of fossil fuels. The infrastructure for a sustainable world will need massive energy inputs. And I saw that in both these ways, it was a race against time. It’s like when you realize, just after you’ve poured yourself a second bowl of cereal, there’s barely enough milk. Except the cereal just keeps pouring.

“While Supplies Last” is an attempt to take this subject on. John thomas Oaks is a brilliant, versatile, musically restless and incredibly prolific songwriter I met in the BMI Lehmann Engel Musical Theater Workshop in the late ’90s. He is a Christian who writes both religious and secular songs. Though I’m not religious, I respond deeply to Christian music, and I think Jt’s background brings a deep spirituality and a rich Americana to his setting of the lyrics.

Disruptors. Are we over them yet?

January 30, 2021 · Leave a Comment

We live in an age of disruption. Both in technology & politics. The exploitation and corruption rival the Gilded Age. Tech giants and startups alike make end runs around hard-fought labor rights and democracy. Political opportunists go all in on accommodating them. Meanwhile, we are told that disruption is not only an economic necessity, but fashionable and beautiful. This ethos goes beyond advertisers purring reassurances and TED talks’ restatement of the blandly obvious. It is the full-scale repackaging of capitalist exploitation as a benign — nay glorious — form of consumerism. People with power changing the rules to suit themselves is nothing new. But packaging it as a liberating force for humankind is.

Like many of my songs, “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It” attempts to make its point in the negative. It is sung from a the perspective of an unsavory character. He’s boasting, and glorying in, his ability to change the rules as it suits him. He is essentially advocating the opposite of what I believe. I use this technique enough to know that it can be a challenge for the listener to discern. I contemplated singing it in a more charactery voice, but opted to sing it straight, and let the words and music succeed or fail in their mission.

Alfred Johnson is a songwriters’ songwriter with a feverish, fertile imagination, whom I deeply admire. We made several stabs at collaborating on various song ideas. At one point I presented him with a list of titles, many of them clichés with a twist, which he termed antithets (thus providing me part of the title and concept for my 4-volume magnum opus, Anthems & Antithets). This song was one of the antithets that we worked on.

Though the concept was mine, Alfred contributed a lot to the lyrics and the development of the ideas. Much of the music originated with Alfred, including the feel and the piano part of the intro, verse and bridge, with me occasionally chiming in with a melodic idea. I came up with the chorus, after more than a dozen failed attempts. I bore you with these details not for their sake alone, but to demonstrate that it is harder to build something that to tear it down, but infinitely more worthwhile.

Small Penis – a Feminist Take

December 11, 2020 · Leave a Comment

Feminism – for want of a better term – has been a liberating force for women and for men. What started with challenging received notions about femininity and women’s roles, has blossomed into a framework for human liberation. First, rape jokes were questioned, then, prison rape jokes. First, female circumcision was opposed, then, male circumcision. (Patriarchy cuts both ways.) Obviously, the pushback to feminism has been enormous and fierce, but the ideas continue to spread. Awareness of gender stereotyping, body-shaming, gender fluidity and consent now inform our thinking and behavior.

One cliche that’s been stubbornly resistant to a feminist rethink is the small penis joke. On the political left, a small dick is the hilarious putdown that explains macho behavior like driving sports cars, collecting guns, and authoritarianism. On the right, a small dick is the cause of male sensitivity and the dreaded liberalism. More than just a joke, this casual body shaming is used figuratively and literally as a key to understanding a man’s psychology.

A large part of what’s called toxic masculinity is exercised in the enforcement of destructive attitudes among men. Trying to live up to unrealistic body images is a form of repression, but that feminist insight hasn’t made much of a dent in our thinking. The belief that the size of a man’s penis should determine his manliness and his worth is an unspoken cultural assumption, whether one subscribes to it or not. It’s a destructive ideology, largely reinforced through jokes.

But how much can feminist thinking actually change something so seemingly biological? That remains a topic for another day and another song. “Small Penis,” the song at hand, takes equality and justice as worthy aspirations.

The four-volume music project I’m working on is called Anthems & Antithets. An antithet, in my parlance, is a song that takes a cliche and turns it on its head. Volume 3, Antipathy & Ideology, focuses on the political. It occurred to me that while small penis jokes aren’t very funny, a song bragging about having a small penis could be both funny and political. An antithet was born. A new kind of small penis joke.

For the music, rhythm and blues struck me as having the right mixture of plaint and celebration. I didn’t have the patience for a 12-bar blues form, so I made it a 9-bar blues. It’s a little shorter than average but it gets the job done.