Where Did The Arena Rock Bands Go?

Cheap Chalupas takes a breather from undermining the ethnic cohesion of his country of birth for a glorious experience of authentic face-stuffing to link to a Pitchfork story about the pittances that rock stars get paid today. In the comments, “lords of lies” responds with an interesting take on why there are so few bands today who have any staying power beyond one or two radio-ready songs.

the era of the long-lasting arena rock band with scores of top ten hits is over for four reasons:

1. the low-hanging fruit of novel guitar riffs has been picked clean. it’s just much harder now to compose more than one or two catchy tunes that don’t blatantly rip off songs from the past, autotune to the contrary notwithstanding. how many ways can the twelve-note scale be arranged? depressingly, there may be a limit. plus, the ready availability and replayability of forty year old rock songs means that current artists can’t plagiarize the past without getting called on it. this was perhaps not so much the case for past artists, who could safely crib from older songs that weren’t subject to so much radio or internet replaying.

2. the incentive structure has changed. a dude who pens one decent song can get on stage and score chicks for years, maybe even decades, based on that frantic bestowal of fame. internet play action and advanced marketing offer instant fame to the fly by night, one hit wonder musician. the pussy rewards for male artistry flow faster and stronger today than they did in the past, thanks partly to unshackled female hypergamy and partly to the betatization of the average american male. as a result, the self-perceived need to pump out multiple albums of high quality work has diminished.

3. easy living (c.f. porn, video games, endless plates of food stamps) has taken the edge off the urgency to create a compendium of works of spectacular art that can win over a large and dedicated audience of admirers and payers. men, in a word, are being medicated into comatose feminized stupor by dopaminergic distractions.

4. diversity is our lack of diversity. the advent of the diverse playground known as the internet has created so many ostensible musical niches appealing to everyone’s most personalized tastes that it has, paradoxically, made music *less* diverse, by funneling would-be artists into similar musical paths which maximize the odds their voices will be heard above the din. what point is experimentation and building an oeuvre for the long haul when your potential audience is so prefragmented and fickle? may also explain why music is getting louder today.

i’d add that there exists the possibility as well that people in the west are simply getting less creative in some genetic/physiological sense. perhaps it’s all those BPAs in our plastics and Pills in our water.

It’s a good question why the modern music industry produces so few “stadium rock” bands anymore. Prosperity likely has something to do with it. And the reasons given above are plausible, if not proven. You can make the case that someone like Justin Bieber (update: yesterday’s news) or Kesha is the 2012 equivalent of U2 or Led Zeppelin based on sales numbers and breadth of fame, but the comparison is rendered a mockery under any actual music-based standard. Platinum-selling country music stars and remixers rappers featuring X, Y and Z are about the closest present-day analogues to long-lasting power rock bands of the past.

This is not to say there is not good music being produced today. I like a lot of stuff that’s come out in recent years, mostly from fly by night, non-mainstream eclectic acts. But most of the stuff I like is by a multitude of bands that tend to disappear after one hit album (which usually contains no more than three righteous songs). Even looking at top 40 songs, the bands comprising that radio-ready list have little staying power. fun. has a couple of catchy tunes, but does anyone seriously think they’re going to pump out one stellar album after another, for years on end, like Zeppelin or The Beatles or even Nirvana did?

As for the main complaint that musicians don’t get paid enough from internet radio royalties, I have to agree with this:

cry me a river. hard to get worked up over the financial travails of quasi-rock stars. do people realize what motivates men to form bands and play on stage? they do it all for the nookie. the girls they get couldn’t give a rat’s ass how little they make from pandora plays. this is why there continues to be a steady stream of aspiring young men throwing caution and their bank accounts to the wind in hopes of becoming the next indie flavor of the month.

When the day comes that dudes stop picking up guitars and warbling beta ballads to score poosy is the day that I’ll entertain their griping about illegal downloading.

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Overheard In SWPL-Land

“It’s inexpensive, if you think about it. You’ll pay two-hundred and fifty for a Michael Kors. For something only half as cute.”

If this facade were to burn tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear for its loss.

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The Season Of Donating

It wouldn’t be Christmas spirit if I didn’t ask readers for generous gifts under the Donate Tree over there ===>

The giving of gifts, the receiving of gifts. You know you want to. It feels good! Like handjobs under the table at a fancy restaurant.

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Are The Cads Outbanging The Dads?

The dude who runs the Evo and Proud blog has an interesting post about earlier male maturation rates indicating that females may be favoring cads over dads as mates.

There is thus plenty of genetic variation for selection to act on. No need to wait for new mutations. But why would there be natural selection for earlier male puberty?

One reason is that early puberty is genetically linked to other sexual characteristics. In particular, a class of X-linked androgen receptor alleles is linked in males to aggression, impulsivity, sexual compulsivity, and lifetime number of sex partners and in females to paternal divorce, father absence, and early menarche (Comings et al., 2002). It is likely that these alleles also influence male pubertal timing, but research on this point is lacking—apparently because it is difficult to find a marker for pubertal maturation among boys that is as salient as age at menarche among girls (Ge et al., 2007). Early male puberty thus seems to be part of a “package,” or more precisely a reproductive strategy, that affects the way men go about finding a mate. Natural selection may favor one strategy or another, depending on the current cultural environment.

Is natural selection now favoring the “cads” over the “dads”? That might be what’s happening. As sexual relationships become less stable and shorter-term, women will ignore men who are oriented towards stable, long-term relationships.

I am on record as hypothesizing that two major sexual market shifts are pushing boys to earlier puberty: 1. Diversity and 2. Unrestrained female hypergamy.

Diversity of different groups of boys who mature at different rates would tend to favor the selection of boys with alleles for earlier maturity rates, given a sexual market that benefits sexually aggressive cads. Or, late-maturing k-selected boys will conform to the norm for r-selected early-maturing boys instead of the other way around, given a lack of cultural or circumstantial constraints on female sexual choice.

Female hypergamy — women’s desire to mate with the highest status men they can get, given what their looks and willingness to put out can afford them — is the complementary force that pushes evolution to select for earlier maturing, and thus more caddish, boys.

If earlier puberty among boys is real, no matter the cause, and is indicative of women favoring cads over dad, then core philosophical underpinnings and cultural analysis of the dating market found at Le Chateau Heartiste are validated in some measure.

You’ll notice I titled this post “Are the cads outbanging the dads?” That was deliberate, because there remain questions about whether cads are actually breeding more or less than dads. Outbanging is different than outbreeding. A woman could casually ignore potential beta dads throughout her teens and 20s (her prime years) for a sterile ride on the cock carousel with alpha males, only to settle down later with a beta male and bear him 1.8 children. Cheap and easy contraceptives thwart the natural procreation advantage that alpha males would normally have over beta males in the state of nature, so it is very possible that alpha males could be winning the Banging Sweepstakes while losing the Breeding Sweepstakes.

Evidence that cad outbanging and supercharged female hypergamy is occurring resides in the later age of first marriage rates, and the lower overall marriage rate, as well as the higher STD rates among women.

And there is evidence for cad outbreeding as well. Serial monogamy — which is a form of soft polygyny — is on the rise, and men who have had more than one partner have more children than men married to one woman.

On the other side of the debate are the GSS (General Social Survey) gurus who marshal self-reported evidence that dads are winning the breeding wars over cads.

I remain skeptical of the GSS data, but give it its due. My contention has never been that cads are having more children, but rather that cads are having more premarital sex than dads with higher quality (read: better looking) women when those women are in their sexual primes. This, not the discrepancy in fertility rates between alpha and beta males, is the contraceptively-aided shock wave that is roiling the sexual market and upending organic rules thousands, perhaps millions, of years old.

A society of both cad ascendence and civilization is unsustainable and incompatible. One or the other will go, and the pendulum with either swing back to dads or civilization will regress to accommodate the rise of women choosing cads. All social and economic indicators (particularly the debt overhang), and my personal experience in the bowels of the dating market, lead me to be pessimistic about a happy resolution to this building tension. Hopefully, I’m wrong, but in the meantime I’ll do what is necessary to secure my pleasure.

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The Undercover Orbiter Strategy

Beta males who get stuck in the friend zone (“LJBFed”) with women are rightly mocked for their self-defeating clinginess and the burden of their blue balls. But the strategy — if it can be called that — to befriend girls that one would like to fuck must have some utility for some men some of the time, or it wouldn’t exist in the state of nature. And, if one observes women through the years, there are those beta male orbiters who do manage, through sheer force of persistence or ungodly patience for a stroke of luck to come their way, a tender five seconds of intimacy with their female friends which the girls immediately regret afterward.

So you might say the undercover beta male orbiter strategy is extremely long-term, with no guarantee of sexual closure. It’s a painfully slow and laborious process for extracting sexual favors from girls, so why then do some egregiously betas do it? Well, because for these kinds of weak men the pain of the subversive orbiter strategy is less painful than the pain of outright rejection from busting a move that would destroy all their hopes and the delicious uncertainty that acts as mental lube for their masturbatory daydreaming.

However, if approaching and hitting on girls with sexual intention is simply out of your realm of possibility, then there are ways to conduct your undercover orbiter strategy that will maximize your odds of a bang with the torment of your dreams. I lay them out here.

– Always talk about the girls you are dating, fucking, or seeking same from to your girl “friend”. Do so in a way that does not seem try-hard; that is, offer it up like an afterthought to some other topic that triggers the segue.

– Limit your friendzone time to drinking, shows, art exhibits, and house parties. Try to avoid shopping or other quintessentially girlie or best gay boyfriend activities. The object is to do friendly things with her that mimic real dates, while avoiding doing those things with her that strengthen her impression of you as “one of the girls” (who happens to have a penis, if the rumors are true).

– Immediately and without qualification change the subject when your girl “friend” begins talking about a guy she likes, or the dudes she’s fucking or wants to fuck. Once you go down that road, there’s no turning back from eternal LJBF hell. She will never see you as a sexual creature if you are willing to listen to her sob stories about other men plowing her clean.

– Don’t make a production of her wistful musings about other guys, though. Don’t change the subject by exclaiming your refusal to listen to her dating life; doing that opens her to suspicions that you really like her, and if your Undercover Orbiter strategy is to work, you can’t put yourself in a position of needy weakness. Better to change subjects by simply changing them, as if you didn’t even hear her comment about the serial killer she really wants to boff who offed her twin sister.

– You’re going to want to invoke feelings of latent jealousy as much as possible. A girl “friend” that you are orbiting may not consciously perceive you as a potential lover, but when she sees you holding court with other girls, or flirting with one of her friends, her instincts will kick in and she won’t be able to control a growing desire for your preselected malehood.

– Use her as a target for practicing your teasing skills. A platonic girl friend (but you know better, don’t you, tiger) presents an excellent opportunity for honing your cocky teasing skills. And a welcome bonus is that she may start to want you after all your gentle insulting.

– Once in a while, she’s going to unload that “I fucked a hot dude last night” conversation bomb. Do not react negatively, even though you will feel intense burning jealousy mixed with disgust. In fact, do not react at all. Raise an eyebrow, and say something along the lines of, “Tell me more when the wedding date is set.” The idea is to ridicule her idea of a fulfilling dating life. More good replies: “Your parents would be proud”, “Hey, congratulations, you magnificent slut!” (say this with a shit-eating grin), “This is news?”

– Your one advantage, if you can call it that, is that you are the guy who is “there for her” when times are tough and she needs a shoulder to cry on. Occasionally, like when Jupiter aligns with Uranus and her oxytocin levels are off the charts, a girl will feel strong intimate feelings for the emotionally available and sensitive beta male. That’s when you leap in. You’ve been laying the groundwork for months, perhaps years, and now it’s time to cash in your “terrific guy” chips for a shot at her weepy vulva. Bust your move by gently stroking the back of her hand for hours. Progress to giving her many more hours of cunnilingus when you’ve gotten an unambiguous green light for bedroom intimacy. (Your green light will need to be unambiguous, because pushing hard for sex over her coy protestations will strike her as terribly incongruent with your personality, and she will recoil.) Finally, be prepared for waves of regret to wrack her mind in the morning, or even as soon as when the tip of your penis grazes her labia. Allow that she will need this time to regret her actions, and take the necessary precautions to avoid a feminism-inspired legal imbroglio by wiring your place with audio and video recorders the day before she arrives. You can never be too safe.

– Finally, preemptively dump her after the first time you bang her. Yes, that’s right, unceremoniously dump the girl of your dreams, your White Womb. As her confirmed beta orbiter, there is little chance she will want more sex with you after her moment of weakness (that’s what she will think it is), let alone a relationship, if you do not take steps to push her in that direction. And pushing her in that direction means pushing her away from you. There’s nothing more infuriating, and hence, more alluring, to a woman than a man who has inexplicably made himself less available to her after sex. Especially when that man has spent so much time prior being the guy she could count on. This is script-flipping on steroids. You must make her stop seeing you as her reliable, sensitive, asexual friend, and that means you need to start becoming less reliable, less sensitive, and more sexual. A preemptive dumping is just the strong medicine a girl “friend” needs to being the healing of her “regretiness”. Don’t do it the very next morning, but don’t wait too long either. You have to get the jump on her before she hits you with the “I don’t want to ruin our friendship” sermon. Timing is critical. You want to be the bearer of that message before she is.

– If you are slow to act, and she manages to “dump” you first, you have a counter maneuver. Agree with her. “Yes, this was a mistake. We need to stop so we can remain friends.” (Never mind the bizarre logic of this statement; with women, emotions are what matter.) Then, in the days immediately following, see her once, and then cut off all contact for a few weeks (or months, as the circumstances require). Cutting off contact means taking a full day or two to reply to her texts or vmails or IMs, and not making a big deal about it when she inquires why you are being distant. Act as if she is the one imagining things are wrong between you two.

– This is hamster manipulation of the highest order. You are the one instigating the Distancing Protocol, while blaming her for perceiving something that’s “all in her head”. This contradictory tactic spares you from leaving an impression of butthurtness, and keeps her in a constant state of self-doubt. From such fertile psychological ground sprouts the chaser-chasee inversion algorithm, a seduction ploy that is the special sauce which underlies every womanizer’s exotic power over their prey.

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We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Hamster

Sometimes, in moments of deep reflection, I wonder… just what delusional depths can the typical American woman plumb? I thought I’ve seen it all… attack lawyers bitching off the shoulder of sensitive niceguys… I watched cockblocks glower in the bar near the target babe. All those delusions will be spun in time, like hamsters on wheels. Time to self-deceive.

But now I see there is more out there. A bigger, better, faster hamster. A rodent so enormous on a wheel spinning so violently it creates its own black hole of irrationality, sucking in logic, reason and common sense to an event horizon doom.

Behold: The Hamster of Hamsters. The Mother of All Rodents. The MOAR you know… the more you despair that America is in the grips of a virulent, and wholly undeserved, narcissism determined to sink the nation ship with the utmost alacrity.

The beast hungers:

In that sense, vanity is yet another stick with which people are beaten — because women are told, constantly and without any real deviation from the message, that they have to look a certain way to be worthwhile, to be of value. To be REAL, in some sense.

This is, of course, utter bullshit. Because any woman who identifies as a woman is a real woman. There’s a lot of different ways that can look and they are all valid.

“Because any woman who identifies as a woman is a real woman.” Is this the ur-tautology? Or just the usual gibberish from the usual losers unable to cope with the revelations from clear thinking?

Leaving aside for the moment any presumption this particular breed of hamster vessel knows what she means by the word “valid”, it is absolute falsehood that all women have value no matter what they look like. A morbidly obese land whale has almost zero romantic value to nearly all men. A woman who is so disgustingly fat she ceases to retain even the merest shimmer of womanly shape is a female of very low physical value.

Her post seems melancholy to me in some ways, caught and struggling in the web of the social expectations that are thrust upon women.

Expectations exist because we are biological machines with biologically-based desires that react to specific body types. When those body types deviate from the desirous norm, we recoil as if we have seen a monstrous creature of the nightmare world.

if you are fat and you accept your body as it is, you are often bombarded with “Your fat!” (they never get the “you’re” right)  [ed: female humor] in email and comments and sometimes in person, as though you need the reminder because you’ve risen above your station.

If you accept your fatness, then you wouldn’t be bothered by people calling you fat. Is Donald Trump bothered when people say to him “You’re rich!”?

One of the best things I ever did for myself was to consciously make an effort not to judge people’s bodies.

Here comes the patented feminist self-contradiction within two sentences…

I do not care if your hipbones stick out.

But you noticed, didn’t you, Judgy McJudgemytwoextrabeefpattiesonasesameseedbunfueledwideloadass? The “hipbones stick out” descriptive excess is classic fatgirl speak for healthy weight, slender women, hidden under an obfuscating layer of plausible deniability that she “does not care” about those skinny girls and their jutting hipbones. Fat shits just love their propaganda that the world is about to be overrun with thin women on the verge of mortal anorexia.

Your body is awesome.

Yes it is.

I do not care how many chins you are packing.

Men do. And that’s what matters.

Your body is awesome.

No it’s not.

So is mine.

I’ll be the judge of that.

Awesome, indeed. Awesomely rotund.

“So is mine.”

It’s like listening to a small child argue. The mind on display here is underdeveloped like a child’s, but at least children have the excuse that their brains are still a work in progress. This is an adult woman talking like this. Acting out like a petulant brat that reality is what she says it is, and so there!

“There’s no place like my body. There’s no place like my body. There’s no place like my body. Yay, I’m happy with myself again!”

If you wish for it hard enough… well, you’re still a fat crap.

My vanity — when I am not compromised by my own intrinsic self-doubt (two days before my period, like CLOCKWORK) — is of the traditional form. My vanity is in thinking that I am absolutely worth being looked at, absolutely worth being seen. Absolutely worth thinking of myself as talented.

Correction: You’re not worth being looked at, you’re not worth being seen, and goshdarnit, you’re absolutely not worth thinking of yourself as an alternative and equally worthy female form. And this fact will not change no matter how much you lie to yourself otherwise. It will never change until you change the fact itself, by losing weight and slimming down to a reasonable facsimile of a sexy woman. In your case, the fact itself looks to weigh about 100 unnecessary pounds.

Vanity is distasteful in people who at least can claim some justification for feeling vain; we may not like it but we understand. In contrast, vanity is farcical delusion in people who don’t possess a scintilla of real world evidence to justify their bloated self-regard. The vanity untethered from reality is a joke; it’s Generation Lookatme! on uppers, their heaving bulk held aloft by a helium-filled entitlement complex. The best thing for society would be to have these BubbleBoars disabused of their fanciful self-delusions. Of course, it might take more than a few stabs with the soulkilling shiv until they get the message. There’s a lot of ego blubber to cut through.

I wouldn’t call that inflated. I wouldn’t call that undue. I’d call that actually having a pretty good grasp on being confident that I am, in fact, a worthwhile human being.

A person’s actual worth is inversely proportional to the efforts she takes to convince herself of her worth.

Other than the death fatness and the blue hair, I’m actually pretty conventional in my appearance, according to the social beauty imperative: I am white, I have a clear complexion (mostly), I have thick curly hair on my head but little body hair. I have an hourglassy shape.

You’d have to be sober-ish to think she’s hourglassy. Hey, I thought all body types are worthwhile? She shouldn’t preen about her clear complexion and hourglassy shape. Is there something wrong with hirsute women?

I am still going to advocate for everyone being at least a little vain though. Because “pretty” should not be the sole criterion for “worth being seen.” Because “pretty” is actually kind of a bullshit narrow construct.

The hamster has gone suborbital.

In fact, when people who do not fit into the effing oppressive beauty standard that is going on in America are vain as hell, I love it.

“I am a beautiful, healthy woman. Fuck you, dad!”

I think it’s powerful and subversive and political and awesome.

No, it’s just retarded and transparent and silly and self-defeating.

Because fuck those folks who think you don’t deserve to be seen.

The problem is that there’s too much of you to see.

It’s worth clarifying as well — not only is no one required to participate in beauty culture,

No one is required to participate in breathing oxygen, either, but there are consequences if you choose non-participation.

you are still awesome and worth being seen [for the degenerate freak show you are] if you reject beauty culture entirely.

ftfy.

If vanity is about excessive pride in our appearance, well, let’s just say I’ll be damned before I look in a mirror and hate what I see just to avoid being vain.

Interesting reasoning. I didn’t know the opposite of vanity was self-hatred.

My only caveat regarding the awesomeness of vanity? Your intense and concentrated awesomeness does not mean other people are not also awesome.

I bet she doesn’t think Todd Akin is awesome.

Jane and the xoEditors actually have a whole new project in the works that will celebrate all things VAIN. It’s pretty hella exciting.

I used to think that setting these insipid behemoths straight would require nothing more than ignoring them. The sexual market is cruelly indifferent to one’s constructed vanity, and fat shits would find in short order how unloved they were by men with options. But now, I dunno… cold indifference doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Pointing and ridiculing is the next step in the campaign against raging American female egotism, and if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always diabetes, chopped feet, and early death.

Why do I put crazed egomaniacs like this woman on the breaking wheel? What’s the point of being so mean to someone who is probably nice to puppies when she isn’t eating them? I do it to set an example for the others. To push back against evil ideologies that infect innocent minds. And make no mistake, this woman’s message is evil. If other women who had not yet ruined their bodies by blowing up to her repulsive dimensions took her words to heart, they might feel entitled to let themselves go, figuring that their body is beautiful no matter what it looks like, and shame on you for saying differently.

And then the world would be a little bit sadder, a lotta bit uglier, and a hella lot fatter. And that would be decidedly un-awesome.

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The Alpha Male Gifts That Women Love

One time, I recorded myself singing a song I wrote for a girl. I used a hand-held recorder, so the quality wasn’t good. You can hear a dog barking in the background and rain falling outside on the patio. We eventually broke up from intractable circumstances, but keep in friendly contact occasionally, and she tells me that to this day my recording is the only item of love she has from any man that she refuses to discard.

Cost of this gift to me: zero dollars.

Psychological value of this gift to both me and her: priceless.

Ability to leverage this gift against future girlfriends who know about it: infinity priceless.

The alpha male gifts that women love are never what Kay Jewelers, Zales or VisaMastercard tell you they are. The gifts women love the most are not those gifts that by virtue (or vice) of their cost demonstrate the extent of your beta provider resource pool. No, the gifts women love the most are those gifts that demonstrate the personality traits of the alpha male, a man with romance in his heart despite carrying the burden of multitudinous options with women in his groin.

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