Smoking and the Image of Cool

How many of you, for those who are smokers or were smokers or at least have ever tried smoking at some time or another, did so for the first time in some sort of live musical context? There is a relationship between music and smoking that together forms this iconic image of a cool renegade; a badass rocker decked out in subcultural fashion trends of the day, hacking on a cigarette as a symbol of independence, adult-status, and resistance. Or at least there has been for years. Our knowledge of the health dangers and threats to smoking are, I believe, having a positive effect on young peoples’ decision to not smoke cigarettes. There is another side to the coin, however, one that shines a little irony in the face of the noble marketing effort, and that is: the more successful anti-smoking campaigns have been at promoting the idea that smoking kills rather than looks cool, the more the marginal youth seeking to resist all forms of mainstream society is tempted to indulge in the targeted habit.

I would love to be able to survey all the readers of this article and ask, “what exactly came into your head when you read the title of this article? What image popped into mind? Was it a particular musician sitting there with a cigarette dangling from his lips while he soloed away on his Stratocaster a là Keith Richards or Jimmy Page? Was it an iconic black and white image taken from the golden age of the jazz years in Harlem—Lady Day standing at the mic in a smoke-engulfed Minton’s or Thelonious Monk sitting at the piano with an ashtray and burning cigarette next to the high C? Was it a badass Sid Vicious, Patti Smith, or Joey Ramone leaning on the brick outside of CBGBs, one knee bent with Chuck Taylor flat against the wall—the cigarette signifying the ultimate “Fuck You” to both the camera and you, it’s viewer. Or was it a solemn and lonely Tom Waits or Willie Nelson, playing to a crowd of four on a chicken wire and Christmas lights lit stage in a roadhouse somewhere off Highway 87? Regardless of what your vision was, in my opinion there is a certain romanticism and genuine hipness to the scenes I just laid out for you that is emphasized by the cigarette. I don't think you would be reading this blog if you felt otherwise. Replace the cigarette in each image with a carrot juice, and let's face it, the icon just lost its majestic power. Where is the "edge" in a vegan shake?

(As a side note: Did you ever stop to ask where the cigarettes are in hip hop, soul, classical, or pop music? It’s strange how some genres of music embrace the cigarette while others seem to abandon it altogether.)

Enough of the rock stars; let’s shift to the crowd. In an article written by Columbia University professor of Ethnomusicology Aaron Fox, the Dean of the Department contends, “[M]usic is like a cigarette…. ‘[they] are bad [and] that’s why they are good.’” Fox argues the disdain for smoking lies in the contradiction of a cigarette – what makes it so desired is the fact that it is so shunned against. This is precisely why smoking a cigarette becomes, what Fox calls, a ‘sublime’ act; because of our learned hatred for this small object we are taught will kill us, it exists in our conscious as an object representative of intense desire. In the case of the rebel, that desire gets inverted and becomes a desire “for” rather than a desire “against.” This passion for the subversive signifiers a cigarette instills is similar to the passion youth hold for specific musical genres as well; hence the marriage between the two forms is born. Being a member of a deviant subculture that is only admired by those within its sphere, and accordingly hated by everyone else, perpetuates the individuals desire for taste and expression of that said membership. Therefore the music, like the cigarette, signifies an embracement of those abhorred symbols – it’s good to love what is bad to love.

Fox takes the analogy of smoking and music one step further. “Smoking in a group of smokers is profoundly sociable,” he claims. Let us not forget our history of tobacco and remind ourselves that smoking came from Native Americans who would share pipes as part of a communal, social event. Music only enriches the experience of this gathering. Here, I find it necessary to quote Professor Fox at length: “The sociability of smokers is mediated by elaborate rituals of offering cigarettes to others (or conversely, “bumming” a smoke), of handling cigarettes performatively, of lighting both one’s own cigarette and those of others, and of organizing the rhythm of conversation around the rhythms of smoking.” This adds to the perception of “cool” especially for the impressionable adolescent who admires and emulates his/her elders of the same subcultural medium.

To the chagrin of parents, medical professionals, and anti-smoking campaigners worldwide, I argue that, as unfortunate as it may be, smoking as “cool” is an image that will never fade. In fact, like many social tropes, the more smoking is pushed to the margins of mass society the more it will be sought after as a symbol of the anti-normal. The only silver lining in all of this may lie in an argument supporting the necessity to address global overpopulation.

The citations for this article were from Aaron Fox, “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country As “Bad” Music,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate. eds. Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004) pp. 39-61.

Dial up the Bunnies

I know the following has little to do with music and culture, but it does have to do with the Internet, which has changed the way we receive and listen to music. I was asked to write an article about the first time I ever went online for BreakThru Radio as part of their "Communication" theme week. Perhaps, after reading this, you will end up thinking about your own discovery of the Internet and the very first Web site you visited.

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In the fall of 1994 and I was taking a 12^th grade law class even though I was still in the 11^th grade. The reason for this was that the teacher, Mr. Regan, had a reputation for being not only an excellent instructor of law but also one of those faculty members who was “in the know” with all the up-and-coming stories going on outside our small community bubble in northern Ontario. He was a man who was educated at Notre Dame University (a far-reaching impossibility for students in my high school) and a teacher who participated in cultured/educated practices like reading The New York Times every day and subscribing to The Economist and The New Yorker. He was a true “mover and shaker” long before Larry Page and Sergey Brin had even thought about their Stanford dissertation.

I remember sitting in the portable classroom and listening to him try to explain this new computer “thing” (I am almost positive this was the noun he used to describe it) called “the world wide web.” Only one girl in our class of about 30 had any notion of what he was talking about, as she told the class her father had already made appointments to have it “installed” the following week. As I recall, the way Mr. Regan explained it to his class was that the Internet (“Sorry. The what?”) was like a library in your computer. As unbelievable as it was, one was now able to visit different places to read written content and look up pictures taken almost anywhere in the world all from home and through a simple PC. “Think of it like a million books inside of your computer,” were his words.

It sounds almost ridiculous now; but how does one go about explaining this concept to a group of 17/18 year-olds most of whom had only been on a computer a handful of times, and out of that, only to type an essay or play a game. The concept of “online” was as foreign to us then as the concept of solar energy is to Republicans now.

Trying to wrap my head around it as a 17 year old, I realize now that it was the verbs “visit” or “go to” that confused me the most. I just couldn’t understand how one could operate a computer to “go somewhere.” Has the computer somehow become some sort of teleportation device? “This is freakin’ AWESOME,” were my most immediate thoughts.

Less than a year later, my parents were on board. Trust me when I tell you, for those of you too young to know life without the Internet, this thing took off like a forest fire. One day you were sitting in a classroom trying to make sense of a concept that places a worldwide library inside your computer, and the next you are sitting in front of your Compaq Presario 486DX2 listening to the sound of digital fibers rub up against one another like wounded crickets in a dying attempt at a mating call inside of a snowy television set.

It was a Friday night and my parents had gone away for the weekend when I lost my web browsing virginity. As you do in high school when the folks leave home, my brother and I had a small get together of friends to drink Olde English and play euchre around the kitchen table. Only this time, the drinking led us upstairs where our family computer sat in my sister’s room. One of my friends was well on his way to establishing himself as a tech-nerd (he is now a Senior Vice President of a banking IT division that designs and develops algorithms for Mutual Fund management) and was going to give us other athletic hooligans our first taste of the online world. He showed me how to disconnect the phone line from the wall and plug it into the back of our brand new Compaq (“A computer with a telephone jack? What the F?”). He then demonstrated where to click in the bottom of the screen to prompt the connection between computer and landline. My buddies and I had little patience for the tiny blue light that moseyed its way back and forth between computer icons waiting for something to happen. After a full beer and a few shout outs of, “this suuuuucks” and “dude, are you kidding me with this?” the green light was lit and we were on our way to being “connected to the whole world.”

The next step in my friend’s futuristic hacking abilities was to “double-click” on this picture of a shipping helm that sat on the desktop of the screen. After a few loading minutes, a new “window popped-up” and there was apparently “an address bar” at the top (recall: all of these terms are in quotation marks because they were so foreign to me/us at the time, we had no idea what my wiz-kid buddy was talking about. He was using a language none of us had ever heard before). “Are we in yet?” the group of adolescent fellas all wondered like a band of thieves who were trying to crack a safe. The loading Netscape home page had yet to produce a thing other than a taskbar and scroll bar--two features none of us had ever seen before.

Some things about the Internet will never change – they may have gotten a lot better – but they will never change. My reason for this quick digression away from our story is to prompt the question to the reader: “What Web site do you think a group of 17 year-old boys would first visit while drinking on a Friday night in a parent-less house?”

My friend explained that we had to type in “www” which stood for “World Wide Web” (“Woooaaaa. Cooooool!” we all gasped) and then the “address” of the place we wanted to visit. Apparently, we could type in anything (this was long before search engines were popular. You used to have to know the actual http address of the site you wished to visit in order to get there more quickly).

Then my friend hit the keys: w. w. w. p. l. a. y. b. o. y. .. c. o. m.

“Awesome dude!”

“Are we gonna get in trouble for this?”

“What if the cops come?”

“Will my parents know I looked at this? How do we delete it?”

The anticipation and adrenaline rush of the Internet was thrilling. What was going to happen? For all we knew the most recent Playmate of the Month was going to step out from the monitor of my computer screen and start asking us for i.d.

I can remember the page taking many minutes (which felt like hours) to load. First, the background color would appear; then the logo at the top. Next was the written content, which practically appeared word-by-word. There were very few images on homepages back then, as it would slow down the page download time way too much. To see an actual image, you would have to click on the “thumbnail” and it would reload a page. This could take several, and I mean SEVERAL, minutes. And the photos wouldn’t load top-down the way they do today either. The entire image would appear on the screen as one large blue-gray, out-of-focus mash. As minutes passed, the pixels would slowly become more defined and into focus. It was a bit like looking at a magazine through dirt-filled, foggy lenses and having them rubbed clean one swipe ever 2-3 minutes until you could make sense of what you were supposed to be looking at. After about five minutes, you could start to see an image that resembled skin tone and a female figure, and after about ten, you finally had a clear picture of a nipple.

It has been sixteen years now since my first Internet experience. Yesterday, I video Skyped from my iPhone while walking down Broadway in New York City to a friend of mine who was sitting at Heathrow waiting to board a flight. It is almost inconceivable how far, and how fast, the Internet has evolved. There is no arguing that it has literally changed the way we live and communicate.

For those readers who are now only 17 and using the Internet as a daily source of social nutrition, I wonder what you will be writing about in sixteen years? What will you be describing as archaic and unbelievably vintage? And just how will you be doing it?

In sixteen years from now, I wouldn’t be too surprised if you just hook up some nodes to your temples and think about what you want to say. The software program will write the words itself, translating your thoughts to text in seconds.