Music: Mix the Bourgeoisie and the Rebel?

Via Robin Hanson:

Consider three kinds of celebrities: politicians, athletes, and musicians. We clearly hold politicians to higher moral and social standards than we do musicians. This makes sense because we feel more vulnerable to bad behavior by politicians than by musicians. An out of control politician could kill us all, while an out of control musician would at worst just fail to make music we like.

What about athletes? While we may not hold athletes to the high of standards we hold politicians, we clearly hold them to higher standards than musicians. Tiger Woods was vilified for moral violations that wouldn’t be worth reporting about a musician. Yet the above explanation for politicians vs. musicians doesn’t work here. While we are no more vulnerable to athletes than to musicians, we still hold athletes to a higher standard.

For our distant ancestors, athletic skill was much closer to political power. Small forager bands feared that the few most physically powerful members would attempt to dominate the band by force. Foragers had much less reason to fear domination by the few most musical folks in the band. So it made sense for foragers to hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians.

So I suspect our tendency to hold athletes to higher standards than musicians is a holdover from our forager days. . . .

I like the idea of tracing the anthropological roots of current social trends and assumptions, and it's probably alluring because any such conclusions can't really be proven false. Like, are we upset about Tiger Woods cheating on his wife because he would have been the one to decide how much food we got to eat 5000 years ago? Probably! Who knows! But, I think there are other things at play, here.

First, I think the athlete-musician distinction is partially one of widespread relevance: 106 million people watched Peyton Manning et al. in the most recent Super Bowl; by comparison, Taylor Swift's 'Fearless'--the best-selling album of last year--has moved just over five-million copies. Indeed, our interests in music are far more diverse than those in sports, which means that widespread relevance is enjoyed with far greater regularity by our most prolific athletes than our most prolific musicians. This, in turn, often leads to more attention regarding those athletes' personal lives, which then triggers greater vilification after some kind of moral failing. We can only care about private failings to the extent that we feel invested in public successes. If, that is, we care about private failings at all.

Beyond that, sports are more often associated with regional unification and collective enjoyment than music. We go to Super Bowl parties, plan road trips to baseball games, and unite around a local team's triumphs and failures. So, a well-regarded athlete is a modern 'leader' in a way that rings true with our foraging past (Probably! Who knows!). But this is distinct from a leadership based on moral standing.

Now, a popular song can certainly create a collective experience or unify a region--think about hearing Kanye's 'Gold Digger' at a club in its prime, or Jay-Z's 'Empire State of Mind' today. But the shelf-life of such a hit tends to be short (at least in comparison with, e.g., Tim Duncan's tenure with the Spurs), and songs aren't inextricably tied to the respective artist within such an experience. That is, such songs can trigger a certain mood or bring about nostalgia, but typically do so as the accompaniment to a shared event. Watching a local team's playoff run, on the other hand, is the shared event. So, the athlete is more central to our collective experience than the musician, which is another way of increasing their widespread relevance. And that relevance, as I said before, is a necessary condition for public concern over personal failings.