Frank Kogan

The title of this post is a bait-and-switch, actually, since my fundamental motive is to get you to read my old Las Vegas Weekly piece on "cumulative advantage," which is a concept from economics and sociology that I think everyone needs to know.

To summarize in one sentence that combines two ideas: small advantages in fame, wealth, power, etc. can grow into large advantages, large advantages can grow into larger still, and there's always, ineradicably, an element of randomness, of luck, as to what gets the small advantage in the first place, and what gets to leap from one level to the next. So, all fame is viral, and we can never be certain in advance as to which viruses will catch hold and which won't.* But once something is famous, the fame is very hard to dislodge.** So my first point of the day:

(1) There's always an element of luck when anyone or anything becomes well-known. Always. This includes Darwin as well as Rihanna. From the piece:

The more people know about each other’s choices, the more likely they are to come to agreement. In retrospect, this strong agreement can make an outcome seem as if it had been inevitable: Look, all these people agree, so this must reflect the taste of the public, or the quality of the merchandise. But in fact the experiment [by Duncan Watts and crew] shows the exact opposite. The more people know about each other’s choices, the less predictable the outcome.***

(By the way, the passage would have been just as correct if I'd added "size of the promotional budget" to the phrases "taste of the public" or "quality of the merchandise.")

(2) My second point is about explanations, not about cumulative advantage. Even disregarding luck, people who claim to know the (other) reasons "Bar Bar Bar" became a hit have at least some shit in their thinking: no explanation of such a single social event is testable.**** For instance, take the idea that "Bar Bar Bar" became a hit because Crayon Pop are different from everyone else in K-pop — they have a different look, and "Bar Bar Bar" has a different sound — which seems like a good explanation to me, and is one I myself would give, despite all these caveats. The trouble is that if "Bar Bar Bar" had not hit, I could have used that very same reason to explain Crayon Pop's failure. And EXO, whose music is at least as novel as Crayon Pop's, didn't go top 10 in Korea until they hit with the relatively conventional "Growl."

(3) Putting 1 and 2 together: there's an element of luck as to which explanations themselves become common and accepted. Cumulative advantage applies to ideas as well as to people and songs.

The problem with the phrase "element of luck" is that it doesn't tell us how large the element is. In my limited reading, I've seen no way of specifying the percentage luck plays in cumulative advantage. Is luck 10 percent of the reason one song became a hit, and 80 percent of the reason another one did? How do we quantify this sort of luck? It's not like a coin flip, which we know is 50 percent, or the roll of a die, which is 16⅔ percent. [EDIT: Well, assuming the coin is balanced and the die isn't rigged, the chance of a particular result of a coin flip is 50 percent and of the roll of a die is 16⅔ percent, but the percentage attributable to luck is 100 percent for each: it's entirely chance.]

( The break )

Sad situation: E.via posted on Twitter that she's split with her agency, Dline Art Media, and that they're not letting her take her stage name E.via with her. The issue seems to be almost total nonpayment over the last two years. (Allkpop provides a translation.) Even if we take into account that we're only getting her side of the story, it nonetheless does seem as if she's acting as decently as possible and the agency is being vindictive and destructive. Yes, it's by her own account that she looks good, and of course the smart strategy is to appear generous and understanding when one is recounting the alleged bad behavior of others.* But her tone and generosity are entirely consistent with what else I know about her. The goodness seems credible. Not that I know much at all; I haven't had a lot of time to follow Korean performers in their role as personalities beyond the singing, dancing, and dressing. But E.via was one of the very very very few to speak up to the mob that was attacking T-ara, she didn't have to do it, it was a risk, and she did it in a kind rather than an accusatory manner. Art heroes aren't always wondrous human-being heroes, and they don't have to be, but here's one who most likely is.



Another thought, though. Yes, she's an indie rapper, not a product of the idol system. But nonetheless, she's recognized internationally, she's been in the top 30, she's appeared on Music Bank. She's something of a star. Yet in effect she's been working for not even peanuts, for practical purposes an artist in her garret, her art life as shoestring and/or part-time as that of any writer or poet or painter laboring in obscurity or hanging around little-known fringe scenes. Even doing okay in the fame business, she's getting thrown down the ladder in the business business. That's the way things shake out, money and power generally going to the people who already have it.

Here's my E.via tag, if she's new to you. My most substantial posts about her are these two:

E.via (artist of the year, 2010)
The Five Faces Of E.via

Anyway, love to you, 이옥주, Lee Ok Joo, Napper, E.via, Tymee.

h/t davidfrazer

*A strategy that I rarely manage myself, I must say. Not my temperament.

Given that there was an element of chance in the Sex Pistols' becoming famous,* is there a way to quantify that element?

I assume that the answer is no, since I've no idea how to try; though maybe social psychologists with a strong grasp of statistics have been working on such questions.

This question was inspired by Mark's starting his Adam And The Ants stint at One Week, One Band with the question, "Do people talk about Jordan much these days? Once — for a year or three — she mattered quite a lot." And a couple of posts on, he asks, "So what exactly was I suggesting earlier today: no Jordan (—> no SEX —> no Pistols —> no Jubilee —> no Ants) —> no (UK) punk? Or else maybe, less aggressively counterfactually, I'm dubbing her the Bez of punk, maybe?"

Mark's point isn't about probability but that the story of a band is way more populated than most people realize. But to underline both my question and Mark's point, I'd never heard of Jordan or Bez until reading those names in Mark's piece yesterday.** And I'm not as sure as he is that his contention ("no (UK) punk?") is counterfactual.

I assume that if we start from 50 years ago and ask ourselves, "How likely then was it that the world has this particular configuration now?," the answer would be vanishingly small no matter what configuration we end up with (though of course some overall features of the configuration, e.g., "the world would still have an atmosphere, even after a life-ending nuclear war," are quite predictable). So to make my question comprehensible, you could say, "Given Britain the way it was in 1975, and glam and glitter and pub rock and punk rock as they already existed in scenes and subcultures in New York, London, Cleveland, L.A., Ann Arbor, etc., not to mention the pages of Creem and ______ (some British counterpart?),*** there's nonetheless huge unpredictability as to whether the Sex Pistols are going to become famous, or how famous, not to mention, once they are famous, what gets made of what they're doing, and so forth."

Remember, even here, the chance of any particular outcome, including the one we got, is vanishingly small. And my concern isn't to come up with a number, anyway. What I'm really pondering is this: back in the late '80s in my fanzine I asked and gave what I consider a good answer to the question, "Why was there a punk rock explosion in Britain in '76 but not a glitter explosion in the United States in 1973?" But my answer was entirely causal. The Dolls had these attributes and this potential audience; the Sex Pistols had those attributes and that potential audience. I wouldn't fundamentally change that answer now, even though I know that there is an element of unpredictability in what happened with the Dolls and Pistols. What I don't know is whether or how much I should mention the unpredictability, or how to work it into the story. What is there to say about unpredictability, beyond that it exists? I think that, even if the Dolls had become famous, they wouldn't have produced the explosion the Sex Pistols did. And I don't think the Sex Pistols would have become a sudden big deal**** in the U.S., even if they'd been as big here as KISS or Aerosmith. But even if I'm right about that (it's not as if I could run an experiment), I don't think even in retrospect that it was inevitable or obvious that they or anyone like them would have sparked the fire in Britain that they actually did spark.

( 티아라 파이팅!!! )

( The butterfly effect )

( A Tale Of Two Patsies )

( footnotes )

Essay question regarding Occupy Denver (200 words or less): If Occupy Denver were a success, what would this look like?

Answer (my vision of immediate utopia): We'd have an informed and engaged citizenry, rather than the ignorant, alienated voters we have now. People would want to understand concepts such as "cumulative advantage," "liquidity trap," "IS-LM curves," and the like (not all of which I understand, btw). Economic and social structure would be a matter of experiment and at least partial choice rather than "this is the way things are" (and no, I don't know what this looks like). The power of Big Money could be checked and countered from within and without government (I don't know what this looks like either, but I doubt that "No More Bailouts" and "End The Fed" are wise or get us there, though I don't know, being ignorant and alienated myself). People's ideas wouldn't always match their hairstyle. Everyone who wants one gets a puppy, but you have to take care of it. People who sing "We Shall Overcome" would develop better rhythm, or would respond to police action with a livelier song, such as "Hold It Against Me." Not only would HyunA have raps and dubstep breaks, which she already has, but dubstep producers would also sample HyunA.



[Someone at the Tuesday 7 PM GA asked us to answer this question (though I don't remember his exact wording) and to bring him the answers at the next GA, which I had to miss. He said something about providing a place to answer on the Facebook page as well, or the Webpage, though I haven't seen it at either site. So I'm posting it here.]

I don't pay any attention to local news, owing to its shameful neglect of K-pop, so it didn't dawn on me until about four days ago that there was an Occupy Denver. The weather's been mostly nice, and it's only a 25-minute walk from my apartment to Civic Center Park, where they hang out.

I feel a bit hypocritical for not getting involved, since I'm the one who strenuously insists that the major flaw of my musicwrite world is its unwillingness to focus and follow through: that the people in it don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation and are totally unable to comprehend the need to persist on a topic, return to unanswered questions, develop rudimentary thoughts, work to understand someone's ideas, communicate their own, etc. Not that I expect anyone at Occupy Denver to do better or accomplish much of anything. But I doubt they'll do any harm. And as Mark said in WMS #13, getting people all in one place is amazingly hard, much less with at least the illusion of moving all in one direction, and persisting. So I may drop by, today or tomorrow, just to see.

William Bowers (in reference to Tinysong and Twisten.fm, "which combine to crawl Twitter for music")(Puritan Blister #43 Twisten to Yr Heart): Isn't it a tad more populist/democratic than Hype Machine even, because your users are mostly "folks," right, which is not to give bloggers too much status/esteem, but some of 'em are getting royalty-esque. Not in the sense of money-royalties, but 'tude, maybe?

My question here is, what does Bowers* mean by "populist/democratic"? Is what the populace pays attention to inherently populist/democratic simply because the populace pays attention to it? One could argue that Twisten gets rid of traditional gatekeepers, going straight to the people for its information.** But one could also then argue that the Twisten results become gatekeepers themselves. My buzzword here is "cumulative advantage," which just means that that which is somewhat popular has a huge leg up in becoming more popular, and this is merely because it's popular (above and beyond its inherent appeal), and that which is little-known remains little-known. So the more information that flows about how much people listen, the less diverse the listening will get over space and time. As the world gets more cosmopolitan, it gets less diverse, even if individually we become more aware of the diversity that does exist. - I'm not committing myself to what I just said, by the way. I'm making arguments, creating hypotheses.

Democracy doesn't just mean "majority rules," it also depends on diversity, depends on there being diverse people with diverse opinions; otherwise we wouldn't need to vote, we could just poll a single individual and let those results decide for everybody. And its rationale is that, with access to the diversity of ideas (rather than just ideas coming from the top down), the people get to debate and choose which ideas are best, and they get to experiment with new ideas. So the flow of information is critical to democracy, since it's critical that diverse ideas be heard; but also, owing to cumulative advantage, the flow of information cuts down on diversity. (Same caveat as before about not altogether committing myself to this argument.)

*If you click the link, you'll see that Bowers is actually VERY skeptical about the benefits of new media.

**And I'd hypothesize that The People chose to use gatekeepers, and chose their gatekeepers, in the first place.

h/t freakytigger

This week's column. Trying to construct a line out.

The Rules Of The Game #19: A Friend Of A Friend

( taboos and typos )

I wrote this piece before going to my PO box and finding the bad sales report for my book, but the two reinforce each other: the need for us to find routes outward to get our messages to potential colleagues unknown. Any suggestions?

( Links to my other Rules Of The Game columns )

For some reason (there are glitches in the software) my column this week first went up without the final three paragraphs, making the title unintelligible. But it's fixed now.

The Rules Of The Game #16: Vaccine Protects Against New Ideas

My thoughts didn't quite coalesce this week, though as Jack Thompson once pointed out I can't do a "Hero Story" every week (or live a hero story every week, for that matter). But where my thoughts are leading to is: How do we break out into the wider world? That is, how do we - meaning you and me and the people in our corner of the livejournal galaxy - bring our ideas to the wider world, but more important how do we bring our minds to the stories the wider world could tell us, if we knew where to look and what to ask?

( Links to my other Rules Of The Game columns )