There always has to be someone who spoils it before we even get there, eh?
Let's not bother. We'll stay in and embrace some clean water instead, for National Clean Your Aquarium Day. Any excuse to play something from these guys... ooh, wait - looks like they've got a new song out!
Here's another way to clean the air. Today is also the International Day for Countering Hate Speech so this seems pretty appropriate...
This meths was clearly an anagram. And yes, I know The Smiths only appeared here a few weeks ago, but they had two excellent songs to share. First, the really obvious one...
I was a little upset to discover I didn't own that track... I thought I had pretty much everything that ever made the Top 20 in the early 80s. Then I listened to it again and figured it was no great loss.
Give yourself a good laugh and watch that video if you've not seen it in awhile. Kenny Everett springs to mind.
Not only that, but it's National Coconut Torte Day. A day to contemplate sit in the dessert which "sits in that delicious gray area between cake and pastry: rich like a cake, structured like a layer dessert, and often dressed up enough to look like it belongs in a bakery window."
I don't think I've ever eaten a coconut torte. Have I been missing out.
It's National Jewel Day too - I did my quiz about jewels this week, but it wasn't a particularly interesting subject so I won't bother you guys with it.
It's also (no, I'm not making any of these up): National Earmuff Day, International Riesling Day, National Open An Umbrella Indoors Day (on Friday the 13th... are you mad!?!), National Freelancers Day and World Sleep Day.
But all of these wonderful celebrations are trumped (I don't like using that verb any more, even in terms of metaphorical card games) by the aforementioned Bad Luck Friday... our second in a row, thanks to February's insistence on being exactly four weeks long (most of the time).
Actually, there are surprisingly few decent songs about Friday 13th. Thank god then for little Bob Smith, who's clearly having another Bad Hair Day in this video... no change there then.
There hasn't been much to laugh about at Top Ten Towers over the past couple of weeks, thanks to various automobile-related shenanigans, but hopefully the end is in sight for all that and I'll be rolling in the aisles again soon.
Anyway, last time we did one of these, I pondered a question about whether we can still laugh at a song even if the music doesn't naturally fall under our area of acceptability. Mainly because I'm drawn to things lyrics-first, although I know lots of you aren't. Ernie, for example...
While I enjoy a good lyric as much as the next person, they aren't the most important bit for me. For example, I listen to a lot of African music and I can appreciate the quality of the singing and music without understanding a single word.
Many's the time I lament the fact that my lyrical focus stops me properly appreciating other musical stylings. When I read Ernie's African series, for example. Or when I listen to some of the tracks Swiss Adam shares. Or when Ben pesters me to listen to more Mogwai.
Notice that they remembered to sing something on that one!
C also responded to my question, in a post which featured lots of songs by Flight of the Conchords...
Interesting question you pose there and I think that yes, I need to enjoy the overall music first in most cases - but not always. If the lyrics or the humour really pull me in then they can override in some instances, so it's interesting how much weight we give to each aspect really quite unintentionally.
Unfortunately I have something of an aversion to the FoC, and it's got nothing to do with their music or their humour, it's simply down to the fact that I had a friend some years ago who was obsessed with them and he overwhelmed me with their material: "listen to this", "listen to this again!", "you must hear this one", "this is SO funny", "listen to this again!" on and on and on and on and as a result I have a strange gut reaction that has turned me right off ever wanting to hear them again; there is something about being force-fed humour which has the opposite effect. Which is a shame, because I do know they are clever, musical and funny.
It reminds me of something we looked at in the old Self-Help For Cynics series (which will return one day!)...
There’s nothing more guaranteed to make me instantly predisposed to dislike someone than being told that I’ll love them.
Why does this also apply to humour? How many times has Louise made me watch something on the interweb that she found really funny, only to notice that I'm not reacting in the same way she is... and then come out with the internet equivalent of, "well, I guess you had to be there". And I'm sure the same thing happens when I show her something that has tickled me. Bear in mind that Louise and I have pretty compatible senses of humour - it's one of the main things that stops us killing each other.
I guess it's also the same thing I write about a lot when I do my Year End reviews - too great an expectation can stop me enjoying something in a natural, organic way. If the critics all love a movie, I go in there expecting to be blown away... and often come away disappointed. Whereas if I'd seen that same movie without any of the hype... I'd probably have appreciated it a lot more.
Turns out scientists have a name for this phenomenon (of course they do!) - REACTANCE.
According to iffypedia...
In psychology, reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, regulations, advice, recommendations, information, and messages that are perceived to threaten or eliminate specific behavioural freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit their choice of response or range of alternatives.
So when C's friend keeps telling her to love the Conchords, C's brain goes into reactance overload.
Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured into accepting a certain view or attitude. Reactance can encourage an individual to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude which is indeed contrary to that which was intended — which is to say, to a response of noncompliance — and can also increase resistance to persuasion.
And the more he tries to persuade her, the more C's brains digs its heels in, creating and strengthening those neural pathways we talked a lot about in the Self Help series.
When I think about the funniest film I ever saw - the film which still makes me laugh every time I see it (and I've seen it a lot) - it's interesting to note that the first time I saw it was at a late night critic's preview when I knew very little about it and had no pre-conceived notions. I'd read no reviews. Nobody had told me "you've got to see it, it's hilarious!" or anything like that. I went in there and made up my mind with complete freedom.
I'm not going to tell you what that movie was (some of you probably know) because I don't want to trigger your reactance. Of course, that also means that every time I recommend a tune on this blog, I run the risk of reactancing you... so maybe it's time to stop talking about stuff I like in case you think I'm stealing away your freedom to make up your own mind.
Blimey, for a series about humour, this post's been a laugh a minute, hasn't it?
Here's a song I thought was very funny when I was a kid. It probably isn't that funny almost fifty years later. I'd not advise you listening to it, for the risk of reactance. In fact... Don't look, Ethel!
Teachers love their Awareness Days' Calendar. Black History
Month. World Environment Day. International Literacy Day. There’s always
something to build a lesson on if you go searching.
Along the way, I’ve come across some truly ridiculous
awareness days… and so… you can guess the rest.
What better day to start than January 16th?
It's National
Nothing Day!
National Nothing Day is an "un-event" created in
1972 by newspaper columnist Harold Pullman Coffin and observed in the United
States annually on January 16 since 1973.
Its aim is “to provide Americans with one National Day when
they can just sit without celebrating, observing or honouring anything”.
We need this day in the UK too!
Here are some sweets nothings to help us celebrate….
Welcome back to the Cancel Culture Club, where a distinguished committee of leading lights from the blogosphere (and me) debate old songs with attitudes that now seem rather suspect to modern ears.
Is this week's offering our most contentious contender yet?
I think I'll let Alyson from the Jukebox Time Machine do the introductions, as she's much better at it than I am. Alyson... What's It All About?
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. A phrase we’ve all heard of which could almost have been coined for the Rolling Stones. I’m just about old enough to remember both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones from the mid-1960s, when we saw them on telly in black and white. I think I fell a little in love with baby-faced Paul McCartney, but I was always a bit unsure about the Rolling Stones as they exuded something I couldn’t possibly have understood back then. As I got (a lot) older, I realised most of their lyrics referenced sex, drugs or both which brings us on to their song Brown Sugar from 1971, the song up for debate this time.
It seems Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics to Brown Sugar whilst he was in Australia filming Ned Kelly and then in the Muscle Shoals recording studio in Alabama. Mick himself admits the song was a bit of a mishmash, with everything he was thinking of at the time thrown in. He also said he wouldn’t write those lyrics nowadays and the band no longer play the song in concert. But why?
Well, I for one, believe him when he said he was writing about what he was thinking of at the time. It is no secret that the band were habitual users of heroin back in 1971, the drug also known as Brown Sugar. He probably thought it could be a great title for a rock song whilst at the same time getting it past the censors. At this time in Australia, he was probably also missing his girlfriend of the time, Claudia Linnear, who was a very striking backing singer with Ike and Tina Turner. As a young man on the other side of the world, he was no doubt reminiscing about his sexual exploits with Ms Linnear which coincidentally fitted his Brown Sugar lyric. So far, I have no issue with the idea of the song and unlike our American cousins, I don’t think we in the UK had a particular issue in 1971 with interracial sex. If we cancelled all songs that refer to sex or drugs there would be very little left in the rock pantheon.
Once Mick arrived in Alabama to record the album Sticky Fingers, he had to finish the lyrics to Brown Sugar. Apparently, he sat with a yellow legal pad and soon came up with the song we now know. Based in a Deep South state, there is no doubt his mind would have wandered to the history of the place and what happened in the cotton plantations over a 100 years earlier. Again, there was interracial sex, but this time not of a consensual nature but that between master and slave. To be an attractive young black girl back then was a curse as you would have been repeatedly raped and forced to have sex with the white plantation owners and overseers, whilst their wives turned a blind eye. The verses of the song refer to this abhorrent practice which I really hope Mick included as a bit of a history lesson highlighting the gratification the white men got through using violence (the whip) towards a young girl.
Whatever Mick intended, the song now makes for a troubling mishmash of what happened during slavery, combined with references to the enjoyment to be had from both using heroin and having consensual sex with your black partner. A real juxtaposition. I can see how it wouldn’t go down well nowadays in the Southern States of the US. It was however a big hit in 1971 all over the world, as Keith Richards also came up with an excellent riff and rhythm for it. I’m tempted on this occasion not to cancel it but keep it in the public domain as it is still a great example of what the Rolling Stones did at their height and as a reminder of what happens when humans treat fellow humans as possessions or chattels, a practice that still goes on today.
Hope I’m not too out of kilter with everyone else although I think this one is going to be quite divisive.
Thank you, Alyson - as always, your research skills and historical perspective shine through. And yes, I do think we'll find a diversity of opinion below... yet I don't think we'll have too much disagreement overall.
Let's see what my old pal Martin from New Amusements thinks...
I must admit I hadn't really thought too much about, or listened too closely to, the lyrics of Brown Sugar before. I've been content to chug along with the riff, and just assumed the narrative was the singer's preference for black women, albeit expressed in sassy 70s dialogue. Maybe it was even an example of positive discrimination - after all, they "taste so good", presumably in comparison to plain old white sugar.
I do think that's an easy interpretation if you don't listen deeper - and as Alyson says above, it would be quite a button-pushing one for rock 'n' roll "bad boys" to make back in 1971.
But it's not about that, is it? It's about the slave trade, and more specifically about the rape and sexual assault of slave-traded women and girls.
The first two verses describe the trader and a house boy engaged in this, the last verse describes the narrator at it too. He attempts to explain this away, singing "I'm no school boy, but I know what I like" ... except that's no excuse.
The Rolling Stones have created a number of lyric videos for their biggest hits, and they're all up on their official YouTube channel... but there's no lyric video for this, which perhaps tells its own tale. And although it's their fourth most played song live (if setlist.fm is to be believed) they haven't done so since 2019. Maybe the band are in the process of slowly, gently cancelling it themselves? If so, that's good enough for me.
I think they probably are. Though as the legendary JC, aka The Vinyl Villain, suggests below, there are limits to self-cancellation in the world of rock 'n' roll...
I’ve long been troubled by this one. It is a ridiculously catchy tune, one that is tailor made for radio,and whose upbeat tempo seems to have a celebratory, ‘wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care’ feel about it.
But we really should care.
The lyrics are genuinely horrific as they glorify slavery, extreme violence against women and rape.
What makes it worse is how much Jagger seems to be enjoying singing the lyric...almost as if he is imagining himself as being the person carrying out all these acts of degradation, while the closer of ‘how come you taste so good, just like a black girl should’ interspersed with all sorts of whooping and hollering means racial stereotyping can be added to the charge sheet.
I believe that Jagger and Richards dropped Brown Sugar from the live set lists a few years back, so in that regard they at least have acknowledged it is a problematic song. But they and their management team will still happily collect the royalties that amass from the regular airings the song gets on radio stations...no real surprise given that the music industry is riddled with hypocrites.
It's easy to be a hypocrite when money is involved. Just ask Billy Bragg in his clifftop mansion. Actually, I think he sold that... no doubt to move into something even swishier. Not that I begrudge him a penny of it, because he's a socialist of the heart.
OK, so far we've all been in broad agreement. Though with each new comment, we seem to steer closer and closer to cancellation. Over to Walter from A Few Good Times In My Life. What do you make of Brown Sugar, Walter?
That's a really good example to talk about. I put the album on again and listened to it from start to finish, and I have to say that Brown Sugar is one of the weaker songs on this record. A simple rhythm and blues riff certainly doesn't make it one of their most popular. It's more likely the lyrics, which revolve around non-consensual sex between a guard and a slave girl.
It is well known that this type of lyrics are characteristic of Mick Jagger's attitude at that time, and he ventures into misogynistic territory that was later claimed by gangster rappers from the East Coast.
And no, I can't listen to this macho bullshit anymore. Obviously, the Rolling Stones feel the same way, since they removed the song from their live repertoire a few years ago and are trying to downplay this lyrical faux pas by claiming that the song is explicitly directed against slavery.
Ultimately, this song is one reason why we're talking about cancel culture.
Well, yes. Although Walter raises a good point that we touched on last time - and that's the preponderance of sexist attitudes still to be found in a lot of far more modern tunes from the world of rap and r 'n' b. The world has changed a lot since 1971... but how much has it really changed?
Someone else who, like Martin, hasn't really considered the lyrics of Brown Sugar until now is C from Sun Dried Sparrows...
I have a confession: I've never actually read, or given any thought at all, to the complete lyrics of 'Brown Sugar'... Perhaps it's because the tune and chorus are so familiar and it feels as if they have been for my entire life, that it's become a musical equivalent of "a part of the furniture". It's just there, and always has been, but it's never been that important to me either, so I couldn't actually recite it or sing along with it word for word. And now you've brought it into focus and, rather than just listen to it again, I sat down and read the lyrics in stark isolation. And the truth is, I felt really quite bothered by it.
I understand that it's describing a scenario and, as in murder ballads and songs like Tom Jones's 'Delilah' or Tony Christie's 'I Did What I Did For Maria', we can hopefully credit the songwriters/artists with (presumably!) not actually sharing the sentiments of the characters they inhabit in the song - just as we do with books, films, plays, etc. - we get that it's not autobiographical, nor are we going to think it's ok to murder someone or whatever just because we've heard a song about it. That's usually my reason for not wanting to cancel stuff.
But there's something about 'Brown Sugar' which I'm finding particularly discomforting / distasteful - now that I've finally paid full attention to it, that is! I think it's due to the combination of factors: slavery, racism, violence towards women and sexual objectification of a young black girl, punctuated with a particularly celebratory sounding chorus as our narrator appears to revel in it. I'm trying to analyse my new feelings about it now. Yes, perhaps that's what turns it for me - the inclusion of that chorus against the rest of it. If it had been an obvious 'story' type song all the way through, the verses could have been bracketed as such. But there's something about the way the chorus comes in which brings the story more up-to-date and seems to validate the sentiments, horribly. I don't know if I'm explaining this well...I'm finding it hard to describe and, to be honest, have completely surprised myself with this immediate reaction. All I know is, something about the song feels distinctly off now, for a multitude of reasons, but I had never even given it a second thought until asked to write about it here. So, Rol, this is quite the shock revelation for me. Contrary to my own expectations, I'm now not sure I really want to hear it again and given the huge Stones back catalogue to delve into for more superior songs too, that wouldn't really be a great loss. Wow, I hadn't anticipated this! And I'll be very interested to hear everyone else's views.
It's at times like this that I feel guilty for hosting this feature. Like I've spoiled this song for C now, and wouldn't it have been better to leave her happy with her surface interpretation? Ignorance is bliss. I hate the idea that this feature will spoil a song for anyone.
This seems like a good time to bring in the Dubhed himself, Khayem... because, unlike C, he appears fully aware of what's going on in this tune... and he's ready to put the boot in!
I might as well put my cards on the table and say that, however much is made of the legendary Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership, I find Jagger’s lyrics achingly poor most of the time. When I was in my teens, I saw the Stones as has-beens with nothing to say about my life and nothing to aspire to. My opinion about their music - the first decade and a half at least - has changed considerably over time but it’s fair to say that I still don’t go to The Rolling Stones to remind myself of Jagget’s lyrical prowess.
I never particularly liked Brown Sugar either, and that was before I stopped and listened more carefully to what Mick was singing, not just how he was singing it. The ‘ambiguity' about whether he’s referring to slavery or hard drugs or both is undermined by a heavy handed approach that even a naive would-be poet in Year 9 would think twice about committing to.
However, what defined the song for me was listening to the cassette version of Neil’s Heavy Concept Album inn 1984. Yes, as in Neil the character played by Nigel Planer in The Young Ones. The cassette offered up “extra verbal meanderings, including a 58-second ‘version’ of Brown Sugar.
In brief, Neil comes across a couple of buskers playing an instrumental riff, and he decides to get his guitar out of his bag and join in. Neil clearly has only a vague acquaintance with the song, coming in late when the buskers sing “Brown Sugar! How come you taste so good?”. As he echoes the next line, Neil realises what he’s singing and asks the buskers to stop. “Who wrote this song?” he asks. “I thought it was supposed to be about whole foods, free range eggs…"
And since then that’s what I always think of when I hear Brown Sugar.
Musically speaking, Brown Sugar is a good song. Lyrically, it’s terrible but rather than be cancelled, it should be cited as an example of how not to tell a story!
I've never heard Neil's version before, K... but clearly it's a thing of beauty and brilliance. Thank you.
I will say though that although I don't hold Mick Jagger up as one of rock's great wordsmiths, I do think from time to time he hits gold. Three examples below...
OK, maybe they're not going to steal Mr. Zimmerman's Nobel Prize In Literature, but I do think that all of those could be offered up as defence against any accusations of racism that might be levelled at Mick. He always seemed a pretty socially conscious dude...
That said, he's also written some very ill-advised lyrics... ones that make even Brown Sugar pale in comparison. Here's Our Man In Portugal... George!
The Rolling Stones, well, Jagger and Richard, have written some objectionable and quite nasty songs, such as Under My Thumb and Yesterday’s Papers. These two tracks seem to be deliberately offensive.
Brown Sugar, in comparison, is quite absurd with its language and I wonder if “no offence was meant”. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s yet another song where I dissociate from the lyric (or go to Georgie La-La land as my partner would say). And I say No to cancelling.
I'm surprised George didn't also mention this one, which deserved a mention back in the very first edition of the Cancel Culture Club, when we were debating Young Girl.
Going back to Martin's earlier point though... while we can't find a lyric video for Brown Sugar on the tube of you, we can find one for each of the above. 'Nuff said.
I thought it might be worth getting the opinion of an actual songwriter on this matter. So I consulted our resident troubadour, the wonderful Mr. John Medd...
Jagger’s "meagre" lyric writing? Who says?! Oh to have written *any* Stones song over the last 50 years…
Who am I to argue with an expert? But John, what about today's offering?
Brown Sugar? I love this song with every fibre of my being. Is it about cunningulus? Yep, probably.
Woah, woah - what now?
I just sent you a screen grab.
Okay... well, that certainly opens up a whole new line of enquiry...
Is it about Heroin? Yeah, that too. Does any of this matter? Of course not. It’s the Rolling Stones. In their pomp. In their majesty. Should it be cancelled? No! However, in America, they’ve cancelled it themselves seemingly and agreed not to play it live. Street fighting men? Maybe not so these days.
Of course, being a fan of a particular artist can make us more willing to overlook their tomfoolery. As anybody who still wants to listen to The Smiths will be forced to admit.
Over at No Badger Required, the estimable SWC recently held a vote on the Best Eponymous Albums Of All Time. Despite our host's own reservations (he refuses to even name the band these days, calling them only The Sm***s - I'm thinking of doing similar with Oasis, and referring to them only as *as*s from now on), their debut album came third in the countdown. I mention this to illustrate the complexities we wrestle with every time we fling open the doors of the Cancel Culture Club.
Mick Jagger is on record saying that he probably wouldn't be able to write this song in today's society. Which probably gives us some idea but I suppose back in the 70s Mick didn't remotely care about morals and all that.
Lyrically it is suspect. Musically, the riff at the start is incredible and Charlie Watts' drumming is amongst the best you'll hear and that sax solo about 90 seconds in is incredible.
It's also one of the best opening songs of any album anywhere.
But yeah...suspect...
SWC's comments illustrate the ambivalence we often feel when it comes to songs like this - the clash between head and heart, perhaps? And nobody summed that more perfectly this time than Swiss Adam from Bagging Area. That's why I saved his comments till the end...
The whole concept of cancelling art is problematic isn't it? Who gets to choose what's cancelled and what isn't? We usually deplore censorship. Regimes that ban art/ music/ literature are weak and authoritarian ones that are frightened of people, race, song, culture, sex, otherness. Cancelling anything is a high handed position to take. I suppose there's a difference between organic popular cancellation and government imposed cancellation but even so, the word cancel carries an ultimate weight of no return.
Some people try to separate the artist and the art and this seems an eminently sensible position to take but even here there is a sliding scale. Gary Glitter is done and gone. Michael Jackson's songs are still played on the radio. John Cleese complains long and hard about cancel culture- usually in mass market tabloid newspapers or on the tv and comes across as a mean spirited old duffer totally out of step with the modern world. Fawlty Towers is still (largely) funny.
Morrissey holds political beliefs and has attitudes about race that are impossible to justify but I can still enjoy The Smiths. Ian Brown has uttered some ridiculous shit about Covid and vaccines. I still listen to The Stone Roses. Nick Cave's position on Israel has been problematic for me and I don't agree with his attendance at whatever royal event he attended- the coronation?- but I get a huge amount from his music.
I used to love The Who but Roger Daltrey's knobheadery about Brexit and general small mindedness plus Pete Townsend's 'issues' (ok, arrest for child pornography) have made it difficult for me to listen to The Who. Have I cancelled them? Dunno- but I don't listen to them any more (made easier by the fact that I only really like The Who from 1965- 1969). I'm sure there are other artists whose views have put me off them.
Brown Sugar is a deeply problematic song. Racist? Yes. Sexist? Yes. A glorification of slavery? Yes. All these things and more. Utterly out of date attitudes and impossible to support. Even the Stones themselves have stopped playing it and Jagger has said that he'd check himself if he found himself writing those lyrics now. Keef maintains the song is about the 'horrors of slavery' but the tone, the music and the performance would suggest that everyone's really rather enjoying themselves rather than spotlighting the appalling treatment of female slaves on American plantations. If any song deserves to be cancelled, pulled and removed from playlists, it's probably Brown Sugar.
That guitar riff though...
Thank you, Adam. This is why I organised the Cancel Culture Club. Not to spoil records for C, and certainly not to ban them... but just to sneakily get people who are much smarter than me to explain my own feelings in ways that my own humble skills would be incapable of doing.
Roland arrived at Grange Hill a year or so before I went to High School. He didn’t have a good time of it, being the fat kid who everyone picked on… his only friend being annoying Janet with the whiney voice. He was singled out by school bully Gripper Stebson, who made his life a misery, and towards the end of his first year, he ended up in hospital after running out into the road in front of a speeding car.
I missed the episode where Roland got run over, so somehow I managed to convince myself things had got so bad he’d tried to commit suicide. The internet tells me, years later, that it wasn’t actually a suicide attempt, but Grange Hill went to some dark places, so I’m not 100% convinced.
The reason I’m telling you about Roland is that when I started High School, the bullies and the wags soon twigged to the fact that I share the first three letters of my Christian name with the Grange Hill character played by Erkan Mustafa. And even though the end of my name was different – who cares? Rol became Roland… and the sound of kids mimicking whiney Janet’s catchphrase, “I only want to help you, Ro-land…” was soon echoing through the halls of our Secondary. And I hated it.
Author and neurobiologist R. Douglas Fields created the acronym LIFEMORTS to summarise nine triggers in our brains that cause us to get angry, lose our shit and full on HULK out. Last time, we looked at the first of these – L for Life or Death Situations. Today, we’re looking at I… for Insult.
I’d argue that many times, getting hit by a stick or a stone – even if it caused us the long term inconvenience of a broken bone – is preferable to many of the insults we’ve received in our lives. The insults the cut us to the quick. The insults that we lay awake at night recalling. The insults that leave permanent scars.
Unsurprisingly, scientists have studied the way our brains react to insult, and they compare the effect to a “mini slap in the face”…
The researchers found insults uttered by a fictitious person triggered short bursts of brain activity in the front part of listeners' brains, regardless of who the insult was directed at, themselves or somebody else.
These very rapid responses, which the researchers say are akin to a slap in the face, did not diminish over time; offensive statements continued to grab the brain's attention, generating large responses of similar magnitude, regardless of how often the invectives were heard.
Insults elicited a larger response in brain activity than compliments, and they continued to do so throughout the session, the experiments showed.
Ouch. Insults have a bigger impact and stay with us longer than compliments. So much for “names will never hurt me”!
It's a telling reminder of how our brains tend to fixate on negative events more intensely than they do positive things – what's known as the negativity bias.
Get that – what they’re basically telling us here is that our brains are much more likely to brood over negative things than they are to get zuzzed up by positivity. Our brains are essentially miserable emo/goths. It’s a wonder we’re not all on Prozac.
The reason our brains don’t like being insulted goes way, way back to the dawn of man when our very survival often depended on being part of a fledgling community, and hierarchies became suddenly very important. The higher you were up the hierarchy, the more chance you had of surviving. Of getting food and water, or having others help you by sharing resources and skills. Of finding a mate and being in with a chance of passing your genes on to the next generation. However, even back then, there were lots of buffoons who made it their business to try and batter other people down, and if they couldn’t do it physically, maybe they could do it verbally. The insult became as much a threat to our position in society as the stick or the stone… and our brains, whose primary job is to keep us alive, began to realise that insults could be deadly.
When Swanny chanted out, “I only want to help you, Ro-land,” and the other kids laughed, he was knocking me down the hierarchy ladder, and cementing his own position near the top. And this made me angry.
According to Psychology Today though, Anger is the absolute worst response to Insult. Whereas the strongest way to respond might well be… acceptance.
When someone insults us, we ought to consider three things: whether the insult is true, who it came from, and why. If the insult is true or largely true, the person it came from is reasonable, and his or her motive is worthy, then the insult is not an insult but a statement of fact, and, moreover, one that could be very helpful to us.
Which seems fair enough… although in that case, it is really an insult? Aren’t we just talking about constructive criticism there? Some people have a hard time with that too – any form of criticism – but it still differs from an insult.
On the other hand, if you think that the person who insulted you is unworthy of your consideration, you have no reason to take offence, just as you have no reason to take offence at a naughty child or a barking dog.
I think that as we get older, it becomes a lot to ignore insults from dingbats who aren’t worth expending a breath on… but when you’re a teenager, that’s much harder. Everyone’s opinion matters to you in the deadly hierarchy of the school yard.
As kids, we’re more likely to return the insult… I know you are, you said you are, but what about me? That doesn’t quite work when the insult is linked to your name though. I suppose I could have tried to come up with an equally stinging riposte linked to Swanny’s name – yeah, well, you look like a swanee whistle (maybe I could have imitated the sound of a swanee whistle every time he walked past?) Or could I have compared him to a Swan Vesta – you’re a hothead, Swanny… where’s your vest? It’s hardly Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker, is it? And chances are he might just have (to use another swan analogy) broken my arm in return.
The fundamental problem with the put-down, however brilliant it may be, is that it equalizes us with our insulters, bringing them up to our level and us down to theirs. This gives them, their behaviour, and their insult far too much legitimacy. Returning the insult also risks injuring the insulter (who, in all probability, is fairly fragile) and inviting further attacks.
Depending on the power differential in the relationship, fighting fire with fire is rarely a smart move… not when the other side has bigger fists and is more than prepared to use them.
If you can’t use humour to deliver a stinging rebuke then, perhaps you can use it to defuse the situation in another way? When Swanny piped up, “I only want to help you, Ro-land,” maybe I should have replied, “Cheers, Swanny – any chance you can do my Maths homework for me?” Or turn the mockery back on myself to show him it didn’t bother me at all. “Ouch – that hurts. I’m going to have to go do what Roland would do in this situation… eat a few pies and wash them down with a gallon of Irn Bru.” Of course, it’s all very well thinking of witty ripostes after the fact (shades of L'esprit D'escalier), particularly 40 years after the fact! But I think eventually this was the strategy I began to adopt in terms of dealing with insults. I got in there first. I insulted myself, put myself down, before anybody else could. Take the insulter’s power away by showing them I had an even worse opinion of myself than they did. It works… to a point… but no wonder I ended up with low self-esteem.
