Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
The Media Poll 04
From xx609@prairienet.org Sun Feb 23 09:41:16 1997
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 01:05:52 -0600 (CST)
From: Media Poll <xx609@prairienet.org>
To: ftp@etext.org
Subject: The Media Poll - No. 4
_______________________________________________________
THE MEDIA POLL Number 4 February 23, 1997
_______________________________________________________
By John Marcus
Featuring:
-YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: Yuppie Must Die
-THE MEDIA POLL 10: Pop Go the Grammys
-POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW: Tricky in the Head
--------------------------------------------
[To receive The Media Poll by email, request a free subscription at
xx609@prairienet.org]
YOU HEARD IT THERE FIRST: Yuppie Must Die
Isn't it time to kill the term yuppie? The comedian Paul Reiser once said
that the word is so overused as to be meaningless, that it now applies to
anyone between the ages of 18 and 50 who owns an appliance.
This is true. I would venture to guess that the word defines far more
about the person who uses it than about the person to whom it is
ascribed. Legs McNeil, the man who coined the phrase "punk rock" in
1975, reportedly was accosted by a panhandling Mohican in Greenwich
Village last year, only to be cursed with the Y-word when he refused the
young poseur any change. McNeil's companion shouted at the perpetrator,
"he invented you!" -- furious that just because McNeil was 40-something
and ordinary-looking, the youth sought to classify him in the category to
which no one will admit membership. The word is used to separate the
speaker from someone else, nothing more. It has no concrete definition
any longer.
BUT ONCE UPON A TIME, yuppie was an acronym. The Y-U-P stood for,
depending upon whom you asked, either "young urban professional" or
"young, upwardly-mobile professional." The term was so successful as a
pop cultural reference that several variants emerged: buppy (for
blacks), guppy (for gays), and DINKy ("double income no kids"). But then
the term went the way of all too-successful slang terms when overuse led
to a watering-down process that revealed it to be the weasel word it was
all along: all smirk and no bite.
But when did it get off the ground? How long ago was it that the word
was really fresh?
MY GUESS was that the term surfaced in the 1970s. I seem to be able to
associate it with a certain Manhattan, Studio 54, pre-Wall Street,
non-counterculture subculture of cocaine, advertising, and ferns. But
one Media Poll reader asserts that although the term may have existed
before 1980, it didn' t "take off until Ronald Reagan launched a new gilded
age in January 1981," the stock and bond markets "headed toward the
stratosphere," and young stockbrokers "hired fresh out of college were
making a half million two years out of college." While I always felt
there had been a strong sense of yuppie before the MBA in Finance became
the degree du jour, the evidence from the Poll suggests, as usual, my
memory is wrong.
First known use (in a major newspaper) of the word yuppie:
-July 19, 1982
-The Dallas Morning News
In a review of a new play, the Morning News' theater critic described a
character as "a black yuppie." The lack of explanation or definition of
the term indicates that the word was considered common language by this
time, but the fact that it is the first known use in our archives would
suggest that it had not been around too long. Of course, with older
terms originating prior to 1985 or so, the Media Poll can lose its sense
of relative accuracy since only a handful a papers in the archives go
back online to the late '70s and early '80s. Keeping that in mind, here's a
record of yuppie media growth up until last year:
Mentions of the word yuppie(s) or yuppy in a group of about 10 major news
sources
1982 - 1
1983 - 0
1984 - 249
1985 - 1812
1986 - 2233
1987 - 2829
1988 - 2778
1989 - 2461
1990 - 2405
1991 - 1815
1992 - 1598
1993 - 1482
1994 - 1180
1995 - 656
1996 - 829
WITH JUST A CASUAL GLANCE at the results one can't help noticing the
exponential growth rate between 1983 and 1985, the peak in 1987, and the
slow decline to 1994, followed by quite a big drop in 1995. Curiously,
usage bounced back a bit in 1996. My guess is that it had to do with a
presidential election obsessed with special demographic voting blocks
(see Media Poll No. 2 on "Soccer Moms"): in fact, yuppie appeared in 67
articles that mentioned "election," 97 that mentioned "Clinton," and 49
that mentioned "Dole." Articles mentioning Steve Forbes, perhaps the
first yuppie candidate, only included 15 yuppies. (I take that back.
Many of the articles in our 1984 sample discussed Gary Hart as "the
yuppie candidate," or, "the candidate of the yuppies.")
If you think this edition of You Heard it There First seems way past its
sell-by date, I don't blame you. Yuppie is a hopelessly old slang term to
be discussing as something interesting; I'm sure columns like this were a
dime-a-dozen in the mid-80s. In fact, I found many of my own 1997-era
sentiments included in a Christian Science Monitor column from 1984. One
Melvin Maddocks lamented the term's popularity, its lack of real meaning,
and said he had been waiting and waiting for "the word to go away." A
bit pretentiously recalling more "substantial" colloquialisms for groups
of people, Maddocks invoked the admittedly more meaningful "Babbit" and
"Pickwick" from earlier eras. "What do you see when you say yuppie?"
Maddocks asked. "A statistical abstract.a crude, graceless term, of use
only to political pollsters and retail market analysts." With uncanny
foresight, Maddocks went on:
"One can, in fact, imagine that Yuppie, after serving
as a political demographic index, may enjoy a second
life among ad executives, scouting a new consumer
target: the Yuppie market. It is far less likely that
we have come into the Age of the Yuppie than that we
have come into the age when people will keep thinking
up categories like Yuppie - undoubtedly with the help
of the computer."
That last bit about "the help of the computer" is a bit 1984 all right,
but otherwise, Melvin's on the money.
_______________________________________________________
THE MEDIA POLL 10: Pop Go the Grammys
Although some say the Grammy Awards are mere testaments to retail sales,
and some say they are the out of touch consequence of clueless Academy
members, I'd like to test the theory vaguely articulated in earlier
editions of this column that says press coverage is some kind of
freakishly powerful cultural force. That's an exaggeration. It was a
vaguely articulated guess, not theory.
Without further ado, the MP10 will predict the winners in the two top
categories of the Grammy Awards, to be held this Wednesday in New York,
based solely on press coverage during 1996:
BEST ALBUM
(ranked by number of articles in the top 50 U.S. newspapers mentioning
the artist and album title in 1996)
Rank Artist Album Mentions
______________________________________________________
1 Celine Dion Falling Into You 445
2 Various Artists Waiting to Exhale
Soundtrack 432
3 The Fugees The Score 430
4 Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie 277
5 Beck Odelay 153
BEST RECORD
(ranked by number of articles in the top 50 U.S. newspapers mentioning
the artist and song title in 1996)
Rank Artist Record (Song) Mentions
______________________________________________________
1 Alanis Morissette Ironic 292
2 Celine Dion Because You Loved Me 249
3 Smashing Pumpkins 1979 187
4 Tracy Chapman Give Me One Reason 179
5 Eric Clapton Change the World 152
SO. If Celine and Alanis, the two chanteuses from Canada, come through,
I'll be whistling Dixie all the way to Toronto. If they don't, we'll try
this one more time with the Oscar nominations, just to be stubborn.
________________________________________________________
POPULAR ARTS IN REVIEW
Pop Music: Tricky in the Head
As sophisticated as Tricky's music is, I can't stop thinking that it would
be best experienced in the black-lit loft above my teenage friend Char
Hansen's garage, with a six pack of Miller and a chunk of hash the size of
a bar of Ivory Soap. While we wouldn't have known what to think of
Tricky's mix of dub, soul, hip hop and rock back in 1976, if we were able
to recreate the scene today (Char's house and garage are now gone,
replaced by a toddlers' playground), and if we were willing to take the
drugs, I think we'd find it better suited to soaking up the Bristol,
England artist's sonic tropical rain storm than the front seat of my 1992
Dodge Caravan, where I now listen to music loud on my way to the Jewel
grocery store.
ON HIS TWO PROPER ALBUMS, "Maxinquaye" and "Pre-Millennium Tension,"
Tricky made head music just like the purple art-rock and proto-metal
dinosaurs of the '70s, Yes and Led Zeppelin, did. Except Tricky is (at
least partly) black, and he uses the musical roots of various cultures of
the African Diaspora in a primary way, not in the third-generation,
bombastic, heavy-handed way Zeppelin did with the blues. Freaky and
frequently drug-induced they may be, but if you're sympathetic to
syncopation, Tricky's loopy compositions make you move, not nod out.
Like the proprietors of 1970s head music, Tricky uses the latest studio
technology to parse, extract, massage, and edit the sounds of real
streets and fields. Ideally experienced through headphones, the
resulting collages of loops, samples, and reggae rhythms come alive in
the mind as warped three-dimensional grooves, dead-serious merry-go-round
music that makes a playground of your head. Tricky's paranoid rants about
sex and death are balanced by the warmth of collaborator and vocalist
Martina Topley-Bird's fine soul singing: when they collide within a single
composition, the contrast is sublime.
AT THEIR JANUARY CONCERT in Chicago's crumbling Metro nightclub, an
ancient American dancehall with decades-old beer puddles spaced
strategically throughout the floor, Tricky and Topley-Bird ranted and
sang with all the lights out, the occasional red or pink spot briefly
showing their unsmiling faces deep in concentration beneath the shadows.
As if to create the illusion of listening to headphones in a crowded
room, the darkness placed all the emphasis of the show on the music
alone, forcing the grooves to come alive in the mind as well as the
body. The intensity of the performance recalled the dissonant funk
trances induced live on stage by early 1980s fellow countrymen Gang of
Four and Public Image Limited, but relief was provided during the encore
by guest Flavor Flav, late of Public Enemy, whose now old school rhyming
reminded Tricky fans to lighten up before heading out into the cold. But
the haunted "Christian Sands" and the squeal of the eerie "Strugglin'"
lingered in my head long after the musicians left the stage, long enough
to drive by Char's old place, to hear the phantom sound careen among the
slides and swings in the dark suburban shadows.
Flavor Flav may be in the house, but Tricky's in the head.
---------------------------------------------------------------
For now, past issues of the Media Poll are available in The Etext
Archives, a two-gigabyte archive of Net-based e-zines. Point your
browser, as they used to say, to
http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/TheMediaPoll/ or you can retrieve them
via ftp at ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/TheMediaPoll
To subscribe to the email version, email xx609@prairienet.org
To complain, email xx609@prairienet.org
The Media Poll is Copyright 1997 by John Marcus
