“Liking” is now officially the most universal activity on the planet. Thanks to Facebook, we have all become compulsive and exhibitionist “likers”. From musical artists, movies, and TV shows, to religious figures, our friends’ opinions, and defunct 80s consumer products, our preferences can now be announced to the whole world, simply by clicking on the word “like”. Of course, we have been doing this sort of thing in everyday conversations for years but social networking’s documentation of our tastes has elevated “liking” into the collective consciousness, while reinforcing its very premise: the idea – or perhaps myth – that we are what we like; i.e. cool people “got” (500) Days of Summer, incomprehensible-but-supposedly-cool people like Hal Hartley, while comically uncool people like Titanic. If Facebook truly is our personal PR image-creators (as its critics have often suggested), then our overt fondness of certain things are our “packaging”.
This, of course, makes us more exposed to snob culture and the resultant judgment from snobs, who as we all know by now, are the gatekeepers of cool. Snobs are a curious lot – they are passionate about the things they like and are equally passionate about the things they hate. It’s not enough that your taste does not meet their standards, it must offend them. Personally. Since these people have Facebook accounts too, criticism as we’ve come to know it has been democratized (and not to mention simplified). Instead of getting a pulse of what I’m supposed to like from the latest issue of Spin Magazine, I can now know what’s cool from my tattoo artist who just “liked” the Diablo Swing Orchestra 14 hours ago. I can now also be crucified online for liking Taylor Swift. But do these people really know what they’re talking about? In fact, do all of us know what we’re talking about when we say we “like” something? It might be a totally useless question, but luckily we have Jason Hartley and Britt Bergman, co-founders of Advancement Theory to straighten things out for us.
Advancement Theory is an infinitely fascinating concept that attempts to undo decades of snob-prejudice. Everything you need to know about Advancement Theory can be found in the book “The Advanced Genius Theory”, written by co-theorist Jason Hartley. The theory claims that when a formerly cool artist is starting to be perceived as uncool – characterized usually by a puzzlingly bad album, a sell-out project, or general “self-indulgence” – it doesn’t mean the artist is no longer great; it just means that the artist has far Advanced beyond the general public’s capacity to appreciate his or her work.
Hartley and Bergman stumbled upon this idea while talking about Lou Reed inside a Pizza Hut in South Carolina sometime in 1990. Their discussion centered on the popular notion that Lou Reed’s music has declined in the 1980s – a notion that they didn’t necessarily subscribe to. So they formulated a hypothesis: if Lou Reed was considered “ahead of his time” in the 1960s, then that should still be the case 20 or so years later. And if that truly is the case, then it’s only logical for people to not “get” his new music either.
Their pizza-spiked chatter eventually grew into a full-blown theory when signs of Advancement were also seen in other musical artists such as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger; visual artists such as Andy Warhol; filmmakers such as Orson Welles and George Lucas; and actors such as Marlon Brando. While many snobs would claim that Dylan “lost it” in the 80s, Bowie and Jagger embarrassed themselves beyond repair with “Dancing in the Street”, and that Paul Mcartney’s post-Beatles career has been one big joke, Hartley claims the exact opposite: their genius has become too incomprehensible to normal humans.
To know whether or not an artist has achieved Advancement, Hartley offers the following guidelines: he or she must (1) have done great work for more than fifteen years (or at least was an innovator in his or her field), (2) alienated his or her original fans, (3) must be completely unironic, (4) must be unpredictable, and (5) must “lose it”, spectacularly. Well, at least those are the “formal” guidelines. In the book, Hartley invokes some other signs of Advancement such as selling out (which should be earnest and not ironic), leaving your band to go solo, love of technology, and a love of leather jackets and dark sunglasses.
The opposite of, and sometimes precursor to Advancement is what Hartley terms as Overtness – a quality that usually appeals to snobs. Overt artists are those whose work is often ironic or tongue-in-cheek, whose approach to subversion is predictable, if not totally cliché, who does things that are either expected or the complete opposite of what’s expected (the Advanced does things that are totally out of nowhere), and whose weirdness is all too self-aware. One can overcome his or her Overt stage when one becomes so confident with his or her own genius that the need to impress becomes totally irrelevant. When your weirdness not only starts to come out more naturally but also starts to antagonize people, not least of which are your own admirers, then you know you have truly Advanced.
Hartley and Bergman stumbled upon this idea while talking about Lou Reed inside a Pizza Hut in South Carolina sometime in 1990. Their discussion centered on the popular notion that Lou Reed’s music has declined in the 1980s – a notion that they didn’t necessarily subscribe to. So they formulated a hypothesis: if Lou Reed was considered “ahead of his time” in the 1960s, then that should still be the case 20 or so years later. And if that truly is the case, then it’s only logical for people to not “get” his new music either.
Their pizza-spiked chatter eventually grew into a full-blown theory when signs of Advancement were also seen in other musical artists such as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger; visual artists such as Andy Warhol; filmmakers such as Orson Welles and George Lucas; and actors such as Marlon Brando. While many snobs would claim that Dylan “lost it” in the 80s, Bowie and Jagger embarrassed themselves beyond repair with “Dancing in the Street”, and that Paul Mcartney’s post-Beatles career has been one big joke, Hartley claims the exact opposite: their genius has become too incomprehensible to normal humans.
To know whether or not an artist has achieved Advancement, Hartley offers the following guidelines: he or she must (1) have done great work for more than fifteen years (or at least was an innovator in his or her field), (2) alienated his or her original fans, (3) must be completely unironic, (4) must be unpredictable, and (5) must “lose it”, spectacularly. Well, at least those are the “formal” guidelines. In the book, Hartley invokes some other signs of Advancement such as selling out (which should be earnest and not ironic), leaving your band to go solo, love of technology, and a love of leather jackets and dark sunglasses.
The opposite of, and sometimes precursor to Advancement is what Hartley terms as Overtness – a quality that usually appeals to snobs. Overt artists are those whose work is often ironic or tongue-in-cheek, whose approach to subversion is predictable, if not totally cliché, who does things that are either expected or the complete opposite of what’s expected (the Advanced does things that are totally out of nowhere), and whose weirdness is all too self-aware. One can overcome his or her Overt stage when one becomes so confident with his or her own genius that the need to impress becomes totally irrelevant. When your weirdness not only starts to come out more naturally but also starts to antagonize people, not least of which are your own admirers, then you know you have truly Advanced.
However amorphous it tends to be, Advancement does have a basic tenet: that everything we’ve ever been conditioned to view as unseemly or just plain pathetic is just as good – if not better than – everything we consider cool. More than a counterintuitive theory on artistic greatness, Advancement is really a counterintuitive theory on good taste. And this is where it gets tricky.
In one of the most entertaining parts of the book, Hartley struggles to prove that Sting is Advanced because he can’t bring himself to like his adult contemporary solo albums. Sting can’t simply suck, Hartley says, because he was mostly responsible for The Police, which he swears to be one of the greatest bands of all time. “Just as Einstein’s math predicted black holes, Advanced math predicted that Sting is Advanced,” he writes. “But as with black holes, Sting’s Advancement would always be doubted by some until it could be observed. The problem was that I was the one who doubted it most, and I was afraid that Sting would turn out to be the black hole of Advancement in another way, by sucking all the light and energy out of the Theory.”
What makes this Sting conundrum very interesting is that it actually shows how limited Hartley’s taste is for a supposed advocate of broad taste. A lot of people love Sting’s adult contemporary work. In fact, in the world of adult contemporary, very few artists can match the otherworldly beauty of “Englishman From New York”, “Fragile”, and “Fields of Gold”. But the kind of people who like these songs are probably the same kind of people who would consider Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” unlistenable, so it’s hard to imagine Hartley respecting their tastes as Advanced. His oblique philosophy aside, Hartley simply is a true-blue hipster; but he’s the kind of hipster who’s been in the scene for so long that he’s grown to hate what hipness has become. The Advancement Theory is his way of recovering the coolness that has been co-opted by mainstream culture. And this is why Advancement looks suspiciously like inverted-snobbishness.
Hartley is highly critical of critics and critical tradition in general (he regularly writes critical jabs at critics on his highly entertaining blog), taking issue specifically with the very idea of “telling people what they should like”. But Advancement seems remarkably like the bastard child of traditional criticism: it tells you who you shouldn’t not like, and worse, it also tells you who’s lame, only it calls them “Overt”. Albert Camus once famously said that all rebels inevitably become what they’re rebelling against. Apparently, he was also talking about music fans.
To criticize Advancement Theory, however, is to totally miss the point, no matter how much Jason Hartley tells us that he’s being totally serious. The best way to appreciate Advancement Theory is to have fun with it. “Is so-and-so Advanced or just Overt?” is an extremely awesome game and is best enjoyed under the influence of certain substances (hopefully legal). Most importantly, Advancement does leave one important legacy: the Advanced Genius – a being so secured in its sense of self that it couldn’t care less about other people’s opinions. This is how the Facebook generation should approach “liking”.
There is one truth that critics and pop culture theorists would never ever tell us because doing so would negate their very existence, and that truth is this: why we like something isn’t as important as what happens when we like something. Even if we only like something because it subconsciously makes us feel cool, the effect is still the same as any other kind of liking – it makes us happy. Everyone’s allowed to like or dislike whoever they want in so much as everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Labels such as “hip”, “corny”, “poseur”, “genuine”, and “pretentious” are really unimportant because apart from being passé, all they really do is suck the happiness out of liking. But “Advanced” admittedly sounds fun and if you don’t agree, then you’re just being Overt.
In one of the most entertaining parts of the book, Hartley struggles to prove that Sting is Advanced because he can’t bring himself to like his adult contemporary solo albums. Sting can’t simply suck, Hartley says, because he was mostly responsible for The Police, which he swears to be one of the greatest bands of all time. “Just as Einstein’s math predicted black holes, Advanced math predicted that Sting is Advanced,” he writes. “But as with black holes, Sting’s Advancement would always be doubted by some until it could be observed. The problem was that I was the one who doubted it most, and I was afraid that Sting would turn out to be the black hole of Advancement in another way, by sucking all the light and energy out of the Theory.”
What makes this Sting conundrum very interesting is that it actually shows how limited Hartley’s taste is for a supposed advocate of broad taste. A lot of people love Sting’s adult contemporary work. In fact, in the world of adult contemporary, very few artists can match the otherworldly beauty of “Englishman From New York”, “Fragile”, and “Fields of Gold”. But the kind of people who like these songs are probably the same kind of people who would consider Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” unlistenable, so it’s hard to imagine Hartley respecting their tastes as Advanced. His oblique philosophy aside, Hartley simply is a true-blue hipster; but he’s the kind of hipster who’s been in the scene for so long that he’s grown to hate what hipness has become. The Advancement Theory is his way of recovering the coolness that has been co-opted by mainstream culture. And this is why Advancement looks suspiciously like inverted-snobbishness.
Hartley is highly critical of critics and critical tradition in general (he regularly writes critical jabs at critics on his highly entertaining blog), taking issue specifically with the very idea of “telling people what they should like”. But Advancement seems remarkably like the bastard child of traditional criticism: it tells you who you shouldn’t not like, and worse, it also tells you who’s lame, only it calls them “Overt”. Albert Camus once famously said that all rebels inevitably become what they’re rebelling against. Apparently, he was also talking about music fans.
To criticize Advancement Theory, however, is to totally miss the point, no matter how much Jason Hartley tells us that he’s being totally serious. The best way to appreciate Advancement Theory is to have fun with it. “Is so-and-so Advanced or just Overt?” is an extremely awesome game and is best enjoyed under the influence of certain substances (hopefully legal). Most importantly, Advancement does leave one important legacy: the Advanced Genius – a being so secured in its sense of self that it couldn’t care less about other people’s opinions. This is how the Facebook generation should approach “liking”.
There is one truth that critics and pop culture theorists would never ever tell us because doing so would negate their very existence, and that truth is this: why we like something isn’t as important as what happens when we like something. Even if we only like something because it subconsciously makes us feel cool, the effect is still the same as any other kind of liking – it makes us happy. Everyone’s allowed to like or dislike whoever they want in so much as everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Labels such as “hip”, “corny”, “poseur”, “genuine”, and “pretentious” are really unimportant because apart from being passé, all they really do is suck the happiness out of liking. But “Advanced” admittedly sounds fun and if you don’t agree, then you’re just being Overt.
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