Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Weezer’s Teal Album, Reviewed

    I woke up this morning to the news that Weezer has released an album of cover songs. This, of course, is immensely important to people like me. So here we are, a review of The Teal Album (you can listen along here).

    There are, broadly, two theories of how to cover a song. The Filipino Bar Band Theory of Cover Songs holds that a good cover is one that recreates the original nearly exactly. It is so named after Arnel Pineda, the Filipino singer who sounds so much like Steve Perry (listen to this) that he is now the lead singer of Journey. Anyone who has spent time in Southeast Asia is familiar with any number of house bands who specialize in stunningly accurate covers of pop standards.*

    The Joe Cocker Theory of Cover Songs holds that the point of a cover song is to recreate the song differently, in the style of the cover band, and that that is what makes a cover interesting. So named for Joe Cocker’s version of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” it is the theory that underlines some of the very best covers, from Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to Dinosaur Jr’s “Just Like Heaven” to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” to John Mellencamp and Me’Shell Ndegeocello’s “Wild Night” to Nirvana’s “Oh Me” to Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” to The Ataris “Boys of Summer” (shut up) and every cover of a Bob Dylan song.

    Weezer generally subscribes to the Filipino Bar Band Theory. This was apparent with their earlier release of Toto’s Africa, which sounds a lot more like Toto than it sounds like Weezer. This theme continues throughout the rest of The Teal Album. Most of these covers are fairly faithful reproductions of the originals. As such, they are mostly uninspiring copies of otherwise great songs.** The rare exceptions are what keep The Teal Album from being a total flop. In order of interestingness, I’d rank as follows:

    1. Happy Together—this is pretty good
    2. Stand By Me—the “Buddy Holly”-style guitar work on the string section makes the cover
    3. Paranoid—big gap between the first two and this one, but it’s fine
    4. No Scrubs—it is possible that this cover will grow on me over time

    The rest of the covers are, musically speaking, entirely forgettable. If I want to hear “Take On Me” performed like the a-ha version, I’ll just listen to that.

    NOTE

    * The house band at Bugil’s in the 2000s did a stunningly realistic cover of Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved.
    ** It should be illegal to release a cover of “Everybody Wants to the Rule the World.” The song is perfect as it is and cannot be improved upon.

  • The Language You Speak Predicts Your Beliefs, Values, and Behaviors

    Several weeks back I tweeted the preliminary results from a new research project that uses World Values Survey data to test the linguistic relativity thesis.

    The idea that your language constrains how you conceive of the world around you is an old one—attributed originally to Willem von Humboldt but more commonly to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It is also one that has enjoyed a recent resurgence in economics, sociology, and political science.

    In a new paper, I take a closer look this literature. Here is the first paragraph:

    There is an emerging consensus that linguistic structure has a direct, causal effect on speakers’ economic and social beliefs (Chen, 2013; Davis and Abdurazokzoda, 2016; Feldmann, 2018; Ginsburgh and Weber, 2016; Hicks, Santacreu-Vasut and Shoham, 2015; Jakiela and Ozier, 2018; Liu et al., 2018; Mavisakalyan, 2015; Mavisakalyan, Tarverdi and Weber, 2018; Pérez and Tavits, 2017; van der Velde, Tyrowicza and Siwinska, 2015). This paper contributes to this dynamic new literature by uncovering the linguistic origins of nativist public opinion, focusing on how human languages structure the relationship between subjects, objects, and verbs (Dryer, 2013). Languages in which the object of a verb follows the verb encode a concept of distance and difference between subject and object directly into linguistic structure. By contrast, languages in which the object of a verb precedes the verb are more likely to place the subject and object next to one another and also highlight the receiver of the action over the action itself. Contrast the two following two constructions of “I love you”:


    (German)   Ich liebe dich
               SUBJ VERB OBJ
               I    love  you
    (Japanese) Watashi wa anata o aishiteimasu
               SUBJ        OBJ     VERB
               I           you     love

    This distinction between “VO” languages like German and “OV” languages like Japanese has implications for how language speakers conceptualize social difference and distance. By grammatically requiring separation between subjects and objects, VO languages lead their speakers to conceptualize the social world in “us-them” terms. Consistent with this prediction, I document a highly statistically significant correlation between speakers of VO languages and nativist preferences (specifically, opposition to hiring immigrants) using over 200,000 respondents to the World Values Survey, covering over one hundred countries across three decades and controlling for a rich set of demographic features. These results contribute to the emerging literature on the linguistic origins of economic and social beliefs, and also suggest that the very languages that we speak affect our conceptualizations of identity and belonging.

    Be sure to download the paper to read more. The results may surprise you.