The Ugly Theory of Civilization Development....

In our previous discussion of beauty, and why only hot chicks sing in rock and roll bands, DNA dismissed beauty-ism as the main culprit of this cultural phenomenon. But, beauty-ism exists. Check out this article if you doubt DNA.

Beautiful people get more breaks, they get more respect, they get more chances to fuck up. People like to look at beautiful people. They like to be associated with beautiful people. What a shallow existence that must be, having, as one of your requisite skills, “being pretty.” This takes up a lot of brain power, which could be devoted to other subjects, like, oh, math. This is why DNA thinks most female deep thinkers and philosophers, scientists and artists, are not necessarily the prettiest peaches in the basket. Those smart people don’t have to “be” pretty. Thank God for that. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote comedies and tragedies of manners 200 years ago because they could see that their culture was in the business of training one half of the population to be window dressing, and more insidiously, training girls to want to be window dressing, and training boys to want window dressing. The same thing happens now, in our society. We haven’t outrun that past, yet.

300,000 years ago, attracting the hunkiest cave man with the biggest club was an evolutionary necessity. However, at some point, not too long ago, there were enough ugly dudes that no matter what, even if they only bred with the most attractive females, plenty of ugly children resulted. Not being cursed with beauty, many of those individuals began to do the more important things in the world---invent bronze tools, tattoos, agriculture, boats, and other shit like that. DNA calls this the Ugly Theory of Civilization Development. On one side of the Ugly Divide, with a small hunter-gatherer society, for example, there are not enough ugly people to spur innovation. On the other side of the Ugly Divide, there are lots of pissed off, sad, desperate, un-entitled, disenfranchised, sexually frustrated ugly people to really get shit done.

Although people gravitate to beautiful people, initially, most people, ugly or not, realize quickly that most superficially beautiful people are just that----superficial, shallow, and grate on the nerves like shingles (the disease, the remnants of the chicken pox virus which lives on in your nerves, quietly waiting until you are weak or stressed to strike---not the roof covering). So being uglier, but being a little bit smarter, because the ugly get to exercise their brains in different ways than the beautiful do, means that ultimately, being beautiful is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, a lodestone around the neck. Eventually, the beautiful person will be as rare a phenomenon as the trailer park queen is now, produced when the ugliest of the ugly, all fornicatin’ like drunk dogs in the “wheeled domiciles only” zoned section of town, comes together right and a beautiful child emerges from one of those unions with more teeth than all of her uncles combined, and in the right places, too.

Here is the irony though: When beautiful people become more vacuous through the cultural processes in their lives which make them aware of beauty as a commodity and they work to refine that commodity, they are no longer beautiful, and in some cases, they are no longer really people, but they are objects, created by society, and just as often, by themselves. And, when ugly people do the things they do, without superficial beauty clouding people’s judgment of them, then they become beautiful for who they are. Of course, there are some ugly people who do ugly things, and they, frankly, are fucked, and there are a few beautiful people who do beautiful things, and those people are golden.

But this brings us back to the point: Doesn’t it seem odd that so many of the beautiful people, and specifically, beautiful women, front bands? There just aren’t that many beautiful people doing beautiful things, and even if there were, why are they all fronting bands? According the Ugly Theory of Civilization Development, most of our singers and musicians should be pretty ugly, since the beautiful have more important, less significant things to do. (Again, with the irony---many of the kids who form bands in high school and college are the outcasts, the dregs, the losers, and yet, they produce the music which all of the beautiful people sing as the soundtrack to their lives, and as the loser makes it big, the cheerleader who treated him like dirt becomes the groupie who degrades herself to fuck him…. How strange it is).

Since most of our female singers are not ugly, if the theory holds, then it must be true that most of what they do isn’t singing or musicianship. Most of what they do must be a commodity, like the beauty they cultivate. So, most rock and roll must be crap. DNA has argued this point before, and came to the conclusion that all music is art, and someone who you think is a hack is still probably someone who really believes in his or her “art,” no matter how smelly a pile of dogshit it sounds like*. However, given this new set of criteria, if the music is made as an extension or as an accessory to someone’s “beauty,” then fuck it, it must suck. Unless, like the trailer park queen, it is an anomaly, and is actually good in spite of its progenitors.

So, why are most female rock and roll singers hot? According to the theory, because most rock and roll is crap. But also according to theory, some female rock and roll singers must be hot, because their art is awesome and makes us want them. And, a little bit of rock and roll must be made by the trailer park anomalies.

Although this may explain why female rock and roll singers are hot, it does not explain the missing ugly majority that should be fronting bands and are not. Are these women frustrated housewives, or annoyed clerks at Wal-mart? If there are lots of ugly people who should be making music and aren’t, then we really have to consider the cultural implications of letting so much talent go to waste, or locking such talent away under a cultural blanket of beauty-ism.

For years, DNA has been proud to be one of the plain people, one of the slightly imperfect, one of the ugly ones. Yet, get this, his boy is really handsome, and really geeky, and is into Mad magazine, videogames, band at school, and knocks the top off the standardized tests. Despite believing this mess DNA spelled out over the last few minutes, DNA still hopes he is one of the golden ones. Does this make DNA a hypocrite? Maybe. It’s one of DNA’s uglier qualities.


*that’s a Lara-ism. DNA hasn’t done one of them in while!