This is Your Brain on Shock Value
Why it works, and why you don’t have to care every time someone like Lil Nas X shocks you
“Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.”
-Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
6 weeks ago, Lil Nas X slid down a stripper pole to hell and gave a lap dance to the devil, in the gift to the world that was Montero. People were shocked. Some were outraged. Some thought it was great.
When my grandma was a teenager, Elvis was gyrating his hips on stage, sexualizing rock music. People were shocked. Some were outraged. Some thought it was great.
How do we never see this coming? Last year, the shock-pop “song of the hour” was Cardi B’s WAP (which compelled Ben Shapiro to create my favorite piece of unintentional comedy). Conservatives freaked out and thought it was taboo, progressives defended it in the name of progress.
Every time shock value is used in music, we go through a predictable outrage cycle. Progressive people call it art, and trip over themselves to defend the singer. Conservative people go through a mad stampede to be angry about it, showing it to each other to make themselves more furious (in the church I grew up in, this could be paraphrased as: “look, can you believe how disgusting this is?! Look at it. LOOK!”)
The artist defends themselves, progressives defend the artist, conservatives look like anti-art villains, and the artist collects a huge paycheck. Every. Year. Sometimes every few months! It’s like a giant play, where nothing constructive is achieved, yet everyone feels like they’ve done something. Conservatives walk away feeling they’re fighting a tide of darkness in a culture war, progressives feel that they’ve defended art, and the artists slinks away, paycheck in hand, back to their mansion where they and their marketing team will think up a new way to shock us next year.
It’s nothing new. Shock value has launched and sustained countless careers.
So why does shock value work so well? We obviously love something about it, or we wouldn’t let popstars play out the same tired cycle, pretending that it’s new each time.
In a September 2003 study in the Journal for Advertising Research, three social scientists sought to answer if shock value is a superior marketing technique. From the abstract:
“Our findings suggest that shocking content in an advertisement significantly increases attention, benefits memory, and positively influences behavior among a group of university students.”
*Note: The “positive influence” on behavior that they’re referring to is that in an ad campaign to get college students to use condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS, shock value made the students change their habits at rates much higher than facts and figures did. Not all shock value marketing is so responsible.
Why does it work so well? I’ll let Irish Comedian Dylan Moran explain since he has a gift with words:
The average American is exposed to anywhere between 4,000–10,000 ads a day. Even at the low end, that easily puts us above a million ads seen per year. We can’t consciously take all that in, so our brains filter most of it out. It becomes background noise.
Until something comes along that, as Dylan Moran says in the above video, grabs our attention in a violent way. “Norm violation” as it’s phrased in the advertising study. Shock value norm violation in falls into one (or more) of seven categories:
disgusting images
sexual references
profanity/obscenity
vulgarity
impropriety
moral offensiveness
religious taboos.
Elvis, Cardi B, and Lil Nas X pushed all these boundaries in several categories. Because they pushed these boundaries, they had our attention. Regardless of how you feel about these songs/artists, they didn’t become popular by themselves. It was our arguments over what is culturally appropriate that took these artists to the next level. WAP might have been popular and faded away, but Ben Shapiro took it to number one. The (get this) Governer of South Dakota and Nike took Montero to number one.
All press is good press. They do this because it works. Because we love distractions and we just can’t help ourselves. There are just too many things that matter for us to freak out about whatever musical artist is pulling whatever stunt.
Each time you choose to talk about the latest shocking thing, you are participating in making it more popular. Period. Especially if you’re on the conservative side of things. You’re the fuel that the fire needs to burn.
I’m here to tell you it’s ok if you don’t have an opinion about whatever is culturally shocking today. Like the song, hate the song, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be something new tomorrow. Next time someone tries to shock you, let it pass. We have real problems.