The Beautiful Ones On Social Media



Suede – “Beautiful Ones”

“High on diesel and gasoline, psycho for drum machine
shaking their bits to the hits,
Drag acts, drug acts, suicides, in your dad’s suits you hide
staining his name again,
Cracked up, stacked up, 22, psycho for sex and glue
lost it to Bostik, yeah,
Shaved heads, rave heads, on the pill, got too much time to kill
get into bands and gangs,

Oh, here they come, the beautiful ones, the beautiful ones

loved up, Doved up, hung around, stoned in a lonely town
shaking their meat to the beat,
High on diesel and gasoline, psycho for drum machine
shaking their bits to the hits,

Oh, here they come, the beautiful ones, the beautiful ones.

You don’t think about it,
You don’t do without it,
because you’re beautiful,
And if your baby’s going crazy
that’s how you made me,”


“Beautiful Ones” by Suede.


I think credit is due here to highlight the insight and foresight of this 90’s masterpiece. The term “beautiful ones” comes from the John B Calhoun mouse- and rat experiments in the 60’s and 70’s.

These rodents were put in a comfortable and sustaining space, free to breed, but with limited physical space. What happened at maximal population size was a psycho-social and sexual break down, mainly surrounding behavior to do with normal healthy life. Calhoun called this social breakdown and downward spiral the “behavioral sink”.

There was one distinct behavior that Calhoun termed the “beautiful ones”. They were rodents that lost interest in normal social life and procreating. They just sat around grooming themselves; looking beautiful occupied their days.

So, what I’m saying is, maybe a lot of what we experience as spiraling in this modern culture; In terms of massive spiritual/psycho-social distress and hyper focus concerning skin color, sex, gender, sexuality; is due to pressures in key human life. The pop-culture sub-cultures, with their own styles and philosophies, like goth, Rasta, rocker, punk etc. have been funneled into obsession with superficial identity. We’re under pressure, all of us, and deal with it each in our own ways. Human beings are, after all, much more than physical beings. Our sense of time, space, opportunity, growth, realistic optimism, etc. is the natural human realm of life. That is something to take into account.

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