The Band and the Beast: Some Concerns about the Results of a Google Search for 'Mastodon'

Some of my readers will likely know that 'Mastodon' is a band formed in Atlanta in 1999, representing the 'new wave' of American heavy metal. I have not myself heard this band, but I gather from certain signs, read directly off of the attire of the youth --with whom I am in near daily contact-- that this is a band, and indeed a movement, not entirely to be ignored. 

I would imagine it is a rather smaller fraction of my readers who will know that the Mastodon is an elephantoid mammal that first appeared in the Oligocene Period, some 30-35 million years ago. As such the Mastodon, whose name means 'breast tooth' in Greek, is something entirely distinct from the woolly mammoth, which appeared only around 150,000 years ago, during a relatively recent Eurasian glaciation.

Before I arrive at my real point, let me stress that it is the last of my intentions to seek to condemn heavy metal. As I understand it, this genre emerges out of the auspicious combination of late '60s psychedelic blues with the multifarious strains of creatively anachronistic neopaganism that became visible in the following decade, but that all, likely, have their roots in 19th-century romanticism, in Waterhouse's fairies, in Wagner's recycling of the Niebelungenlied, and so on. A distinguished genealogy, to be sure. 

The golden age of heavy metal did not last long, however, since many of its leading representatives got it into their heads that the best way to advance the genre was through that distinctly 1970s Gesamtkunstwerk that came to be called 'the concept album'. The problem was that Led Zeppelin was not Monteverdi to begin with, and so, plainly, Styx could not succeed in positioning itself (themselves?) as rock's Wagner. After the concept album came the predictable degradation that echoed the flourishing of operetta, and Tin Pan Alley, and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber, when it became clear that the total artwork was not really so total after all: Led Zeppelin's cryptic name was weakly echoed in the outright misspelling of 'Def Leppard'; the New Wave of British Heavy Metal gave rise to a whole army of thick working-class men singing falsetto in costumes that would not have been out of place in Walerian Borowczyk's ridiculous 1975 film, The Beast; and then came the American wave of hair metal, and spandex, and subvarieties as peculiar as rap metal, Viking metal, and Christian metal: like so many Galapagos finches.

As I hope I've demonstrated by now, I care a great deal about 'bands'. At this very moment, I am listening to some preposterous Francophone death metal on the radio station of the université de Montréal. I confess --and I say this of course from the perspective of an American Francophile and perpetual learner of French, rather than of a bilingual Canadian-- that for me there is something inherently incongruous about these gruff, demonic incantations in the ethereal language of Rimbaud and Proust. Diamanda Galas, I think, got the closest anyone ever has to uniting French literary language with death rock (and here I'm not respecting actual genre distinctions all too closely) when she set Baudelaire's Litanies of Satan (Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère, etc.) to music, but for the most part Québécois death metal remains a queer clash of registers, at least to this settler's ears. Yet, nonetheless, I'm giving it an earnest chance.

What I have been trying to say is that it's not that I do not care about heavy metal, or that I do not want it to thrive. I think it's wonderful that Mastodon has resurrected Thin Lizzy, and is returning to those purer forms, before hair had anything to do with it, back when the metal in question was understood to be something forged in the Iron Age, and not the stainless steel we've all come to know from the standard-issue cutlery of the bourgeois kitchen. But still, in the long run, I cannot help but think that Mastodons are more important then Mastodon. That is to say, I cannot help but think that there's something wrong with the search-engine algorithm that permits the Atlanta band, Mastodon, to come up in the list of hits before the species, Mammut americanum.

Heavy metal has sprouted many lower order taxa in the past few decades, but they are all sure to go extinct. They will not leave behind thick bones, but only traces in scattered pop-cultural indices, essentially no different from those that recorded for us the relative popularity of Aba Daba Honeymoon vs. I Want to Go Back to Michigan circa 1914. Oligocene megafauna, in contrast, will continue to constitute an important piece of the puzze of mamalian evolution, of the history of climate change, and so on. And all of this makes me think that perhaps the engineers should start thinking --and start thinking now, before all of this becomes irreversible-- about developing search criteria that go beyond the merely quantitative.

Perhaps there could be a sort of ontological weighting of the various significations of plurivocal terms. I don't know how they would go about this, exactly --the weight of the fossils vs. what? the volume of the hair helmet? the decibels of the riff?--, and I understand that it is asking Google to go against its prime directive: to allow the people's will to decide what gets top ranking. But still, one must not lose sight of the longue durée, or of the relative weight of things.

Comments

[Manyguns]

No offense, but the search engine isn't flawed, it's your understanding of it. The search engine's job isn't to feed you what's best for you, but rather to give you what you're looking for. If the band comes up first it's actually because it's more likely to be searched on than the creature.

In light of that, maybe the real fault lies in society. After all, the search engine operates to meet the wants and needs of the majority.

[rosco]

wow, I read a lot of useless stuff on the internet, but this has to be one of the most ignorant posts I've come across in months, despite its use of fifty cent words. I refer to both your understanding heavy metal & its culture and your understanding of search engine functions. I can only assume you intended to upset metal fans despite your hollow warning. 3quarks should not have linked here. Oh, and the similarity between Thin Lizzy and Mastodon is pretty weak; Mastodon is not blues based.

[raskolnikov]

Madonna gives you Madonna Ciccone rather than the mother of christ.

Is there any justice in the google search algorithm that lets such things happen? Well, a search for "justice" give "Girls Clothing and Preteen Fashion" as the first result.

Who gives a fuck? Google's job isn't to mandate what people use the internet for.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

That's another fine example, Raskolnikov, and all the more reason to give a fuck, in my view.

Oh please, Rosco, I don't really care about your little subculture and its bands. I mentioned Thin Lizzy because that's what I read about when I clicked on the top-ranked Google hit for the search term 'Mastodon'. That is, I read of Mastodon's ancestral link to Thin Lizzy --which you deny, and which others affirm, but which interests me next to not at all-- before I read about the Mammut americanum's physiology, habitat, causes of extinction, and so on.

Now I understand perfectly well how search engines work, and I acknowledged in the post that I don't have any good alternatives to the current system. But I don't see why my concern should be deemed illegitimate, that a merely quantititavely based ranking system is one that overlooks true hierarchies of importance. Of course anyone who really wishes to learn about the Mammut americanum will not rely on top-ranked Google hits, and will move on to other more sophisticated search tools, including Google scholar, but my concern is mostly pedagogical, as I see that increasingly university students are taking Google searches as reliable reflections of the order of the world.

[M]

The real problem seems to be that mastodons don't have an official website or a MySpace page. Maybe you should get on that, Justin E. H. Smith.

[CBR]

A qualitative ranking would probably have to be context-sensitive, which is to say user-sensitive. The search engine would rely on your search history not to weed out hair bands &c., but to feature more prominently sites that also refer to, e.g., fossils, the Oligocene period, &c. This wouldn't be an ontic relevance ranking since bands and mammals are (arguably) equally 'real'. But it would construct context dependent hierarchies of relevance which, in fact, would be a better way of fulfilling Google's 'mission' as understood by a few of the above comments.

[Protoslacker]

I use Clusty as my primary search engine. Like Google it provides ranked results in a list, but unlike Google it also provides groupings of posts they call clusters. In my search Mastodon the band came up 4th in general results. But in the 10 clusters only one had to do with the band. This approach seems to come close to solving the ontological weighting problem you're concerned about. You might try Clusty.

[Aaron]

ROTFLMAO

[jobjoho]

A Google search for "Mastodon" shows up with pages referencing the animal you mention as the 4th and 5th links. If you scroll down to the bottom you will find a number of related searches to help specify what you are looking for, including "mastodon animal."

Your post seems to presuppose that significant numbers of people will be wholly ignorant of whatever they're actually searching for on the internet. Secondly, it ignores that since, probably around 2004 a hard-working band from Atlanta has surpassed the Mammut americanum in popularity amongst the general public. However, should anything remotely similar to Google exist in 100 years (which I doubt) I would wager that the large beast will have once again surpassed what by then will be a totally forgotten group of early 21st century musicians. Unless, perhaps, their tour bus crashes into a tar pit.

My point is, for a man who wants search engines to take long view, you don't seem to be doing it yourself.

And I hope for your sake that this post does not show up on Blabbermouth.net.

And yeah, French death metal kind of sucks.

[Adam]

Oh please, Rosco, I don't really care about your little subculture and its bands.

Wait, really? Then what's with paragraphs 3 & 4, and the claim at the beginning of 5 that you "care a great deal about 'bands'," and that you hope you've demonstrated such care in paras 3 & 4? And your claim in 6 that it's "wonderful" for Mastodon to work with styles of metal that aren't hair-derived? Or the report in 5 that you're giving some French death metal an honest chance? (Why would you do so if you didn't have some investment in metal?)

Is all the stuff that's meant to show you care about metal just a put-on to make you seem dispassionate, even reluctant, when you get to the claim that the mastodon is more important to know about? If so: bad faith, man.

Also, you can tell a dude like Rosco that he missed your point without belittling him or the rest of the metal fans who read your stuff. I don't think you usually come off as condescending (even in the satire), but you sure do here, and it's ugly.

[Adam]

Or wait---maybe there's a joke I'm not getting when you're showing that you do in fact care about metal? I do have kind of a bad ear for sarcasm.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Sorry, Adam, you're right, I allowed myself to respond to a nasty comment with more nastiness, and I shouldn't have. The truth is I do care about metal-- a little bit. I care about it roughly as much as I care about Aba Daba Honeymoon. And I really was listening to French metal on CISM La Marge as I was writing this piece. I listen to everything that CISM plays except for the Haitian program on Sunday mornings (the one with the incessant air-horn and laughing-baby samples). My favorite of all is 'Folk Toi, Folk Moi', which I think is supposed to be some sort of play on words, and which offers up a wonderful mix of Québécois country, Americana, and even specializes in 'the Bakersfield sound'. I also like the standard programming of neo-Gainsbourgian Franco-pop, while, again, the metal is pretty far down the list, but still not so bad as to cause me to turn it off. What I can't stand, though, is the proprietary mentality of subcultural insiders, especially when it's so intense as to obscure the larger point. That's what made me angry, and led me to condescend a bit. But again, sorry.

[Ian]

I thought Rosco's comment was going to be the first in a number of hilarious over-reactions from failing to take the post in good humour, but it's nice to see it was really the only one. You did rather throw the moral high ground away by reacting so vigorously, though I thought it was pretty funny anyway. Nice response to be called out on it by Adam too.
Have you considered creating a myspace page for the animal though? Maybe the future of myspace, having already reinvented itself once to focus on bands, would be to reinvent itself as mammalian resource. I look forward to finding mammut americanum under the genre 'Oglicene megafauna'.
Or maybe we could recategorise bands according the the animal kingdom, so one could easily trace Mastodon back to Thin Lizzy. Or not, whoever Mastodon owe their roots/blues to...