Succès de scandale: "Try That in a Small Town."

"Initially, the track got relatively little notice, landing at No. 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. That changed last week, after the song’s music video became a culture-war battlefield, with some accusing Aldean — one of country’s biggest hitmakers for nearly two decades — of employing racist dog-whistle tactics and the singer defending himself as the latest victim of an out-of-control 'cancel culture.'... As the debate over 'Try That in a Small Town' boiled last week, the song’s consumption metrics spiked...."

I'm reading "Jason Aldean, Decrying ‘Cancel Culture,’ Has a No. 2 Hit/'Try That in a Small Town' went from overlooked to almost topping the charts after a week of controversy" (NYT). 

This got me reading the Wikipedia entry "Succès de scandale":

Succès de scandale (French for "success from scandal") is a term for any artistic work whose success is attributed, in whole or in part, to public controversy surrounding the work.... This concept is echoed by the phrase "there is no such thing as bad publicity"....

That entry quotes Mae West, who got arrested in 1927 for a play titled "Sex": "I expect it will be the making of me."

I reveal the name of the puzzle cited in yesterday's post, "She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles...."

I didn't want to spoil the day's "Name Drop" puzzle, but now that I've updated the post, I'm afraid you won't see it and some other new material that I added there, and because I think some of it is kind of cool, I'm going to repeat it here, after the jump:

"She feels that curves are far more appealing than angles, and won’t accept photographs that do not show her a bit more voluptuous and rounded than the slim silhouette the modern woman has succeeded in making popular."

I'm reading something written in The New Yorker in 1928: "Mae West, the Queen of New York/The writer and star of 'Sex' and 'Diamond Lil' is calm, clear, and eager for success," by Thyra Samter Winslow. 

If you do a certain puzzle, which I won't spoil by naming, you too may have clicked on the link to this article from a century ago.

Aquaria as Melania.

I wish I had some good video to go with this post, since I doubt if many of you watch "RuPaul's Drag Race," but I must post to say how much I enjoyed Aquaria's impersonation of Melania Trump on last night's show. I was especially amused by the handing over of the Tiffany box which, opened by RuPaul, revealed a handwritten note, "Help me!"

This will have to do for now:

What a great gift, Melania! 😂 @aquariaofficial #DragRace pic.twitter.com/QIcIFNMAXL

— RuPaul's Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) May 4, 2018

ADDED: I've only started watching "RuPaul's Drag Race" recently (and only because I wanted to understand what Tom and Lorenzo were talking about in their podcast, which I greatly enjoy). So I'd never seen the "Snatch Game" competition before. But it's been going on long enough for there to be 87 items on "Every Snatch Game Impersonation on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Ranked." #1 is this Mae West, who delivered this memorable (NSFW) one-liner:

Who first came up with the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman's body?

You may have noticed in the news today that Kim Kardashian West has been accused of copying a design idea from Jean Paul Gaultier — a perfume bottle shaped like a woman's torso.



The Gautier design (on the right) goes back to the early 1990s. But surely the idea of a bottle shaped like a woman is older than that. What about the famous Coca-Cola bottle? Wasn't that designed to look like a woman's body? At the Coca-Cola website, I see the company wanted a distinctive bottle (so it could fight off trademark infringers — e.g., Koka-Nola, Ma Coca-Co, Toka-Cola, and Koke):

On April 26, 1915, the Trustees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Association voted to expend up to $500 to develop a distinctive bottle for Coca-Cola. So, eight to 10 glass companies across the U.S. subsequently received a challenge to develop a “bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”...

In Terre Haute, Indiana, the Root Glass Company received the brief and had a meeting to begin to work on their design. The Root team was composed of C.J and William Root, Alexander Samuelson, Earl Dean and Clyde Edwards. Samuelsson, a Swedish immigrant who was the shop foreman, sent Dean and Edwards to the local library to research design possibilities. When the team came across an illustration of cocoa bean that had an elongated shape and distinct ribs, they had their shape....

Ah! So it wasn't a woman's body! It was a cocoa bean! But:

The Coke bottle has been called many things over the years. One of the more interesting of the nicknames is the “hobbleskirt” bottle. The hobbleskirt was a fashion trend during the 1910s where the skirt had a very tapered look and was so narrow below the knees that it “hobbled” the wearer. The bottle was also called the “Mae West” bottle after the actress’s famous curvaceous figure....

It became a woman's body in the mind of the beholders. Whether you want to credit Coke or not, you've got to concede that Mrs. Butterworth beat Jean Paul Gaultier. We've been seeing this bottle since 1961:



To be fair to Gaultier, his bottle omits the head and just has the bottle cap on top of a torso, a design idea copied/arrived upon by Kim Kardashian's people. Mrs. Butterworth has a head, and the bottlecap  goes on top of that head. The cap is a cap. To leave off the head and just put a cap at the neck... that's a bit disturbing, like the truly offensive "Bitchin' Bod" comic by R. Crumb:



For refreshment, this is a hobbleskirt:



And this is Mae West: