by Jonah Lehrer
Brown admired this educational philosophy—it reinforced her skepticism of tradition—but she struggled to manage her students. One assessment blamed her for contributing “a somewhat disorganizing influence to the class.” Another noted her messy approach to the art closet: she spilled two containers of glue and forgot to clean them up.19
But Brown didn’t drop out of Bank Street. Instead, Lucy Sprague Mitchell encouraged Brown to return to writing, only with a focus on children’s books. Mitchell was tired of fairy tales. She wanted Brown to write books that exposed the wonders of the ordinary world. “It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.”
As she began working on her first children’s book, Brown returned to her favorite writer for inspiration: Gertrude Stein. Like her literary hero, Brown also wanted to challenge the stale conventions of her form. “Everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again,” Stein once declared. In Brown’s opinion, this was particularly true of children’s literature, which seemed limited to predictable fairy tales and didactic rhymes. Even toddlers, Brown thought, deserved a little avant-garde.
The Stein influence is most clear in Brown’s masterpiece, written in a single morning in 1946. She got the idea for the book from a dream. A little girl is trying to sleep in a green bedroom. The child is frightened by the noises of the night, but finds comfort in her favorite things. When Brown woke up, she wrote down the idea right away. The story—she called it Goodnight Moon—began with an introduction to everything in the “great green room.” There’s a red balloon, some kittens and mittens, and a mother rabbit whispering hush. These words are written in the voice of the good parent, who teaches the child how to name the world. After this soothing introduction, the book starts to circle back, as we say goodnight to everything in the room. Goodnight room. Goodnight red balloon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.
If Brown were writing a conventional children’s book, we’d now repeat the first half of the book, only with a goodnight preface. (Repetition is a fundamental trope of children’s literature. So is going to sleep.) But that’s not what happens. Instead, Brown introduces us to a new character: the actual moon. (We never met the real moon before, only the crescent moon in the painting.) Then Brown returns to the established pattern, saying goodnight to things we’ve already seen, such as the jumping cow. But then she breaks again—goodnight light and chairs we don’t know—before once again revisiting the familiar kittens, mittens, and bears.
The key point is that Brown dismantles the expected form, which would involve a straightforward repetition. By blending in a collection of new objects, she forces us to pay attention; we can’t take the text or its rhythms for granted. This constant back-and-forth between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, makes her simple book compelling. Every page becomes its own little mystery.
The writing gets stranger as the book draws to a close. After saying goodnight to the brush, Brown features a blank page and a goodnight to “nobody.” Then, right after we say goodnight to the old lady, Brown expands beyond the green room, flying out the window into the wide world beyond. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.
And so the book ends. Not with the old lady whispering hush—that’s the predictable choice—but with an ode to all the noises of the night. As the writer Aimee Bender observes, in an appreciation of Brown, “On some level, it had to have been a felt ending, a note she hit that must have seemed right and took confidence and daring to pull off. The reader has time to linger with that end and accept it—it’s not the obvious closing note of the music, it’s not the fully resolved major chord. But she trusted it.”20
Not everyone liked Brown’s subversive little story. The head children’s librarian at the New York Public Library refused to buy Goodnight Moon; she didn’t like the trippy pictures and, according to an internal review, found it “unbearably sentimental.”21 But Brown didn’t care. She’d learned from Gertrude Stein that a little difficulty can be good. What grabs our attention is not the pattern we expect—it’s the one we never see coming. Not the obvious repetition, but a jarring mixture of the new and the old. So the gentle dissonance becomes a cultural lesson for the child. Brown is teaching them the essential template of good art: it evokes a pattern and then finds a way to undermine it, subverting our expectations and assumptions.IV
Goodnight Moon barely sold any copies for the first several years. Nobody knew what to make of a children’s book inspired by the modernists. But something about those unpredictable words was irresistibly mysterious. As the years passed, Goodnight Moon gradually became a bestseller; by 1970, sales were approaching twenty thousand copies a year. It has since become one of the most popular children’s books of all time, with cumulative sales of roughly 50 million copies. Brown never enjoyed her triumph. She died in 1952 of a blood clot, long before Goodnight Moon became a classic. But writing the book gave her confidence to break the rules. After delivering the manuscript, Brown painted the walls of her bedroom green.
The Mystery of the Blind Headline
In May 1947, Bill Bernbach, the creative director of Grey Advertising, wrote a mission statement that would transform his industry. At the time, though, it was mostly seen as an act of career suicide. In the memo to his bosses, Bernbach launched an attack on the business practices of Madison Avenue, which he said were leading to the death of creativity. “Our agency is getting big,” Bernbach began. “That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damn worried.”22
He was worried because getting big meant following the rules of other people, listening to those confident marketing “technicians” who tried to turn advertising into a slick science. “They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long,” Bernbach wrote. “They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier and more inviting reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact.” But Bernbach believed that such “facts” were suffocating, inevitably leading to a “sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas.” As Bernbach would later put it, “Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.”23 Bernbach wanted to be an artist.
Not surprisingly, the management of Grey Advertising didn’t think much of Bernbach’s cri de coeur. (Those technicians were making them lots of money.) Before long, Bernbach began talking with Ned Doyle, a colleague at Grey, about setting up their own shop. In 1949, they partnered with Maxwell Dane, a business guy with a lease to an empty rooftop office on Madison Avenue. Doyle Dane Bernbach was born. “Nothing will ever get between us,” Bernbach said. “Not even punctuation.”
The early days were tough. The big agencies routinely dismissed Doyle Dane Bernbach as “two Jews and an Irishman.”24 Their rule breaking turned clients off; amid the postwar boom, it seemed smarter to play it safe and trust the technicians. The agency was kept afloat by billings for Ohrbach’s, a moderately priced department store chain, and Levy’s Bakery, which sold crusty rye bread. Although the campaigns were small—Levy’s only had a $50,000 budget—they established the daring, subversive style that would become a hallmark of the agency.
For Bernbach, such subversion had a purpose. He understood that he was in the business of delivering a message that people didn’t want to hear. (They wanted to get back to the television show, not learn about rye bread.) This meant that every spot needed a creative hook, a little mystery that made people look. “Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have an impact,” Bernbach said. “Imitation can be commercial suicide.”25
One of Bernbach’s most effective strategies was to create a tension between the picture and the headlin
e. Although every other print advertisement used the picture to reinforce the message of the text—it usually showed a smiling person enjoying the product—Bernbach wanted a mismatch. We saw the image, and we read the words, but, perplexed for a second or two, we struggled to understand how they fit together. The ad required unpacking, provoking questions whose answer was the sell.
This dissonant style reached its creative peak in Doyle Dane Bernbach’s work for Volkswagen. In the late 1950s, the German carmaker had a single model available for sale in the United States: the Beetle. Although sales had steadily been growing, the Beetle was about to face a new fleet of compact car competition from Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. Everyone expected the dated Beetle to be obliterated by these new models, which featured bigger engines, electronic controls, and fashionable fins. Volkswagen tasked Doyle Dane Bernbach with making sure that didn’t happen.
At the time, car advertising followed a strict template: a highly stylized image of the vehicle featured a debonair driver and an admiring female, followed by a few paragraphs of text that spelled out the innovations in the latest model.
Bernbach realized that Volkswagen required a different approach. The usual claims made in car advertisements—More power! Smoother ride!—couldn’t be said about the Beetle, since it only had forty horses and an antiquated suspension. (He was also limited by the budget: Volkswagen had $800,000 for the entire campaign.)26 Given these strict constraints, Bernbach and his brilliant creative team (led by Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone) decided to break all the rules. Instead of using a glossy car picture with saturated colors, they used a black-and-white image of the Beetle, set against an empty background. It was a utilitarian look for a utilitarian car.
The most significant breakthrough, however, was the text. The agency was tasked with highlighting the number of industrial inspectors used by Volkswagen. While a traditional print ad might have sold this with a picture of the factory and a few paragraphs about its reliable cars, Bernbach’s team created an ad that pulled people in with a puzzle. He juxtaposed a simple picture of the Beetle with the headline “Lemon.”27V
Bernbach’s audacious bet was that this subversive ad—why was Volkswagen criticizing its own car?—would hook the attention of readers as they flipped the pages of a magazine. As Bernbach once observed, “You cannot sell a man who isn’t listening.” The “Lemon” headline got people to listen.
It also got them to remember. In “The Mystery Box” chapter, we learned about a study showing that the feeling of curiosity was associated with increased activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with learning and memory. Bernbach’s advertisements anticipated this finding. By hooking his audience with questions and jokes, he made sure we didn’t forget the product he was trying to sell.
But Bernbach knew that a punchy headline wasn’t enough: he wanted every detail of the ad to feel different. (“It’s not just what you say that stirs people,” Bernbach said. “It’s the way that you say it.”)28 Take the design of the words. Bernbach typeset the copy with plenty of widows and orphans, as he wanted the ad to have a less “professional” and less polished look. Even the VW logo was placed in an unusual position, at the border between the second and third columns. These details were unexpected—every other car company justified their text and featured a big central logo—but they added to the sense of intrigue. Because we’ve never seen anything like this before, we want to know more.
The effectiveness of this marketing strategy has been demonstrated in recent work on disfluent text. In a series of experiments, psychologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed that giving people writing in an unfamiliar font could help them stay open-minded, inducing a less automatic form of thought.29 This is the kind of thinking Bernbach needed. Because his firm specialized in so-called challenger brands—companies attempting to grab market share from their more established competitors—he had to invent a visual form that kept his audience from relying on preconceptions. The Beetle wasn’t a cheap car with obsolete technology. It was a solid piece of German engineering.
Once Bernbach used the mystery in the message to get the attention of magazine readers, he could educate them about those industrial inspectors. Julian Koenig, his gifted copywriter, wrote the prose in a jaunty, conversational tone. The copy begins, “This Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished, and must be replaced.” After another few paragraphs about German manufacturing, Koenig delivered the perfect last line: “We pluck the lemons; you get the plums.”
It’s easy to be difficult. The genius of the creatives at Doyle Dane Bernbach was to create ads that were subversive in extremely precise ways. They broke lots of rules, but each careful transgression reinforced their message. (As Bernbach would remind his team, “The product. The product. Stay with the product.”)30 The vivid headline, the black-and-white photograph, the sans-serif font, even the widows of the layout—these surprising choices all communicated the practical virtues of the Beetle. As Bernbach had written years before in his mission statement, such details defined the art of advertising. “Let us blaze new trails,” he wrote. “Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.”
It was good selling. Three years after the Big Three introduced their new compact models, the number of imported cars fell by nearly 50 percent. The only exception was the Beetle, whose sales continued to climb.
The Information Theory of Kanye West
Kanye West had to run away. His troubles began when he interrupted Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Swift had just won Best Female Video and was a few sentences into her acceptance speech when Kanye ran onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’m gonna let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time,” he shouted. “One of the best videos of all time!”
The furor was immediate. There were reports of Swift crying backstage; the president of the United States called Kanye a jackass; even Beyoncé criticized the intrusion. It got so bad that Kanye had to cancel his international tour with Lady Gaga.
Kanye escaped to paradise. Avex Honolulu Studios, to be precise, a den of recording rooms set in a suburban strip mall, just off the Kalaniana’ole Highway. (Avex is in the back, behind the chain drugstore.) Kanye had booked every Avex studio for as long as necessary, complete with engineers on standby twenty-four hours a day. After a morning game of basketball at the Honolulu YMCA, Kanye and his rotating crew of rappers, producers, and musicians would head into Avex and start playing with sound. The process was the opposite of linear: a track might be finished, then changed and changed again. Kanye would work on a song, then lose interest for weeks; beats would be tweaked, lyrics rewritten; the only constant was change. “I’d never worked the way Kanye was working in Hawaii,” Q-Tip remembered in Complex.31 “Everybody’s opinions mattered and counted.… If the delivery guy comes in the studio and Kanye likes him and they strike up a conversation, he’ll go, ‘Check this out, tell me what you think…’ Every person has a voice and an idea, so he’s sincerely looking to hear what you have to say—good, bad, or whatever.”
Kanye had been on Oahu for a few months when he started working on a new track called “Runaway.” A beat from the producer Emile inspired the track. “It was late one night, and we were hanging out [in Avex Studios], and Kanye asked me if I had any beats,” Emile remembered. “Pretty low, no big deal, we were just chilling playing some beats.” What happened next has become the stuff of hip-hop legend. Kanye listened to the new beat for a few minutes before telling the engineer, “Okay, put it in Pro Tools.” (When he said that, Emile remembers, “the room was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”) Then Kanye stepped up to the microphone and, without hesitating, sang the melody and lyrics of “Runaway.”32
It’s a song built around a stunning inversion. While the pop charts are filled with attempts at seduction, Kanye isn’t trying to seduce in “Runaway.”
He’s trying to repel, warning this poor lady to escape before it’s too late.
Baby, I got a plan
Run away fast as you can
Run away from me, baby, run away.
In case there was any doubt about his sincerity, Kanye goes on to propose a champagne toast for the douchebags, assholes, and scumbags, because he is one of those guys. The typical stance of hip-hop is braggadocio, as rappers celebrate their triumphs and conquests. “Runaway” is not one of those songs. It is an anthem of self-loathing.
This subversive style isn’t limited to the lyrics.VI As Kanye refined “Runaway” in the studio, he created a track that intentionally violates many of the established patterns of its genre. “Runaway” begins with a repeated piano note, a high E-natural played fifteen times. It’s a riff on György Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata II,” which also features a single note repeated multiple times. The piano melody then dips an octave, returns with a high E-flat, then a low E-flat, then a high C-sharp, then a low C-sharp, and so on. It’s a melancholy tune, the keys accented with spite, and Kanye draws it out for nearly forty seconds. It is the least radio-friendly intro imaginable.
Just when we’ve adjusted to those spare piano notes, a throbbing bassline appears, followed by a sharp snare drum and a looped sample from a live Rick James show. But Kanye doesn’t settle for the obvious blend of piano and rhythm. That would time the piano notes to beats one and three of each measure, which are the so-called strong beats. Virtually every pop song obeys this convention, which makes it easier to listen and dance along to the music. Kanye knows this. He has an exquisite understanding of our expectations. And he delights in turning them against us.
Because “Runaway” begins with just the piano, we assume the notes are being played on the strong beats of one and three. There is no rhythm yet, but Kanye realizes that our expectations fill in the void. But then, when the drums enter, Kanye reveals our error: the piano is hitting on the weak beats of two and four. As the musician and podcaster Cole Cuchna observes, in his close analysis of “Runaway,” “That’s why the drums are always so impactful when they come in, no matter how many times we hear the track.… They’re always a bit unexpected and it takes our mind and bodies a moment to adjust to the change of the pulse.”33 Most rhythms are easy to ignore, a ticking clock we take for granted. The bumps and thumps of “Runaway,” however, violate our musical expectations—their timing is a prediction error. They seize our attention.