Publishing information
The first edition published October 2009 by
Rough Guides Ltd. 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL
Email: [email protected]
Distributed by the Penguin Group:
Penguin Books Ltd. 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL
The publishers and authors have done their best to ensure the accuracy and currency of all information in The Rough Guide to The Next Big Thing; however, they can accept no responsibility for any loss or inconvenience sustained by any reader as a result of its information or advice.
No part of this guide may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.
© Rhodri Marsden, 2009
ISBN 13: 978-1-84836-352-6
This Digital Edition published 2010. ISBN: 9781848367487
E-Book format prepared by DK Digital, London and DK Digital Media, Delhi.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Louisa Nicoll, Sam Gould, John Ellingsworth, Serena Cowdy, Leanne Rae Wierzba, Joanna Cordero, Alice Waugh, Rob Desjardins, Luke Pitcher, Justine Wolfenden, John Rooney, Abigail Balfe and Amanda Hawkins, all of whom helped to fill in yawning gaps in my historical knowledge by pitching in a range of fascinating and funny ideas. Thanks also to various Internet communities on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal, whose citizens inexplicably leapt to my aid with nuggets of information. Much gratitude to Elliot Elam for his wonderful sketches, and special thanks to Jenny McIvor for brutally red-penning my hackneyed observations and obtuse grammar. You all helped to make this content better.
Introduction
Thank goodness that common sense deserts us from time to time. Imagine how lacking in sparkle our everyday existences would be if we didn’t occasionally make absurd decisions, such as jumping in a fountain fully clothed, belching loudly at a christening, writing a song about an errant tortoise or marrying our cousin. Without hare-brained, impetuous plans and preposterous ideas to add some va-va-voom to our waking hours, we would all proceed in a preordained, predictable fashion – in fact, our lives probably wouldn’t be worth living at all. And after we’d all gone through the motions, history could be plotted on a gently sloping graph, free of kinks and looking for all the world like the performance data of a highly efficient combustion engine.
But sometimes we’re liable to jump happily on a bandwagon and collectively decide that something is a great idea, while somehow managing to suppress any niggling thoughts in the back of our minds that it might all be a load of rubbish. We usually come to our senses after a while; we’re able to look back with the benefit of hindsight and gasp at our naivety, lack of taste or downright stupidity, before immediately plunging ourselves into some new, ill-thought-out activity that will inevitably be judged by future generations as being a bit silly, too. We can’t help ourselves. We’re doomed to do it.
In 1974 and 1975, a colossal proportion of British teenage girls clad themselves in ankle-length tartan trousers and tartan scarves, and screamed at deafening volume at the Bay City Rollers, a band from Scotland who you could safely say weren’t pushing back the frontiers of songwriting. But by the summer of 1977, you’d be hard pushed to find any girls who’d be prepared to admit that they’d ever had anything tartan lurking in their wardrobe. Total embarrassment and shame had descended. And if it wasn’t for the video evidence, we wouldn’t have known that it had happened at all. “Bye Bye Baby” is no worse or better a record today than it was when it was released, but you don’t find anyone wearing a tam-o’shanter and playing it over and over again while bawling loudly.
You see, humans are terribly fickle creatures; recipes that excite our taste buds today might revolt us by the following Tuesday, and ornaments that our grandparents once cherished are unceremoniously jettisoned into skips if they don’t coincide with our current aesthetic outlook. We live our lives amid a complex web of rapidly changing whims, desires, ethics and policies; we pick the ones we like, and they form the spirit of our age, the spirit of our society. The zeitgeist. When we’re bored with those, we quietly disown them and quickly find something else. And that becomes the new zeitgeist. But what we can’t ever do is get rid of the zeitgeist. It’s always knocking about.
What is it comprised of today? A zillion things: hatred of bankers; the word LOL; a bizarre love of competitive TV-based ballroom dancing; a disinterest in the plight of factory-farmed chickens; and the Kings Of Leon. (See But Surely these can’t Last, Either? The Future for a more exhaustive rundown.) In a hundred years’ time, it might be uploading the contents of your brain to someone else’s during the night as a joke so they wake up feeling all disorientated, zinc handbags, and cannibalism. We have no idea. But what we can do is look back over several millennia of history and laugh at, wince at or, very occasionally, rehabilitate things that our ancestors thought were completely brilliant, but then realized at some point weren’t that good after all.
This content gently attempts to collect some of those things together into a whistle-stop cultural history. It mourns, celebrates and – more often – mocks the stuff that wasn’t quite good enough to recommend to the next generation; we’ll look at what some of these things were, why we thought they were amazing, and why, ultimately, we lost interest in them. Of course, we’ve had to impose a few limits: any antics that non-Western civilizations got up to in the past two or three thousand years are probably best left to another book (the West has made quite enough poor choices of its own) so if you’re looking for the Zoroastrian habit of placing the dead on the top of a tall column to be devoured by vultures, I’m afraid you won’t find it here (although you will find people at the top of long poles for quite different reasons – see also Bouncing up and Down Repeatedly on Pogo Sticks).
We’ve also tried to be sensitive towards innovators – people who came up with ideas that were undeniably great, but were simply superseded by a better piece of technology. For example, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the 8-track cartridge; it didn’t fall out of favour because we realized it was terrible. It just wasn’t quite as convenient or cheap as the cassette. No, what we’ve been looking for are bizarre fads, dead-end trends, inexplicable beliefs – all demonstrating the ephemeral nature of our needs and aspirations. Eating swans. Tamagotchi. Crinolines. Ouija boards. The things that just make you think: WHY?
Posthumous Libation and Naked Gyration: Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome
It’s civilization, sure, but not as we know it. There are many ways in which we can identify with our Egyptian, Greek and Roman ancestors – after all, they probably found work a bit of a grind, threw the odd party, fell in love, went on holiday and got depressed when their friends and relatives died. But, for a while, they also got a kick out of watching people fight to the death, while we prefer fights to be stopped by a clanging bell and a man in a bow tie before they get out of hand.
We’re happy to eat beans, because we don’t imagine for a moment that they might contain the souls of the dead. We don’t shave off our own arm hair unless we’re very drunk. False beards are only worn for comedy purposes. Lettuce is consumed for its mild health benefits rather than for any massive increase in sexual potency. Togas have been assessed as too cumbersome and unwieldy. Didactic poetry isn’t the publishing sensation it once was. In short, we’ve changed. Hopefully for the better. But then again, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans never had to cope with operating five separate remote control handsets in order to be entertained in their own homes. So maybe we’re the misguided ones after all.
Putting Cats on a Pedestal They didn’t Particularly Deserve
Cats don’t generally show a great amount of interest in what we’re doing, unless we’re openi
ng a can of delicious meaty chunks in close proximity to their empty food bowl. But their ability to rid the streets of vermin saw the Egyptians elevate the humble moggy to godlike status. If your own cat died, you’d enter a period of uncontrollable grief, get it mummified, and lop off your eyebrows as a mark of respect. If you were unfortunate enough to be found guilty of killing one, you’d be looking at the death penalty.
But the creation of the cat-goddess, Bast, along with the city of Bubastis and its adjoining temple – a veritable shrine to the grace and poise of the domestic feline – saw the Egyptian cat obsession get slightly out of proportion. In fact, it eventually led to their downfall; the cunning Persians, at the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC, let cats loose on the battlefield while also having cat images emblazoned on their shields. The Egyptians didn’t know where to look, or what to do. They were routed, and this defeat marked the end of the line of Pharaohs. Worth bearing in mind, if you ever consider building a shrine to little Speckles.
Women Shaving their Heads and then Wearing Wigs on Top
Wigs are sported by very few people in the modern world: fashion models; men embarrassed at the rapid onset of baldness; people undergoing chemotherapy; and eccentric old ladies. They’re all either slightly shamefaced about the fact that they’re wearing them, or a little too eager to draw attention to the fact that they’re wearing them.
But to Ancient Egyptians, the wig was pretty normal, and women vastly preferred its reliability and consistency to their own locks, which they’d simply shave off. On ce they’d got rid of every last hair with gold tweezers, they’d buff their scalp with sand and pick out a wig made, ironically, from human hair (although cheaper wigs would be padded out with vegetable fibre). It’s a brilliant idea that could do with being re-adopted across the world. No one would ever have a bad hair day. No one would get depressed about the inadequate follicles that had been genetically bequeathed to them by their parents. They’d just get rid of it all, and buy something that suited them. Keep it in a box, no shampoo necessary, and wake up to a nice, clean bald head every morning, rather than a greasy, lopsided mess. Why did we ever let this one go?
Wearing Leopard Skin to Deliver Religious Sermons
Most Egyptians wore a simple, rectangular piece of linen to preserve their modesty. Priests generally kept things understated, too, and opted for plain fabric. However, the Sem priests – who performed the elaborate rituals associated with the burial of the dead – were permitted to jazz up the occasion with a sassy little leopard skin number. While there was ostensibly a good reason for this (the skin was associated with the God Seth, the adversary of mankind, and the wearing of it symbolized human triumph over him) you can’t help but feel that the Sem priest revelled in his ability to slink around the temple like a prowling feline.
Today, of course, you’d only see a man of the cloth sporting leopard skin if he were delivering a risqué performance of a Tina Turner number at a charity karaoke event. And even then he probably wouldn’t enjoy wearing it. The fact that leopard skin is now inappropriate at any church ceremony – let alone a funeral – is somehow testament to the decline in its religious importance.
Preserving Dead Bodies with a Spot of Myrrh
Today, we’re resigned to the idea that our deceased nearest and dearest will go through some kind of subterranean decomposition procedure – that is if they’ve not already been reduced to a pile of ash in a furnace. But in Ancient Egypt it was all about keeping their form as well preserved as possible in preparation for the afterlife. Of course, the quality of the procedure was largely down to how much money you had to spend, and it’s likely that the “budget mummification” service consisted of little more than a quick evisceration and a wash and scrub before being handed back. But the top-of-the-range, gilt-edged service was magnificently detailed.
The organs would be removed and placed in Canopic jars – except for the brain, which would be dragged through the nostrils with hooks and quietly disposed of. The inner cavity of the body would be treated with palm wine, myrrh and spices such as cassia, before being sewn up and smeared with natron, a salty substance that helped with dehydration. Then, after seventy days, the body would be washed and rolled up in linen, with fingers and toes being given special sheaths so that they didn’t break. At some point, all this was deemed too much bother for someone who was, after all, dead. And we began to concentrate on pampering our bodies while we were still alive instead.
Expecting Elderly Kings to Complete Regular Assault Courses
There’s a great, centuries-old European tradition of allowing elderly reigning monarchs to sit (or perhaps slump) on their throne right up until the bitter end. And if that means a five-year period during which they knocked feebly at death’s door, then so be it. Ancient Egyptians, however, were more pragmatic; they thought that pharaohs ought to be able-bodied, and any physical decline should be kept firmly in check.
Hence the Heb-Sed, or the “Feast Of The Tail”, which occurred during the pharaoh’s thirtieth year in power and every three years subsequently. He would be expected to run up and down a specially laid out course, carrying various cumbersome objects; anyone who considers this cruel should bear in mind that it was previously common practice to simply murder them when they got too long in the tooth. Completion of the course would supposedly prove his physical fitness, although it’s pretty certain that sycophantic priests would ensure that the pharaoh was awarded a pass mark even if he collapsed ten metres short of the finish line while clutching his chest. Thanks to democracy, we no longer need to put heads of state through such rigorous examinations – although it would be fun seeing some of them attempt the pole vault.
Punishing Adulterers by Inserting Radishes into their Anal Passages
The phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold” hadn’t yet been dreamt up by the poetic philosophers of Greco-Roman times. Curious legal quirks allowed certain victims to administer their own form of restorative justice to the person who had wronged them; Roman law supposedly gave you the right to rape a burglar who’d done over your property (“Er … right … couldn’t we just put him in prison?”) and in the case of adulterers in Greece, the cuckolded husband was permitted to retaliate as violently as his imagination would allow. Bearing in mind that colourful punishments of the ancient world included pouring molten metal down someone’s throat, or cutting their nose off and putting them in a sack with a wild animal before dumping it in a river, you embarked on a relationship with another man’s wife at your peril.
Some adulterers got away with their lives, but instead had to suffer the indignity of having a radish pushed up their anus. (Those who imagine that this could almost be a pleasurable experience have clearly never seen the size and shape of certain exotic types of radish.) How this punishment could have been meted out without it turning into an extended closing scene from the Benny Hill Show is unclear, and it’s not something that we’ve chosen to carry forward to the modern era. At least, not outside the classified advertisements of some particularly tawdry magazines.
The Hiring of Professional Mourners to Wail at the Graveside
On the one hand, paying for people to act particularly grief-stricken at a graveside is a despicable charade that insults the memory of the dear departed. On the other, the poor soul might not have had many friends, and few of those might bother turning up, let alone wail and cry at a decent volume. So why not give him a rousing send-off? Paid mourners became a part of funeral ceremonies in both Ancient Greece and Rome, and despite laws being passed to try to prevent the practice, it was probably quite hard to clamp down on. After all, if someone’s a good enough actor to conjure up authentic-looking grief over someone they never knew, they’re not going to find it difficult to put on an indignant face of denial if they’re accused of being a professional mourner. It wasn’t all ululation and flailing; rather like a master of ceremonies, they’d subtly coordinate the grief so that everyone would moan and shake their heads in sadness at the most suitable m
oments. Women were particularly skilled at it, and it’s thought that the Greek attempts to abolish paid lamentation may have been partly to deprive women of the one opportunity they had to display some public power.
Paid mourning – which gave us the Latin word “placebo” – has re-emerged on a number of occasions since ancient times, but the money was poor, the work was depressing, and it never looked good on anyone’s CV.
Exercising Vigorously in Public Without Wearing any Clothes
If you take a moment to ponder which of the world’s greatest sportsmen have achieved their biggest accolades while in the nude, you’ll quickly realize that the answer is “none”. Pelé didn’t blast Brazil to World Cup glory while his shorts were still in the dressing room. Carl Lewis didn’t set his indoor long jump record with dangling genitals impairing his aerodynamicism. They both wisely covered up.
The original Greek Olympics were, by contrast, notable for all the competitors being stark naked – save for the charioteers, who for some reason (perhaps they had a sick note) were allowed to keep their clothes on. The Greeks became very keen on exercising in the altogether around the sixth century BC, managing to convince athletes that it signified courage, strength and high status. Soon, it was de rigueur to be in the nude club, regardless of how minimally endowed you might have been. To be fair, the ensuing comparison of pecs and abs did give everyone the incentive to tone up, and it definitely saved on laundry bills. On the down side, bits tended to get in the way. This is where the Kynodesme came in: this thin leather strap would be tied around the excess foreskin at the end of the penis, and wrapped around the waist to expose the scrotum. Hm. Maybe better off naked, after all.
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