Just two reciprocating stunnas. Courtesy xclusivezone.net.

Although it may be number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100, Lil Wayne’s latest collaboration with Birdman has garnered little interest from most radio stations. And probably for good reason. In all honesty, it’s a rare miss from rap’s King Midas. The song sounds stilted and cluttered, while also lacking the driving beat that usually characterizes Wayne’s work. “Always Strapped” is probably a throw-away track on Tha Carter III, but for the increasingly irrelevant Birdman, it’s the first single off his fourth studio album, Priceless.

So while “Always Strapped’ will probably have short-lived commercial success, its’ chorus promulgates one of the most eternal truths of biological life: a system of faithful reciprocity is the best strategy for dealing with other organisms.

In between slightly disappointing verses, Lil Wayne provides the song’s refrain, reproduced below:

Always strapped when I hit the club
N&%@$#s give me dap
Bitches give me hugs
And since I’m paid
N&%@$#s be muggin’ me
You know im muggin’ back
N&%@$#s be muggin’ me
You know I’m muggin’ back

Always strapped when I hit the club
N&%@$#s give me dap
Bitches give me hugs
And since I’m paid
Bitches be lovin’ me
They know I love em’ back
Bitches be lovin’ me
They know I love em’ back

The clear theme here is one of equality. Lil Wayne promises to treat everyone the exact same way that they treat him, no more no less. It’s reciprocity in its most thuggish form. By the way, I should note here that “mug” is not meant literally in the sense that people are forcibly taking money from Wayne. Rather, as urban dictionary tells us, to “mug” someone can also mean to “stare at someone; give someone a dirty look.” In other words, Wayne promises to return all of the facial hate he receives while also giving back any dap and love his fans may pour on him.

In biolgical terms, Wayne and Birdman are playing a simple game of iterated prisoner’s dilemma. While perhaps overly simplify things, this is another way of saying that the two rappers are in a situation where they will be having numerous interactions with the same people— interactions that have potentially beneficial or deleterious consequences. In the club, Bridman and Wayne have two possible behaviors (give dap/love or mug), meaning that there are four possible combinations for each encounter they have:

a) Give dap/love to someone who gives them dap/love.
b) Mug someone who mugs them.
c) Give dap/love to someone who mugs them.
d) Mug someone who gives them dap/love.

Obviously, options c) and d) should be avoided, as they could cause serious embarrassment, injury, or worst of all, missed sexual opportunities. So Wayne and Birdman should be striving to have as many a) and b) interactions as possible. Here, we also have to assume that Wayne and Birdman will be running into the same people in these clubs repeatedly. The question then becomes what is the best strategy to adopt so that the two rappers are giving the right people love and the right people mugs?

The answer is simple: just do whatever the other person did the last time. This system of behavior, known as Tit for Tat, was first formally “discovered” by Anatol Rapaport and Robert Axelrod in the early 1980’s. After holding a series of computer simulations that pitted basic prisoner dilemma-solving strategies against one another, the two biologists found that, in the long run, systems using Tit for Tat had the best rate of survival and greatest genetic fitness. In his seminal book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins goes on to describe how species of sea bass and vampire bats have utilized similar systems as those of the two Cash Money millionaires.

It’s not just human beings that strive to scratch each other’s backs. The law of reciprocity is ubiquitous in our natural world. It can be found in the jungle, the desert and especially the club.

***Sidenote: Many of the posts in this series have attempted to explain pop songs by using the assumptions and research of evolutionary psychology. Recently, the field of evolutionary psychology has gone under a bit of a media attack. In the latest Newsweek, Sharon Begley chronicles the supposed “fall of evolutionary psychology.” Similarly, in today’s New York Times, David Brooks describes how “evolutionary psychology had a good run.”

While each piece does a commendable job of discussing evolutionary psychology’s flaws as well as the power of culture in human development, there still exists a mountain of evidence (a fraction of which I have discussed here) that illustrates how our thoughts and behaviors today evolved with from the worlds inhabited by our ancient ancestors. I agree that ignoring the impact of culture is myopic, but so is overlooking the conditions that human beings have lived in for 99% of their existence. The final answer to this problem will probably be it’s least satisfactory: both evolution and culture play invaluable roles in shaping the human mind. It’s just up to us to find out how these two forces make us who we are.

For a more even-handed discussion on the faults, merits and future of evolutionary psychology, I recommend a series of essays organized by the Templeton Foundation, which can be found here.

Sure, they're interested. But I doubt it will last. Courtesy scoopthemagazine.com

At this point, Lil Wayne can rap about anything, and it wouldn’t surprise me. The first time I heard the exquisite “Every Girl,” I was a little shocked by how forward it was. But after a few minutes, I realized that this song is really just the natural extension of any rap single. It’s just more candid (and better produced). If it weren’t so explicit, I think Wayne’s latest could be 2009’s Song Of The Summer. It really is the best track I have heard in a while (and that’s including anything off the overrated Veckatimest).

I honestly believe that if the chorus repeatedly proclaimed, “I wish I could talk with every girl in the world,” then “Every Girl” would probably have bumped the insufferable “Boom Boom Pow” off the top of the charts. Then again, if the song focused on just talking with every girl in the world, it wouldn’t give such excellent insight into the evolution of the male mind.

The song features an impressive five artists, each describing how their sexual appetite knows no bounds. And yes, I am going to quote them all. Wayne keeps it simple when he says “I’ll *&%$ the whole group/ Baby I’m a groupie.” The up-and-coming Drake similarly explains, “I will *&%$ with all y’all/ All y’all are beautiful/ I just can’t pick one so you can never say I’m choosy hoes.” Jae Millz gets a little more explicit when he rhymes, “I just wanna *&%$ every girl in the world/ Every model every singer every actress every diva/ Every house of Diddy chick every college girl every skeezer/ Stripper and every desperate housewife that resemble Eva.” Gudda Gudda promises that “I swear I’m feeling all y’all/ I’m scrollin down my call log/ And I’m a call all y’all.”

Yet, the song obviously seems to have saved the best for last, with Mack Maine’s preposterous verse. Maine details how “For free suites I’d give Paris Hilton all-nighters/ In about three years, holla at me Miley Cyrus/ I don’t discriminate, no not at all/ Kit-Kat a midget if that $%# soft I break her off.” Incredible.

All in all, “Every Girl” is a dizzying display of the male sex drive. But notice how no rapper is simply requesting a large quantity of sex. None of these lotharios wants to be intimate with one (or even two or three) women many times. Instead, they desire sexual variety over quantity or quality, a fact that becomes most evident when Mack Maine admits, “I exchange V cards with the retards.”

Sorry ladies, but men don’t really want one woman an infinite amount of times, no matter how desirable she may be. Rather, they seem to prefer an infinite amount of women, each just one time. This trait isn’t restricted to blatantly honest and tattooed rappers. Rather, it’s a biological fact applicable to males of most species. The phenomenon of the male craving for sexual diversity even has a cool name (and a cooler story behind it): The Coolidge Effect.

The Coolidge Effect comes from an awesome, albeit apocryphal, anecdote concerning President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace , who Wikipedia describes as “vivacious” (she was, after all, a founding member of Pi Beta Phi). Both the President and First Lady were visiting a poultry farm. As they were touring the grounds, Mrs. Coolidge asked the farmer how he was able to produce so many eggs with so few roosters. The farmer explained that his roosters “performed their duty” nearly hundred of times each day.

“Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” replied the First Lady.
The President, overhearing the remark, then asked the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”
“No,” replied the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”
“Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” replied the President (please, spare me your Bill Clinton jokes).

The obvious moral of the story is that men achieve better sexual performance when they are given the opportunity to mate with multiple partners rather than one partner multiple times. The empirical evidence behind President Coolidge’s principle is abundant. Male rats in an enclosed box with an array of fertile females will immediately begin having sex with the each female rat until exhausted. When finished, the available females may nudge and lick the male to continue, but he will not respond. Yet, if a new female is introduced into the box, the same rat becomes alert and will attempt to have sex with the new female. The same thing occurs in rams, cattle and sheep. Even if a female is removed and then later reintroduced in an attempt for a repeated sexual encounter, males won’t fall for it.

The Coolidge Effect is also at work in our own species. The numerous surveys on human infidelity all yield a similar conclusion: men desire more partners than women do. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss concludes that “all studies show sex differences in the incidence and frequency of affairs, with more men having affairs more often and with more partners than women.”

The pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey summed it up best in his Sexual Behavior of the Human Male: “There seems to be no question but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions… The human female is much less interested in a variety of partners.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, the Coolidge Effect makes sense. If a male’s desire is to have as many offspring as possible, he shouldn’t want to mate with the same female multiple times. Once a female is pregnant, she becomes infertile. As a result, evolutionary psychology would predict that a male’s interest would wane after his first sexual encounter with a female. I’m sure Weezy knows what I’m talking about.

So call these rappers vulgar. Call them chauvinistic. Call them misogynistic. Just don’t call them evolutionarily misguided.

See them perform at the Cat’s Cradle on March 21st along with A.C. Newman (of The New Pornographers) and Cut Copy that same week.

Top Five Band Names That Consist Primarily of Gender References
5. Man Man
4. She and Him
3. Me and Women
2. Women
1. Girls

There are also three different lists pertaining exclusively to Lil Wayne. Among them:

Top Ten Things Lil Wayne Doesn’t Do, According to Lil Wayne On Tha Carter III
10. Owe you, like two vowels
9. Rap, he films movies
8. Fantasize
7. Have to get his tooth fixed
6. Write sh-t, cuz he ain’t got time
5. Have the answer
4. Wanna finish
3. Know what you are on
2. Give a f-ck if you see him
1. Care

They also remind us of Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig’s college blog and their favorite tertiary characters from The Wire. For the rest of the post, check here.

UPDATE: Check out part two here.

Justin Vernon. Courtesy rcrdlbl.

A whole 17 days before the year ends, we did it. We summarized the best our favorite music of 2008 on our humble blog, and its name was Justin Vernon. The Jagjaguwar re-release of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, our favorite album of the year, made it into six of our nine lists, all in the top five (that was a lot of single-digit numbers, more coming). The lists had three mentions of “re:stacks,” two of “Skinny Love” and one of “Lump Sum.” Some other numbers after the jump.

• Kanye was the second most acknowledged artist, with five appearances-two for “Street Lights” and three for his guest spot with Estelle.
• Vampire Weekend had four nods, each for a different song: “Walcott” and singles “A-Punk,” “Oxford Comma” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.”
• Dan Rossen had four mentions as well, two for Department of Eagles and one for each of the Grizzly Bear singles from the band’s upcoming release
• Mash-up artists the Hood Internet and “Laptop Artist” Girl Talk each grabbed a spot on a list
• Three mentions: Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Bradford Cox (one as Atlas Sound, two as Deerhunter) and MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” (which had a hard release in 2008)
• Two mentions: the Dodos, Sigur Ros, Okkervil River, Lil Wayne, Beach House and Black Kids
• A total of 62 artists made appearances on our lists (this counts Atlas Sound and Deerhunter as different, Kanye as different from his track with Estelle, Grizzly Bear as different from Department of Eagles, etc.)
• This also means that each list had an average of 6.89 original artists
• “Single Ladies” did not appear on any of the lists.