Pop Psychology Special Edition: LDOC and Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It (On The Alcohol)”

Every year, I think the music on LDOC gets less and less important. After all, whether it’s sap-rock, granola-rock or just plain old nostalgia-rock, few people really seem to remember the performances. Instead, we remember obnoxiously waking up our hall at 8:00 to “Since You Been Gone,” inventing drinking games on the fly and, let’s be honest, regrettable hookups. Hell, LDOC might as well stand for “Loosening the Definition Of ‘Consensual’” (kidding!).

Seriously, LDOC is the apex of poor choices on Duke’s campus, and many of us chalk this up to the overwhelming consumption of liquid confidence. Nowhere is this sentiment better expressed than in Jamie Foxx’s latest single, “Blame It (On the Alcohol).” When he’s not suggesting that Miley Cyrus should contract a venereal disease, Foxx likes to spend his time producing air-tight pop songs that reinforce what we all seem to believe: when bottles go up, expectations go down.

The song, which obligatorily features T-Pain, details how Foxx and a certain female become more and more attracted to one another as the night progresses and the drinks keep flowing. Foxx admits that his love interest is only attractive after a few shots, singing that, “I was unaware of how fine you was before my buzz set in.” He gets the same message from his companion, noting “She spilled some drink me/And now I’m knowin she tipsy/She put her body on me/And she keeps staring at me right in my eyes.” In the end, some stuff happens between the two that Foxx believes would not have occurred without inebriation. The chorus places the responsibility of the tryst solely on alcohol:

Blame it on the Goose, gotcha feeling loose

Blame it on the 'Tron, gotcha panties off

Blame it on the Blue Tap got you feeling dizzy

Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol,

Blame it on the ah-ah ah-ah ah-al-co-hol

In all, it’s a good song with less than great message, but that could be said about 90% of the hip-hop music I listen to. Unfortunately, Jamie Foxx is just the latest example (I’m looking at you, Luda!) of people who overestimate the effect that alcohol has in ratings of attractiveness. While drinking definitely plays some sort of role, there is another equally important factor at work whenever people begin looking for potential partners: time.

Consider this study, led by the University of Texas’s James Pennebaker (then at the University of Virginia). Researchers charted the average rating men and women assigned to members of the opposite sex throughout the an evening at local bar. At 9:00, the average attractiveness rating given by participants to members of the opposite sex was a rather harsh score of 5.0 (on a scale of 1 to 10). However, three hours later, that number had risen a full point to 6.0.

The finding has been replicated by North Dakota State’s Brian Gladue in a study summarized here. Gladue and his colleagues similarly asked men and women at various point in the evening to not only rate the attractiveness of other bar patrons, but also to rate the looks of “six opposite-gender photographs that had been previously determined to represent a broad range of facial attractiveness.” Importantly, Gladue also recorded the alcoholic intake of each participant throughout the night. As predicted, attractiveness ratings of the opposite sex increased over time for both genders. However, what’s shocking was that this finding was independent of alcoholic consumption.

As evolutionary psychologist David Buss summarizes, “whether a man has consumed a single drink or six drinks has no effect on the shift in viewing women as more attractive near closing time…As the evening progresses and a man has not yet been successful in picking up a woman, he views the remaining women in the bar as increasingly attractive.” And while Buss here writes solely about men, the same can be said for females, albeit to a lesser extent. It appears that “Beer Goggles” may not be anywhere near as powerful as “Hour Goggles.”

So while Jamie Foxx might want you to think that we can put all the blame on alcohol, we cannot overlook the awesome power of the minute hand. Be sure to keep this in mind on LDOC. If that certain someone looks like a nickel during this but a dime now, you can probably thank Grandfather Time more than Jose Cuervo.