How to listen to the ‘Dirty John’ podcast

Have you ever regretted your choices? Wondered how life would have turned out if you’d taken the other path?

I have.

Now I’m not sure whether this podcast is a triumph, or a low-level genre piece akin to cable TV exposes of crime. But the difference is TV is lowbrow, all about the facts and drama, whereas this is nuanced and told from a reporter’s perspective and you get hooked, maybe because it’s a podcast, what do they say about radio, it’s “theatre of the mind”? Believe me, listening to “Dirty John” will spook you. Because the truth is no one’s immune, anyone can be dragged down, I know, it happened to me.

You see you grow up in a family, with a limited world view. And although your horizons are broadened in college, it’s when you leave the world of education and start figuring things out for yourself that you get in trouble. Maybe you never really left home, maybe you’re still in the cocoon. And maybe that’s good. But if you go to the big city to make it you run into charlatans, people with different backgrounds and different moral values, and if you’re unlucky, you’re gonna make a wrong choice and then…

That’s why I believe in arranged marriage. You’re best off marrying someone from the same background, someone who’s known, because that good-looking person you found at the bar, the one you bumped into at the grocery store, even the one you met at the party…

You’ve got no idea who they really are.

So you’re listening to this podcast thinking this woman is an idiot. And that may be true. But you’ll also be envious of her financial success. Made from scratch in the design business. The truth is everyone is not good at everything. And some of the best business people are bad at relationships.

And she wants to believe, she wants to be optimistic. That’s another characteristic of entrepreneurs, because if you’re pessimistic it’s hard to get ahead.

And you’ll wince when you hear she’s been married four times previously.

But this is not uncommon with baby boomers. I know completely reasonable people who’ve been married three times. This is not today, with its huge divide between haves and have-nots, where the haves marry people from their same social stratum and stay together and the have-nots have children out of wedlock. And don’t shoot the messenger, these facts are based upon statistics, published seemingly everywhere.

So her family smells a rat, almost instantly. But when you’re in love, with the sex and attention, you believe it’s the two of you against the world, and love is hard to find, so you ignore them. And I can quote chapter and verse of families nixing relationships and the couple never getting over the breakup, happened in my family, so…

Liars are good at it. They’re convincing. And the legal system is no help. You think you’ve got the strong arm of the law on your side, but the truth is you’re on your own baby, especially when it comes to domestic disputes.

So you’ll be sucked in, I guarantee it.

This is not “Serial,’ with a unique premise, where you wonder about the facts.

This is cold-hearted crime. A bad actor on parade.

But there are bad actors everywhere.

The L.A. “Times’ is a joke. It’s gotten so thin there’s little news in it. Is this how they save the brand, with investigative journalism and attendant podcasts? That’s right, concomitant with the podcast the story has been printed in the newspaper, so you know what’s going to happen, but that’s not why you’re listening, you’re listening for the human condition. And last time I checked that’s what we are, all of us, humans, frail, imperfect, prone to mistakes…

Just don’t make the biggest mistake of your life.

PART 1: THE REAL THING – Dirty John

 

IT’S THE AGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

It’s all about you, your brand, you’re on your own and it’s your obligation to establish your status. Used to be you were a member of the faceless masses. Now you’re defined online yet retain your anonymity since in a world of competing identities no one stands out, and when someone does, you wonder why you can’t be them. But the truth is there are great swaths of people who are unaware of your hero, seemingly no one dominates, there’s no backbone to our culture, it’s a swarming mass of unconnected dots, so you just retreat to your mobile and post away about your life, believing it will lend definition, but it doesn’t.

MASTERY IS IMPOSSIBLE

You used to know every album, every TV show, every movie. Now there’s so much it’s incomprehensible. Everybody’s talking about their favorites and you feel left out. You want to dig deep and feel a member of the club but who has time to see 13 episodes of this and 39 of that. Meanwhile, those who have not gotten the memo keep telling you they know what’s going on and you’re inadequate when the truth is no one knows and they’re inadequate too.

POSSESSIONS HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING

This is something the older generations cannot accept, just like their forebears could not accept the tumult of the sixties, when the baby boomers disconnected from them. Used to be you were defined by what you owned, that determined status. Now youngsters want to own little and have everything on demand, they want to be foot loose and fancy free. If you’re rooted to your big home and your fancy car you’re over the hill. Especially when they release a new version of everything soon and what you own is obsolete. That’s right, you installed a 5.1 or 9.1 or 13.1 (no that doesn’t exist yet, but it will!) system in your house and then find out it’s obsolete because it’s not voice-controlled and your TV is too small and only 1080 and you get overwhelmed and accept where you are. The hamsters run the wheel trying to keep up, but nobody can keep up. It’s really about you and your circle, your own little life, but that would remove you from competition, and life is a sweepstakes, where you’re ranked by your credit score, your Instagram followers, and if you’re on Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat too, you’ve got no time to spare, social media is a videogame, even more powerful and addictive than anything emanating from a console, the goal is to post and post until your statistics triumph but just when you’ve climbed the mountain they change the game with a new platform and you have to start scoring again. It’s tedious, and it doesn’t keep you warm at night.

ONLINE STATISTICS ARE FAKED

This is the conundrum. You judge someone by their numbers but are they real?

EVERYONE CHEATS

Bill Clinton made it legitimate. Everybody lies to get out of a hole. So you do too. Lawyers took a hit during Watergate and the profession has never regained its status. Truth is for pussies, wimps, everybody’s trumpeting falsehoods, it’s a cultural cancer. And the person standing up for the truth is more interested in the personal accolades than the cause.

YOU’VE GOT TO SERVE SOMEBODY

No one is disentangled. Bob Dylan had it right. Lisa Bloom is defending Harvey Weinstein whom she has a deal with, because being a lawyer is not enough, you have to be rich and famous and part of the entertainment club.

IF YOU’RE NOT WORKING ON YOUR STATUS, YOU’RE LOSING IT

You’ve got to be in front of the public every damn day or you’re forgotten. Take a couple of years off to lick your wounds and inspire yourself and good luck coming back.

LIFE IS SPORTS

There are two teams, right and left, it’s totally tribal, and you’re either on one or the other, no one picks one from column A and two from column B.

GROUPTHINK IS PARAMOUNT

You don’t want to go against the crowd, against your team, otherwise you’ll be ostracized. A nuanced appraisal which shows the situation is complicated just sets you up for hatred from your supposed brethren. The scourge of our society is silence. It’s not the law that’s got us shutting up, but peer pressure.

FORGIVENESS IS RARE

Commit a faux pas and you’re history, taken out of the game, eaten by the lions, hopefully you’ve got enough money to sustain, because you’re not gonna earn any more in your chosen field.

THE MORE EDUCATED YOU ARE, THE MORE SUSCEPTIBLE YOU ARE TO QUACK MEDICAL THEORIES

The elites believe they know better, but they feel powerless like the poor. But they assert their power by believing in quack remedies and refusing to get their children vaccinated.

THE ELITES HAVE CONTEMPT FOR THE POOR AND HAVE NO IDEA HOW THEY LIVE THEIR LIVES

They worked hard to make it, you should too.

So in a world where everything is available at our fingertips, we feel overwhelmed, we feel inadequate, we don’t know what our place is in society. We want to fit in, and we don’t want to sacrifice our identity to do it. But everywhere we go people are talking about what we don’t know and we feel powerless to effect change and all we keep reading is about titans who triumphed who say it was easy leaving out how aggressive they were and what corners they cut.

So the irony is those complaining the loudest are the problem. The newspapers saying they’re underpaid. It won’t be long before you’ll pay for all news, Google is changing its policy, one article will no longer be free. And record companies have buried all the gems from the Napster era. All the alternative and live takes, the unreleased stuff, it’s not on Spotify and it’s not on YouTube, it’s underground once again, meanwhile, the industry is making more money, via streaming.

And the movie industry does not care about you, just China, which invests in it, and the rest of the world which pays to see its high concept movies. How can it be no one you know goes to the movies yet they still get so much ink?

And since everyone needs to be and is entitled to be famous, rankings are abhorred. We cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. So there’s an endless buffet of items from McDonald’s as well as Spago. You just end up eating at the same place. And eating is another incomprehensible endeavor, you’ve got to know every food truck and every chef and have an unlimited budget to partake.

Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer and you’re still complaining.

So, it’s the greatest time to be alive and simultaneously the worst. No one can be bored anymore, the history of entertainment is at your fingertips and you can communicate with everybody you’ve ever known instantly. But you’re lacking meaning in life, while charlatans tell you they have the answer, whether it be the religious right or the bogus left. So you’re left with yourself, which brings us back to the beginning, you’re fighting for your space on the planet yet keep being told you don’t matter, and feeling meaningless to boot. How did we get here?

One thing’s for sure, we’re never going back. Ignore the Luddites complaining about the negative consequences of screen time, they think if they yell loud enough the past will come back, but it won’t.

And the tech titans lack moral responsibility.

So it really does come down to you, and humanity. Give up the race to consume. Give up the attempt to be all-knowing. Information is important, but soft knowledge eclipses it. Relationships, philosophy, those haven’t been changed by the technological revolution, but they’ve been backwatered by industrialists who want to sell you something.

We are in a personal crisis. A moral crisis. We’re unsure how to lead our lives. We want someone to make sense of it all, to point us where to go, so we can be part of the universe, feel connected, because too much of this so-called connection online is leaving us unfulfilled. We’ve got the bounty, but we’re empty inside.

When you get the answer, tell me.

In the era of cacophony.

It was not supposed to be this way. The internet was supposed to level the playing field. The future was to be a vast meritocracy. But we did not realize the internet would allow everyone to have a voice, and with this megaphone hypesters yelled for attention, so we gravitated to trusted sources, and those sources are manipulated by publicists.

I’m not saying you cannot get a foothold alone, using social media tools, I’m just saying the odds of breaking through big are de minimis unless you’re part of the system. Ignore the stories of the lone upstart breaking through, instead focus on the products promoted by the goliaths, the movie studios, major record labels, HBO and Netflix.

Used to be only a few could play. Now that everybody can play, there’s a new tier of success that sits above the broader landscape. Forget those who are already famous, look at those on the way up. When you hear about a new band, a new financier, a new star, the truth is media was not on the hunt for them, but they were promoted by the usual suspects, the PR infrastructure.

Not that good products must not be at the core of the endeavor. For once people pay attention, they want to be satiated, but how do you get yourself in front of everybody’s eyeballs?

Forget spamming. People ignore it. That’s right, e-mail every famous person you can find the address of, tweet them, but the gatekeepers, and believe me they still exist, will ignore you. You need relationships. And you need money, someone to invest in you and push the button.

And you especially need these tools if you want to graduate from the low ranks to the rarefied air. Just like graduating from the lower class to the upper class in an era where the middle class has been decimated, the journey is nearly impossible without help. Help is usually a college degree from a top university and working the relationships. Same in entertainment. You’ve got to pay your dues when no one is looking and then attach yourself to the equivalent of a mentor at P&G or Amazon.

Furthermore, we ignore those without portfolio. You believe you can make it without doing the work, without paying your dues. Which is why most teen phenoms expire, there’s no there there. And the fact that some enterprises boost these no-talents does not undercut the fact that those who last have something at their core.

So we’re ruled by publicity.

Sometimes you can buy it. That’s what Facebook ads are all about. Talk to a concert promoter, they buy them all the time. With data telling them exactly who to target and how frequently.

But that’s after the talent has been made a star.

It’s not about untold appearances, it’s not about carpet-bombing outlets so that every consumer will be touched. Rather it’s about a few placements that influencers take notice of and spread the word on.

Forget being on a late night talk show. But never underestimate the power of an appearance on SNL. Not because anybody will see you, but because everybody will read you were on! And that’s a hard gig to get, the hardest on television, so you must be worth paying attention to.

And a feature in the “Times” or the WaPo, you can decry these outlets as left wing echo chambers but the truth is all influencers pay attention to them. If something is anointed, they know it’s for real, that there’s money behind it, that it’s worth paying attention to. No one wants to invest in an amateur product. It’s like the stock market, it’s like IPOs, it’s like Wall Street. You see who else is involved. Sequoia? I’m in! Because too many ventures run out of cash, are undercapitalized, have good vision but don’t make it.

You want to make it.

And you can’t without the push of publicity. Which is paid for by the gatekeeper known as the major. Having money is not enough, you can hire your own PR person and gain no headway. Once again, outlets deal with the majors every damn day, there are relationships.

PR used to be a backwater. Now it’s the essence of success.

No one makes it alone. Even if they tell you they did. That’s another thing to be wary of, when you read these stories and someone says “it just happened,” ignore that. The truth is success is hard and people are striving for it all day long and they don’t want to appear the workaholic networker they truly are so they soft-pedal it.

You can read the stories, can follow them like sports, or you can make them.

But if you want to make them, you need powerful publicity people. Now, more than ever. If you truly want to be a star.

What kind of crazy fucked-up world do we live in where the only artist of stature standing up to President Trump is an ethnic college graduate who made his bones on Broadway?

One in which the “Hamilton” cast album is the 13th most consumed album of the first half of 2017, and #13 in sales too!

That’s right, “Hamilton” eclipses Harry Styles’s solo debut and Rihanna’s “Anti” and DJ Khaled’s “Grateful” and Khalid’s “American Teen” and Chris Stapleton’s “From A Room; Volume 1,” but it’s almost like it doesn’t exist in the musical discussion. And this is fascinating in a world where “Despacito” came from left field and triumphed. That’s right, the music press and radio are out of touch. “Hamilton” had 472,606,041 audio streams in the first half of the year, eclipsing those of numerous “stars,” but you can’t hear the songs on the radio…

But you will hear them in bedrooms.

“Hair” was a Broadway success in the sixties and cover versions dominated the Top Forty. But that paradigm isn’t happening today, despite Atlantic’s best efforts, because everybody in radio is too cool for school, but the public understands.

“Hamilton” is a phenomenon. I’ve heard more talk about it than any act. And it’s been going on in excess of two years. The artist development story of the past few years is “Hamilton,” not some boy band or rapper.

But “Hamilton” is rap. But since it’s on Broadway the educated whites against Trump who normally pooh-pooh the urban sound can embrace it. And you would too, if you just saw the show.

But you can’t get a ticket.

Katy Perry doesn’t sell out, U2 tickets are far below face value on StubHub, but good luck getting a “Hamilton” ticket at a discount, it doesn’t exist!

So Lin-Manuel Miranda has Puerto Rican roots. And he’s no pussy, he tweeted that Trump Is “going straight to hell,” quite amazing when scores of country music fans are shot in Vegas and the Nashville denizens are all hiding under the couch, silent.

But Lin-Manuel Miranda is educated, unlike most of today’s chart-toppers. He can actually think and analyze issues, and knows he who refuses to stand up for what is right is trampled in the witch-hunt to follow. That’s right, it’s only a matter of time before they come for you.

And Miranda got instant press. That’s the power of a musician. They stand up and people take notice, but most are silent, concerned first and foremost about their pocketbook, unaware that when you lay down your personal truth people can relate most to you. That’s what’s wrong with most of today’s music, it’s spectacle, it’s hollow, it’s the equivalent of junk food.

And here’s where you protest, say that description doesn’t fit you!

But Miranda knows the first rule of music, if you want an audience your music must be palatable. You’re whining in your bad voice sans catchy chorus and you expect people to pay attention? NO WAY!

Now the amazing thing about the technology revolution is you can write and record and distribute nearly instantly, but we haven’t had an instant protest record since Neil Young’s “Ohio” back in the spring of 1970. That’s art, not calculating what will be successful on the chart, but reacting, bouncing off input and laying down your thoughts, creating art without thinking about it. That’s what separates music from movies, the latter are contemplated, the former, when done right, is INSTANT! UNFILTERED!

Now “Almost Like Praying” is catchy and close. It’s not quite “Despacito,” but more people would like this than most of the stuff that dominates the Spotify chart, the only one that matters. Apple’s behind a paywall and YouTube is for kids and fading while we’re at it, ignore “Billboard,” go straight to Spotify, it illustrates what people are really listening to. And will they listen to “Almost Like Praying”?

I don’t know.

But it almost doesn’t matter. A major star, one of the biggest if not THE biggest, believe me, “Hamilton” outgrosses every act on the road with multiple companies working six nights a week, takes a risk but the rest of the industry is too scared to stand up?

Make me puke.

But I’m thrilled Miranda took a stand, he’s a beacon, word passes, that’s how it works, someone leads the way and the rest follow. Kind of like Fallon was anointed king and was unbeatable until Colbert switched up the formula, took a stand, ignored the haters and spoke the truth.

That’s the eternal elixir. What we’re drawn to.

Hell, watch the clip on YouTube, which I just denigrated as a music service but is good for video, “Almost Like Praying” is #3 On Trending, deservedly so, I dare you to watch it without having your heart pitter-patter, without getting excited. You think we have no options. Wrong! Artists can lead the way. Lin-Manuel Miranda just did!

(Note: statistics courtesy of BuzzAngle, view them here:

Mid Year 2017 U.S. Music Industry Report)