What It Means – Spotify

What It Means – YouTube

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a band of whites from the south writes the protest song of the year?

One in which everybody in pop music is so busy self-promoting their hedonistic vision that the sideshow becomes the real show.

Glenn Yarbrough died. If you lived through the sixties you’ll remember him from the Limeliters, from his solo hit “Baby The Rain Must Fall.” He was inspired by Woody Guthrie, he saw music could be an agent for change, it didn’t just have to be mindless drivel.

But that’s what we’re subjected to, in a nation where facts are irrelevant, everybody’s got their own agenda and we have not only political gridlock, but cultural and economic gridlock too. Both sides shout loudly and the issue gets covered up and we all put our tails between our legs and move on. But a song, it has power that transcends and maintains.

He was running down the street
When they shot him in his tracks
About the only thing agreed upon
Is he ain’t coming back

Dead is dead, it’s final. That’s something seemingly only friends and families of the deceased seem to know, for everybody else the person gone is a bargaining chip, a point of discussion to hang your viewpoint upon, after you assassinate the character of someone who cannot defend him or herself.

There won’t be any trial
So the air it won’t be cleared
There’s just two sides calling names
Out of anger, out of fear

Fear, it rules our nation, drummed up by wankers on TV and talk radio, saying how bad our nation is when the truth it’s safer than ever before. It’s all about perception as opposed to reality. And the outside agitators want to fan the flames of despair, it suits them, then you’ll pay fealty to the powers-that-be, give up power over your own destiny, pointing at others as opposed to marching forward yourself, how ever hard that might be.

If you say it wasn’t racial
When they shot him in his tracks
Well, I guess that means you ain’t black
It means that you ain’t black

The Supreme Court says we live in a post-racial society, that voter equality laws are passe, oversight is eliminated, and then the usual suspects make it harder for the underclass to vote.

I mean Barack Obama won
And you can choose where to eat
But you don’t see too many white kids lying
Bleeding on the street

Just because we have a black President, just because separate but equal laws have been struck down, that does not mean we have equality. Today, unless they’re athletes, African-Americans are demonized, as opposed to being given a hand up.

And it happened last weekend
And it will happen again next week
And when they turned him over
They were surprised there was no gun
I mean he must have done something
Or else why would he have run

He’s running because once you’re entangled with the police the games begin, it no longer becomes about the traffic violation, your entire character and past come into question. So, you’re scared. And when people are scared they don’t make the best choices.

And they’ll spin it for the anchors
On the television screen
So we can shrug and let it happen
Without asking what it means

The media… Fox has an agenda. As does Murdoch’s “Wall Street Journal.” But call this out and the right wing just attacks the bleeding heart liberal press trying to get it right, it’s the left wing media that blinks, not Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity stirring up discontent. News is purely entertainment, it’s about the narrative, the personages proud of being on screen and rich, right and wrong are secondary to ratings.

And that guy who killed that kid
Down in Florida standing ground
Is free to beat up on his girlfriend
And wave his brand new gun around
While some kid is dead and buried
And laying in the ground
With a pocket full of Skittles

George Zimmerman may have gotten off, but he’s turned out to be a bad actor, the shooting wasn’t an anomaly, but the discussion is about black kids in hoodies and white fear.

We’re living in an age
Where limitations are forgotten
The outer edges move and dazzle us
But the core is something rotten
And we’re standing on the precipice
Of prejudice and fear

Just because we all have smartphones that does not mean we are not humans, with foibles and problems that need to be addressed. Instead we’re told to be thrilled by social media breakthroughs and to be happy because we have flat screens, huh?

It’s not only the demonization of the blacks, but the poor whites and the hard-working immigrants too. It’s class warfare amongst the lower third, and those in charge, with power, are completely out of touch, or as even right winger Peggy Noonan pointed out…Syrians are settled in poor white communities as opposed to the Beltway. They don’t want people like them in their own neighborhood, even though they’re bleeding heart liberals.

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Roger Ailes is a harasser who fostered a culture of sexual pressure and intimidation throughout Fox News. And when confronted, like every tribe throughout history the team just circled the wagons until Gretchen Carlson stood up for what was right.

Hillary Clinton is running for President as an advocate for us but she’s so entrenched with the rich financiers that she’s not sure what side she’s on.

Donald Trump has taken advantage of tax laws after being born on third base and confuses running for President with promoting a television show and this guy knows what’s going on on Main Street as much as a denizen of Ferguson knows what’s going on on Wall Street.

What’s a poor boy to do?

Play in a rock and roll band!

I don’t expect “What It Means” to get Top Forty airplay. Then again, it’s no “Eve Of Destruction,” it’s a rambling ditty which will make the band’s fans happy, they’ll sing along, but as for the rest of us…

We’ll never hear it.

Then again, I discovered “What It Means” via Spotify’s “Release Radar,” that’s right, algorithms are more trustworthy than personal recommendations, they’re unbiased, they surfaced this track for me.

And listening gives me hope.

“What It Means” won’t make the Drive-By Truckers rich, it will barely expand their audience, but they’re speaking from the heart, they’re doing what’s right, which is hard to achieve when a track has ten writers and just as many hooks put together for a short attention span audience.

Maybe it’s time we listened all the way through, to those saying something as opposed to trying to razzle-dazzle us into submission.

Every revolution starts with one step forward.

And the Drive-By Truckers just took one.

Now it’s your job to follow in their footsteps.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Or, if you prefer your musical references via the UK as opposed to the US, as Dave Edmunds once sang,
Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage, INTO A BRAND NEW CAR!

In case you missed the memo, and I doubt you truly care, Arianna Huffington ankled the “Huffington Post,” to focus on her wellness company, which is like A-Rod leaving the the playing field to become a Yankee advisor, he was toast and no one ever wanted to listen to him anyway, his expertise was doing his own damn job, at best.

And what is Arianna’s job?

Being famous and getting rich.

The HuffPo was a good idea that followed its initially hyped vision ever so briefly.

The HuffPo was gonna take back the dialogue from the right, was gonna own the web if not talk radio, all the liberals angsting about Bush would have their own platform, where they’d write…for free.

Think about that, it wouldn’t go over today. That’s a dead paradigm. We’ll cough up cat videos, post pictures of weddings and anniversaries, but those who provide content for a living, those who are writers, are on to the scam, they’re not working for free.

Not that there aren’t people who will.

Welcome to the modern web, where everybody’s posting but the caliber of writing is so godawful that no one is reading. We don’t even know if your ideas are half-baked, we can’t get past the headline.

And the HuffPo was all about headlines.

It was about search engine optimization to generate clicks which sold advertising. And the team that developed this paradigm wanted to cash out, and did, and the progenitor moved on to create BuzzFeed, and the HuffPo ended up a couple of years and a couple of changes behind it.

Now let’s give credit where credit is due… The HuffPo invented CLICKBAIT!

You know, all those saucy headlines that lead to non-stories. The HuffPo specialized in that, when it started we were still susceptible. But today, Facebook has mounted an assault against clickbait, it ruins the customer experience. But what kind of experience is it when the whole damn site is clickbait?

That’s today’s “Huffington Post.” A lot of headlines and images but no content, it’s the news equivalent of a Twinkie.

But Arianna became more famous and got more rich and the last laugh is on us.

That’s the game today. Marissa Mayer does bupkes at Yahoo but gets rich in the process. It’s about one and done. Having your payday. And then living the good life ever after.

This is not Steve Jobs on a mission to change the world taking a dollar a year in pay. This is all about cashing out, and staying out.

So, you know that the HuffPo was sold to AOL, and you know that AOL was sold to Verizon. And now there’s no place for Arianna, she’s a cog in a machine that doesn’t want her. But the truth is Tim Armstrong and the AOL brass ultimately didn’t want her either.

But this is less about Arianna than the site, the HuffPo itself. It was cutting edge once and didn’t keep up with the times and is now marginalized. A thrill when it launched, now the left wingers would much rather go to Nate Silver’s 538, at least there’s data there, to go along with the analysis, it’s not all puff pieces, empty calories.

And it’s not only the HuffPo, it’s Perez Hilton too. They both kept expanding into new territories, the HuffPo even launching a divorce vertical and Perez/Mario getting into fashion and pets. But these expansions looked exactly like what they were, land grabs to sell more advertising, and we’re sick of ads, we want substance.

So, BuzzFeed does clickbait better than the HuffPo. It’s clickbait with a twist, they create the content, and source it out everywhere, as opposed to the HuffPo consolidating others’ stories. Aggregation sites are history, we’re inundated with links, we now live in an app economy, on our mobile devices, we choose who gets through the filter and if you don’t, you’re irrelevant.

And Facebook at least pays lip service to its users. The HuffPo was almost always above its target audience, holier-than-thou just like Arianna herself.

It’s a modern tech story, no different from Osborne Computer or Kaypro or WordPerfect or other titans that triumphed and faded away.

They stopped innovating, they didn’t keep up with the times, then they were extinct.

Music is better, because if you’ve had hits you can trade on them forever, people always want to relive the good times.

Then again, the who moved my cheese people can’t get over the death of rock and the rise of pop music and EDM, they refuse to embrace change, they want the past to return, and that’s never gonna happen.

And the new music stars know the game has changed. Only an oldster spends three years polishing an album, the new kids on the block, led by the rappers, personified by Drake, are constantly in the marketplace, even releasing mixtapes for free. Because they know if you’re not in the show, you’re soon to be forgotten. There’s a tsunami of info and if you don’t catch the wave, ride it to the beach and hold on for dear life, you’ll be plowed under, taken out to sea and never heard from again.

Still, the joke is on us. Because we buy this crap. The concept that Arianna Huffington is a star with gravitas entitled to our attention. Not admitting she’s a creature of the media, she’s barely different from Kim Kardashian, but the latter is richer, and if not educated, even more street smart.

So, if you’re following Arianna into her wellness venture I’m laughing. Why exactly should we be listening to her, because she wrote a book? If I want to know about sleep I’ll go to a doctor, I’ll go to an expert, someone who dedicated his life to the cause as opposed to a trendmeister out for a buck.

But bucks she has, from her divorce and the sale of the HuffPo. Arianna’s a winner. Because that’s the American game, making something out of nothing and getting rich in the process.

But when so many are struggling, when the real problems of this nation not only go unsolved, but unaddressed, it’s unseemly that we’ve got a coterie of people who’ve rigged the game to get rich and famous yet have contributed almost nothing to society.

You might hate the cops, but on a good day they keep the peace.

As for teachers, there are tons of bad ones, but they’re on the front lines of the future, educating our children, they’re where the rubber meets the road but we keep complaining about their unions. Come on, teachers haven’t been well off since Reagan, many have other jobs, they can’t live on their pay.

And I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of either police or educators, all I’m saying is they’re underpaid people who are truly making a difference.

Does Mark Zuckerberg make a difference?

Well, he allows us to connect with everybody we ever knew, but is this the basis for a productive society? Where you roll up the world’s population to sell them ads and bogus information?

We’ve got it wrong folks, we need a reset. Don’t confuse today’s tech titans with the progenitors. This is not Bill Gates contributing to productivity, putting a computer on every desktop, this is mostly wankers coming up with lame ideas that hoodwink us so they can get rich.

Of course there are exceptions, Uber is a breakthrough, Airbnb too, however disruptive.

But selling advertising in new ways? Utilizing subterfuge to get us to pay attention?

If that’s your goal, if that’s your achievement, you should be exposed.

And I’m exposing Arianna Huffington here.

Furthermore, she was a bad techie. Steve Jobs brought us the mouse, got rid of the floppy, kept killing the past to get on with the future. Arianna just stuck where she was, a one hit wonder with a pretty lame song to begin with.

Good riddance.

There aren’t going to be any jobs.

Did you read Farhad Manjoo’s article in yesterday’s “New York Times”? All about Amazon’s distribution, now moving to drones? If you get your package via drone, and the costs drop as distribution becomes more efficient, not only do all those delivery people lose their gigs, and the people in the warehouse, which runs on robots, too, but so do the people in physical retail, which can no longer compete.

Sounds good, very efficient, BUT WHERE IS EVERYBODY SUPPOSED TO WORK!

The good news is you can have instant access to products at a cheap price.

The bad news is you can’t afford to buy anything.

Been to a mall recently? Absolutely horrifying. There’s no one there! I went to the Westside Pavilion for a movie and the place was empty and half the food stalls had closed and I know that’s anecdotal, but look at Nordstrom’s numbers and Macy’s too, the latter is closing so many stores…

But you hear the canard that manufacturing must come back to America. That people need to be put back to work at high-paying jobs.

But I hate to tell you, even if they open those factories most of the jobs will be automated, never mind what labor there is driving costs up untenably. Do you want to pay more for a flat screen so Americans can go back to work? We live in the least altruistic society ever, it’s all about me, all the damn time, no one wants to sacrifice. If you think people care about poor musicians, you probably didn’t live through Napster, as for YouTube…the public LOVES IT!

And it gets worse… The triumphant companies making more money with fewer people are dominating in a way that will ultimately hurt the little guy.

Kind of like Apple Music, overpaying for exclusives. Myopic musicians like the cash. No fan ever liked an exclusive. But, the truth is there are no exclusives for developing artists, certainly not those who are not major label priorities. It’s going to be harder to make it. If Apple Music with no free tier succeeds it’ll be good for the top line performers, but bad for those on the bottom.

The winner take all economy is leaving the rest of us out. It’s not only Facebook decimating MySpace, there’s room for less art, you can make it, but no one will see it.

And it’s only gonna get worse. Elizabeth Warren castigates the Silicon Valley titans for their egregious behavior, but the two candidates running do not.

And right now it looks like Hillary’s gonna win.

So it’s gonna be the same as it ever was. With the rank and file losing out. Remember when the rank and file bitched and started the Occupy movement? It’s the media that killed it, saying there was no message. Oh, there’s a message all right. The oligarchs and the monopolists are making life hard for the rest of us. They give us free products in exchange for our privacy and expect us to be happy. And if we dare to push back, with Adblock Plus, they cry foul.

Let’s not even get into Trump. He’s a bozo who’s left rationality behind. But one thing’s for sure, his supporters are angry.

It’s this anger, on both the left and the right, that should be addressed.

But it’s not.

Because the educated winners who made their own bucks feel entitled and don’t want to give up anything and they’ve convinced the underclass that the problem is not them, but the supposed “takers.” And if the rich pay more in taxes, what’s gonna happen when you become rich? Even though the odds are low, it’s this dream that keeps you moving forward.

The discussion is all wrong. It shouldn’t be about immigration or trade… We should acknowledge the change in our society, how it’s become automated, and we should ask how we lift up all players, give them a platform to survive and hopefully thrive.

But no, you’re not making it because you’re just not working hard enough. Even though I had rich parents who gave me not only tutors, but flew me around the world to show me how the other half lives. And then I worked hard to get into a good school and… I started my own business and made a billion. I’M ENTITLED TO IT! I’M SMART AND YOU’RE NOT!

And you’re frustrated and on drugs since my buddies at the pharmaceutical company forced supposedly non-addictive Oxy down your throat and now you’ve switched to heroin and…

It’s not a level playing field folks. And those in the media are envious of the billionaires, which is why Henry Blodgett started “Business Insider,” so he could sell it, why Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher left the “Wall Street Journal” so they too could become rich… Either you’ve won and have circled the wagons or you’re one of the small cadre with a chance of succeeding because of your relationships and status or…

You’re completely left out, like you and me.

Think about it.

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My Own Worst Enemy – Spotify

My Own Worst Enemy – YouTube

This is the best Aerosmith song in decades!

I discovered it via “Release Radar,” Spotify’s new, algorithm-driven, customized new release playlist.

That’s right, Spotify. No, I don’t get paid by them. Yes, the site is imperfect, but not only is it the best streaming service, it’s got a free tier so we’ve all got access, we can all participate, we can all be part of the group, and in this social world that’s everything.

It was a stealth release. “Release Radar” that is. There was a press release last week and then…nothing. Spotify’s got some of the worst marketing of all time. But, the service…

The word is out on “Discover Weekly,” the playlist custom-tailored to you based on what you’ve listened to. And although I’ve discovered a lot of good stuff via “Discover Weekly,” most of it’s far from brand new, and it’s the new stuff I hunger to be exposed to.

And, so far, “Release Radar” is far superior to “Discover Weekly,” the hit to shit ratio is so much higher. With “Discover Weekly” I just click through to find something good, with “Release Radar” almost every track has me listening through.

And my customized new release playlist started off with…

A transcendent version of “Send In The Clowns” by Bryan Ferry, who even knew it was out?

And a new cut by Jamestown Revival.

And a good Florida Georgia Line cut with Tim McGraw.

But it’s the Steven Tyler cut that closed me.

I was aware the album was out, the hype reached me, Tyler’s got a way of promoting without looking like he’s doing so, but going country is still a cheap shot and the initial single, “Love Is Your Name,” didn’t reach me.

But “My Own Worst Enemy”…

You see we don’t know where to start, we might not even know the album is out, and if we do, what track do we listen to?

Lord knows how the algorithm picked out “My Own Worst Enemy,” but it’s looking like the machine is gonna beat the humans, not for the first time, after all, didn’t that IBM computer win on “Jeopardy”?

Now the haunting acoustic intro of “My Own Worst Enemy” sets the mood. This is late night swamp music, when the iPhone camera is clicked off and illicit things happen and you experience the highest highs and the lowest lows of life.

And the stunning thing is…it sounds exactly like Tyler! Like he stepped right out of “Get Your Wings.”

But, the song…it’s more than serviceable, but it doesn’t close you.

And then… At 1:15, after the chorus, when the keyboard kicks in, when the rest of the band kicks in, this is the “Dream On” formula, the whole thing is amped up, reminiscent of what once was but without being a remake.

And the chorus could be better, but then there’s that twist at the very end, when he sings he was wrong, he’s his own worst enemy, you’re intrigued.

And then the strings kick in, Tyler’s vamping, and you’re telling yourself, THIS IS GOOD!

And the accordion adds texture, but what puts it over the top is…the searing guitar solo at 3:40, just when the song fades out, just when you think it’s done, this is the Guns N’ Roses trick, this is what made those Aerosmith records iconic, the wailing on the six string, you’ll be sitting at home blown away, this is the Aerosmith sound you LOVED!

How did this happen? How did Steven Tyler do everything wrong to do everything right? Going on “Idol” for the dough, eviscerating his credibility, his foibles now all over the tabloid press. And Hootie went country but he was so much younger, and every other rocker with a deal has gone Nashville, Tyler was through the door so late that…

Nashville is not embracing him.

But if you’re an old, dyed-in-the-wool rocker…

This is a REVELATION!

Turns out “My Own Worst Enemy” was produced by T-Bone Burnett, with Tyler’s help, demonstrating that the Alpha Band player via the Rolling Thunder Review movie soundtrack guy most memorable for his work with Counting Crows…STILL HAS IT!

And the song was written by Tyler with the Warren Brothers, whoever they are, it’s not a complete song for hire, it’s not just the Nashville formula.

And you’re gonna put this on and say I’m wrong. And if you’re a wanker you’re gonna click off. But if you’re open to being closed you’re gonna let “My Own Worst Enemy” play through and…

Goddamn it, you’ll discover, IT’S GOOD!

P.S. Be sure to hang on through the fade-out, all five minutes and eleven seconds of this cut, it’s like “Sister Morphine,” “Moonlight Mile,” “November Rain,” but it’s BRAND NEW, and isn’t that what we’re looking for, a way to be turned on to the best of what’s coming out, as we march forward in this incomprehensible world we inhabit?