“Callous Billboard survey asks: Who’s lying, Kesha or Dr. Luke?”

It’s the pursuit of clicks.

And I’d laugh if it wasn’t emblematic of our country at large.

Kind of like this Biden madness. The only person pointing out the fallacy in a Biden run is Nate Silver, who suddenly no longer has a platform of significance, so he’s being drowned out by the prognostications of those looking for clicks, doing so without any data input whatsoever. Forget Silver’s tweets, which are being sent into a no-man’s land from which they will never escape, but on his site, fivethirtyeight.com, they parse the data and show that no one entering the race this late has ever won the nomination:

Joe Biden Is Buying Time By Playing The Media

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

Kind of like Lucian Grainge losing his job. Remember that one? A completely insane idea that was cooked up by someone looking to retaliate against Universal Music. But, once again, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Kind of like facts in general. There’s an interesting article in today’s “New York Times” how facts don’t matter, how people are just digging their heels in deeper, flaunting internet searches to boost their position

“The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths”

It’s what we see everywhere, the disempowered use bogus science and the megaphone of the internet to spread a story that’s just not true. Can you say vaccinations? Then there’s everybody up in arms about GMOs. Label them all you want, but the truth is you’re consuming genetically modified items on a regular basis, it’s how companies compete with pests.

But they cannot stop you. From saying whatever you want. In your ignorance. That’s what “Hamilton” has so right, that you’ve got to be in the room to know what’s going on. But since that excludes nearly everybody, they go online anyway and spew their ignorance.

But the difference is the media is now on the bandwagon. The oldsters wondering how to make the transition to digital and the newbies trying to steal their thunder. And since we live in a world where money is everything, we’ve evolved into a lowest common denominator culture wherein you’ll say anything if it gets clicks.

Otherwise why have this “Billboard” survey.

Talk about a company caught flat-footed by the internet revolution. The outlet still can’t catch up, it still hasn’t figured out how to adequately measure today’s success. They’ve rolled up sales and streams into a concoction no one can understand, that is nearly meaningless, because they’re too afraid to piss off any vested interest.

But the truth is the moribund music industry has no cash to invest in advertising, so “Billboard” has gone mass market. But it doesn’t do this as well as Buzzfeed and the rest of the outlets who started on the internet. So we’ve got endless analysis which is equivalent to “this is what happened, I called the people involved, this is what they said” reported by nobodies who’ll write for someone else soon. Now, more than ever, we want trusted sources, and the writers for “Billboard” are not that.

It’s what we need in America at large. Leaders.

One could argue that Kanye West is one, or was one, before his campaign became about rich fashion houses keeping him down. Huh? Bernie Sanders knows you’ve got to make it about everyman, but Kanye keeps making it about himself. Is this the message we want to send, one of personal aggrievement and aggrandizement?

Which is what we’ve got. Everybody’s online establishing their brand, irrelevant if there’s any content behind it. Interested in himself, not anyone else. And the noise is deafening and the supposed paragons of excellence have punted.

The “Wall Street Journal” has become like its cousin Fox News. Remember when we used to get pissed about the bias of that outlet? Now everybody knows Fox News is Republican blather, not radically different from Rush Limbaugh’s spewings.

And “Billboard” has decided it’s not about facts, but eyeballs. And sure, audience is important, but you used to gain that with gravitas, credibility ruled.

But no one’s home at the outlet anyway. Did they even call a  lawyer before they started the shenanigans? Sure, the people they’re asking about are public figures, but falsehoods only reign unfettered when they’re not said with malicious aforethought. Who’s vetting the rumors spewed by respondents?

Or maybe you can consider it opinion.

But don’t we have too much of that already?

Let’s see what the courts have to say about Dr. Luke and Kesha.

The music business is self-correcting. Do a bad job and you lose your job.

As for “Billboard”…

Want a few hints?

Make a few stars. Have someone on your staff who we can believe in. Hell, even hire a few people who can run stats and interpret them.

Even better, redesign your site. It’s so poor it takes away from anything written.

And know that when the market is in turmoil, you succeed by going upscale, not downscale. You don’t get down into the pit, you rise above it.

But that’s impossible at “Billboard” today. Because there’s no one home. No one running the operation with any history and understanding of the music business. And the staff… Worthless wimps bloviating about what they don’t know uninterestingly.

So let this be a lesson. Fight back against the inanity. Refuse to let click-bait rule. Know that when this is all done, we’ll have a bunch of winners who extrude comprehension from chaos.

We’ll have a few hit records.

And a few rulers.

We want someone to believe in, who makes sense.

And right now, all we’ve got is Donald Trump. And that’s a start. He’s a beacon for the future. Standing up to Roger Ailes and Fox News. Not worrying about what the establishment thinks.

But Trump is a buffoon who can’t win.

But there are a bunch of winners out there. Let’s get behind them and weed out all the nonsense.

Like the kind you find in “Billboard.”

Here’s The Thing – Penn Jillette’s Marathon Life in Magic

I’m curious. Everybody’s got a story and I want to hear it. I’ll posit your story is your life’s work, how can you convey your experiences such that a listener will get the gist of who you are, where you’re coming from, what you’re about.

Back before David Letterman turned late night into a comedy program, Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett interviewed people. They didn’t have to come prepared with a funny story, they just had to answer the questions, they just had to be real, they just had to be themselves.

And this is the underbelly of the podcast revolution. Human beings are long-winded, they’ve got a lot to say, and the truth is we want to hear it. How did you get here? Are you happy? What’s the truth behind that rumor? These questions are all answered in podcasts, and right now the man doing the best job as inquisitor is Alec Baldwin.

Who knew? Short-fused actor turns out to be an intellectual, who can banter with the best of them. That’s right, asking questions is not enough, you’ve got to parse the answers, know when to go deeper. And when you’ve got a guest who’s willing, the results are stunning.

I’m not a huge fan of magic, or juggling. But I love Penn & Teller. Because they know the whole thing is a ruse, that there is no magic, that there is no channeling. They’re a constant warning to raise your level of perception, to realize this world is full of hokum and once you become a victim, you’re hopeless. And Penn goes into this, when he found out Kreskin was faking it, he became completely disillusioned. But, if it’s presented on stage, if people go home knowing you didn’t saw that woman in half and you didn’t read anybody’s mind, he’s comfortable with that.

What is Penn’s career based on?

Juggling. Takes six years to be good. That’s why the teen phenoms come and go. There’s no there there, they’ve never done the work.

And after practicing, the work Penn Jillette did was street-performing.

But not like everybody else. He wore a three thousand dollar watch, a multi-thousand dollar suit. Because his goal was to get you to put a twenty in the hat, not a quarter. Penn defined his goals and knew how to get there. And knew if you were just like everybody else, you had no chance.

What else did Penn possess?

An incredible line of b.s. That’s how you succeed in the world. Through conversation. You have to know how to open the door and then put your foot in it and keep it open, a skill most don’t have, never mind work on. “Pay attention to my stuff!” is not banter, and it doesn’t work. Penn got the drama critic of the “Philadelphia Inquirer” to come to his magic show by not only going to see him, but demonstrating his wares live, to the point the critic was intrigued. Professionals are all jaded, they’re suckers for something new and good, and only that.

And, Penn was willing to stand up for himself. That’s the difference between baby boomers and millennials. Question authority, speak truth to power, the boomers were taught by their heroes, to let their freak flags fly and be themselves. Whereas millennials are all about fitting in. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t work in a cubicle farm, busy praising everybody else’s work and eating lunch together and being nice. Winners are unique loners, like Penn. He can only be himself. And this is what draws people to him. He told the “Inquirer” critic his review was crap, that he misunderstood the show. The “Inquirer” critic then asked Penn for an interview and the right to re-review the show.

Not that every authority figure is amenable. But life is long and hard, and if you’re busy sucking up you might make it to the top of the corporation, but you’ll never make it to the top of the art heap.

At least not before. In today’s me-too world, that’s what people expect. And then “Book of Mormon” and “Hamilton” blow everybody away and clean up all the money.

As for music… If you’ve read an interesting interview with one of today’s stars you probably think the Top Ten is fantastic. But you can’t even say that, you’re castigated for being a naysayer if you decry what’s popular and laugh at what’s unpopular, like jazz and classical, whose proponents believe they got screwed instead of seeing times changed and to win today…you’ve got to be Dudamel, a man of the people who’s a great performer with his own mind.

We’re looking for individuals. Who are probably gonna make it long after they started. Overnight success is about old men propping you up, you’re just a figurehead.

But everybody says not to take a risk, to make it bite-sized, to make it palatable.

But that’s not what they do in podcasts.

I’m shocked. Positively shocked, I tell you. You mean educated people are working around the clock to make tons of money and be granted stock options all at the same time? While you revel in guaranteed delivery of quality products at a discount seemingly instantly?

Kinda reminds me of the Wal-Mart problem. You know, moving into town and hollowing out Main Street. The only problem was…people liked the discounts.

And so do you.

Oh, don’t tell me it’s a first world problem or the other rejoinder you employ to make yourself feel holier-than-thou, saying you can wait an extra day for an Amazon delivery. The truth is you like the price and convenience. Remember the pre-Amazon days, when you had no idea of the value of a product and got ripped off at your local appliance store? And are you willing to pay triple for a flat screen? If not, manufacturing ain’t coming back to America, no way.

So this is the way it works. America is split into the haves and have-nots. And the way the have-nots survive with any degree of happiness is by drinking and screwing and partying. Take away their vices and they’ve got nothing. Certainly not upward mobility, to get that you’d have to move to socialist Europe or Canada. Here in the free United States we have the right to start at the bottom and stay there…SO THERE!

But if per chance you’re upper middle class, or even upper class, you’ve got to stay that way. So you pursue the bucks. And the only places bucks are guaranteed are in finance and tech. As for the gigs… I just read John LeFevre’s book on finance entitled “Straight To Hell.” Promoted for the debauchery, what impressed me was the drudgery. If you want to do this work when you grow up no wonder you want to be paid well, for to sacrifice years on this planet to wasting your time is…a waste.

No wonder people want to pursue the arts. But they believe they’re entitled to a living in the arts. Not everybody wants to be a garbage man, but seemingly everybody wants to be a rapper. To get paid by Spotify, garner endorsements and tour to beaucoup bucks. Never forgetting the audience is cash-strapped and if they’re gonna lay down their money they want value, and you rarely deliver it.

Used to be you could do an honest day’s work for a living, but that was back when we had unions and other ways of protecting the middle class. And, of course, don’t get your knickers in a twist, unions occasionally took it too far, BUT DOESN’T EVERYBODY?

You berate Jeff Bezos while you lionize him. He’s a billionaire seer? From taking a risk and sleeping with one eye open. Because if another site, like Jet.com, never mind all the litter on the side of the information superhighway, drops prices a whit, you’re shifting loyalty. He’s driving his workers so you’ll be happy, not them. Because in tech it’s eat or be eaten. Can you say Kaypro and Osborne and BlackBerry and Nokia?

So what did we expect? Bezos to continue to employ the losers and let everybody go home at five? As for his competitors in the tech sphere… You know why they provide lunch and dry cleaning… SO YOU’LL STAY THERE AND WORK!

And we could certainly change as a society. But we refuse to.

We don’t want guaranteed vacations, like in Germany, where you can’t even take your company smartphone on holiday, we don’t want a social safety net, we want everybody to suffer just as much as we are because we’re working around the clock trying to get ahead and if we made it, WE EARNED IT!

Everybody’s so self-satisfied in America, like they grew up in a vacuum, as if Donald Trump wasn’t the beneficiary of bankruptcy laws, never mind the fat cat bitching about entitlements for the poor people…who buy their products and keep their companies alive, never mind guarantee their huge salaries.

We could admit we’re all in it together and have a giant kumbaya moment, but then you wouldn’t be able to live in a gated community and fly private. That’s right, the great unwashed would be able to come right up to your door and scare you, never mind do something worse.

So we need a bogeyman. The immigrants! The blacks! The uneducated! We want to point the finger at everybody but ourselves. We want our workers to be trained, but we want to charge them so much for college the only reason it makes sense to go is you can’t get a job without a degree. Oh, college could be free, but then taxes would be higher, but you know the government…IT WASTES MONEY!

But what about Amazon, what about the Fire Phone? If Amazon was the government Republicans would be agitating for it to be shut down for this failure, because after all we gave the company all that money through our purchases and they WASTED IT!

And the Democrats believe in government, but they’re wimps when it comes to corporations. They beg companies for money and are then beholden to them. So, we can’t get hedge fund fat cats to pay taxes at ordinary rates. Good luck changing that, when Henry Kravis and his buddies donate so prodigiously.

Our whole damn nation is hypocritical. Our only savior is…

ART!

But artists are not satisfied spreading the message, speaking the truth, they too want to get rich. Scratch a musician and he’ll start poor-mouthing. As for writers, they want to sue Amazon, for being so successful. They want to jet back to the past, where distribution was limited and publishers ripped them off with a smile.

I’m glad the “New York Times” exposed working conditions at Amazon. But I wish it engendered a conversation about America, not the company in Seattle. If only people asked how we got here. Where our best and brightest are working like rats in a cage so they can have the trappings of wealth. With a public that views the almighty dollar as king.

Economics baby, it rules our country.

You’re either a winner or a loser.

And we define those who win as those with the money.

Which those people up in Seattle have.

We pay lip service to teachers but laugh at their five figure salaries. We say if they had any balls they’d be entrepreneurs. But they’re educating our children. Well, not MY children, I send them to PRIVATE SCHOOL!

I personally don’t have any children. If so, I’d be worried. California can get everybody to reduce water consumption instantaneously but our whole nation can’t reduce carbon pollution because we’re too busy giving Exxon Mobil subsidies and coal companies pay our politicians.

And I’m not saying things can’t be fixed.

But they only will be when we have a good, honest look at what we’ve become. A society with a self-reinforcing rich class and everybody else just trying to survive. One in which no one can sacrifice, not their job, nothing. At least those culled from Amazon’s workforce weren’t bitching about getting canned. Same thing happens in the music industry and players with lame tunes blame everybody but themselves.

We’ve got to start blaming ourselves.

I’m a sucker for an acoustic guitar.

That’s right, in this electronic world of 0’s and 1’s, something natural, something evidencing humanity, grabs me and has me paying attention.

At least once a week, I cruise the Country playlists on Spotify. And it’s astounding how much of it’s formulaic, me-too crap. All about beer and trucks and… When I hear something different and it rings my bell, I don’t push the button to fast-forward, I listen.

She was dancin’ in a sundress under a Carolina sunset on the last night of MerleFest

Huh? Jerrod Niemann is singing about one of America’s hippest festivals, one people have been e-mailing me about for years, telling me it’s the one I can’t miss, the one that doesn’t fly on the mainstream radar?

Told me she ain’t missed one since the summer she turned eighteen

Used to be it was how big your record collection was, now it’s how many wristbands you’ve got, where you’ve been. It’s not only the Grateful Dead themselves who’ve come back, but their entire ethos.

She had a flower in her hair, a little smoke was in the air

Freedom. It’s what we all want, what we are all too uptight to pursue. If we don’t apply ourselves, work on our careers, we’re going to be left behind, broke down and busted on the side of the road. So we envy those who are willing to cast aside the precepts, to hedonistically pursue being alive.

We were chillin’ in some lawn chairs saying we wish we could’ve seen Woodstock

Don’t think the young don’t envy the oldsters, their ability to see not only Zeppelin, but all the bands on that stage in the Catskills. They feel they missed out. On not only the music, but the experience.

Told me she was leaving in the morning, headed down to New Orleans
Said boy, you oughta come along and I know I shoulda gone

The last time I blew off my plans was when my buds knocked on my door at midnight and encouraged me to skip the LSAT to drive up to Montreal. Which I did. Saw a Truffaut movie and a border cop found a seed in the glove box of Hughes’s Biscayne on the way back. Sometimes I wish I was more free and easy, took more risks.

She’s a Bonnaroo baby, she’s Coachella crazy
She’ll be folking out in Newport, you’ve probably seen her before
Up at Lollapalooza, in the mud at Wakarusa
She’ll be at the Hangout down in Alabama
Just look for the girl in the blue bandana

And there you have a recitation of every famous festival in America today. And there are many. Not only the biggies, like Bonnaroo and Coachella, but Newport and Hangout. Listening makes you want to go, to have the music set you free. That’s what the festival promises, an escape from the way it is from Monday through Thursday. And here’s this woman who’s following the festivals like we used to follow the bands, from town to town, like Deadheads and Phish Heads.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say the lyrics were overbaked, nearly lowest common denominator. But then there’s that sound… The dynamics from quiet to loud, the anthemic quality, rock and roll before it became harder-edged and left so many out. Country is a big tent, like the above-mentioned festivals. And it turns out we all want to go.

Where we’re the stars. Where we let our freak flags fly. Where we’re happy. So it’s no wonder the song closes with…

Now I’ve got a beat-up van and I’m drivin’ ‘cross this land
Lookin’ for a blue bandana

He’s chasing the dream. He wants that feeling back, of being free.

So do I.

And so do you.

We’re all looking for the girl in the blue bandana.

Rhinofy-Blue Bandana Spotify

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