There’s just too much of EVERYTHING!

We’ve got the world at our fingertips, yet we know less than ever before, lack control not only of our government and society, but our personal lives too. We have fear of missing out, but we’re not sure what’s worth doing. The old admire the young and the young laugh at the old but the dirty little secret is the nascent generation can’t handle it either. Turns out you can’t multi-task, that was a media canard that’s been debunked. How do you cope?

Some check out. Especially the oldsters. Not a week goes by when you don’t see an article decrying smartphones or the internet, as if you could turn back time, as if the future doesn’t always arrive.

Others boast that they’ve got it nailed. Somehow, they can update their Facebook page, post on Instagram and keep their job, meanwhile having the free time to tell you all about it. You can either feel inferior or judge them. But the latter is equivalent to hatred, and we all abhor the haters.

Democrats keep calling the Republicans uninformed, which is hard not to do when their candidate keeps espousing falsehoods with no penalty.

And the Republicans feel the Democrats are unaware of their plight. They’re sick of being told what’s going on in their own hometown when the speakers have never set foot there.

And those speaking loudest fly private and don’t engage with anybody but their brethren, they live inside a bubble yet are unaware of this.

There are too many movies. Did you check today’s paper, at least twenty came out, who can keep track, never mind view them. Used to be you knew the up and coming actors from bit parts here and there, now “Vanity Fair” and “TMZ” feature stars you’ve never heard of, and then you ask your children and they haven’t heard of them either. It’s like there’s a whole industry making people famous, but we’ve still got to keep up with the travails of Meg Ryan and Jane Fonda and…how many people can you keep in your brain at one time anyway?

And TV… That’s a constant topic of conversation, what series should I binge on next. And you have to not only collect the data, but pass it through the sieve of the tastemaker’s personality. Sure, “Game Of Thrones” is great, but I don’t like fantasy, now what?

As for music… There are twenty million-odd tracks and it seems whenever you hear something new it either rubs you the wrong way or it’s not quite good enough. And then, when you’re just about to check out, turn the damn thing off, someone serves up something so exquisite you remember how much you love music, but you’ve got no idea how to follow it up, how to find the next great thing.

Babies are scheduled.

Schoolchildren have no free time.

Amy Schumer is working so much she can’t possibly have a personal life. But if you’re not in the public eye 24/7 you’re falling behind. And isn’t it funny how women have mastered this game, it’s the men who are forgotten.

That’s another element. Not only is there too much info, the rules keep changing. New apps take over for old. No one cares about the second link on Google, even the search engine itself, which is more like Wikipedia today, serving up a synopsis as opposed to a link.

And you’re using the service all the time. Nothing is unknown, so you spend endless time looking it up.

And if someone texts you and you don’t get back to them immediately they figure you’re dead, or you’ve ghosted them.

But no one will admit to all this. We’re all keeping up an image. That’s what social media is all about, demonstrating not only our fabulous lives, but that we’ve got it covered, we know it all, when the truth is we know so little.

Youngsters know that if they don’t fight hard for success, they’ll be left behind, there’s no time for finding yourself, watching the wheels go by. Only the toppermost keep telling us this, in their interviews in the media, that a first job is not as important as where you end up. But we can’t get first jobs, and why is it that everybody with a seven digit income has all the answers? College professors are to be pushed back upon, but techies lean in.

But we’re already sick of Sheryl Sandberg, a woman we’ll never meet who we know too much about, actually, more than our neighbors. We hate that which we cannot touch, because we believe it’s holding us back, so we go online and tear them down and these icons protest that they’re just people too.

But exactly what is a person in the teens? Someone who does good deeds, who can keep up their end of a conversation? Or someone who posts really good YouTube clips and has a passel of subscribers. We know money counts, but we’re told everything is about experiences, so we’re confused.

We’re all confused.

This is what the internet, the information revolution, has wrought.

And we haven’t yet figured out a way to cope with it.

And it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that we’ve got no framework. Playlists try to help, but then there are a zillion of those too. And no one has enough time to weed through all the options.

Is that what life has become, an endless weeding through the options, keeping up to date on social media, maintaining soft ties, titillated by online porn, but sans long term personal relationships?

We used to have leaders, heroes who pointed the way.

Now there are people who tell us they have all the answers, yet ultimately we find out they’re clueless too. Meaning it’s all about us. But it can’t just be about us, we live in a society, there’s got to be a hierarchy, but who’s deserving of our adulation?

That’s the human condition today. We’re all in it together, tied up online, but we’ve never felt so separate, and unsure where to turn next.

We’ll figure it out eventually.

But right now it’s utter chaos.

So this is what it takes to get Led Zeppelin back together.

I was getting worried, I figured this would be a slam dunk, that the jury would come back in an hour or two and let Robert and Jimmy off the hook. The fact that they didn’t showed they were thinking about it.

That’s what it’s come down to, eight nobodies weighing in on the provenance of rock and roll.

But where there’s a hit, there’s a writ. And let’s be honest, Zeppelin has nicked songs before. But seemingly the only person who wanted Spirit to win this case was Randy California’s attorney, the public believed it a bridge too far, don’t mess with the canon, our history, what we live for.

Did Robert and Jimmy tell the truth?

Damned if I know, but I do know someone who lied on the stand in a well-known music industry case. And if you believe selective omission is the same as a lie, well…

Then again, musicians were never known for their honesty, otherwise why would they keep firing managers and exhibiting duplicitous behavior that might deliver short term results, but long term penalties.

Are the tracks similar?

OF COURSE!

Is it infringement?

Well, you’ve got an arcane copyright law that doesn’t square with reality. KInd of like the DMCA and YouTube. Washington and the legal system are always a step behind, and if you look to them to solve your problems you’re gonna waste a lot of time and money and probably end up with a less than satisfactory result. Meaning, the end of the YouTube “value gap” will come from negotiation, not legislation.

And music, despite being made on computers, is not zeros and ones. It cannot be stuck in a framework, evaluated by a machine. It’s amorphous and alive and that’s its appeal.

So chalk one up for the creative community, which believed after the “Blurred Lines” case that everything was up for grabs.

But it had gone too far. That Sam Smith song is not “I Won’t Back Down,” unless you believe that Petty tune is also one of many.

Everybody’s too afraid.

Then again, these same rightsholders killed sampling, changing the trajectory of hip-hop, and have also played whac-a-mole with reuse.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. Nothing’s truly original. We’re a sum of our influences.

But where’s the line?

Who knows.

But it’s been pushed back.

Yet the real revelation at the trial was how little money “Stairway” actually made. The performers’ accountant said Page earned $615,000 and Plant $532,000 since 2011, Rhino said the song grossed $3 million and netted $868,000 in the same period.

THAT’S PEANUTS!

That’s not tech money. Maybe not chump change, but nowhere near the $60 million the plaintiff’s expert alleged.

You see there’s just not that much money in music. Much less than we believe. We think if you’re famous, you’re rich, but this is patently untrue. Of course, the Zeppelin boys had other income from their catalog, they did well, but not as well as they did in the seventies, before financiers raped and pillaged and techies became the new rock stars.

This trial brought rock back to earth. Pulled off the scrim and illustrated that not only are its players old, they care about money. Remember when Zeppelin flew back to England after their Madison Square Garden payment was stolen? They showed up here.

Then again, it’s rumored they stole that money themselves.

Then again, it’s about dignity and reputation.

But…

Feel free to steal again. Know that every juror does not see the famous as a deep pocket. Know that the line is truly blurry.

And if you want to get rich…

DO SOMETHING ELSE!

It’s not surprising pop dominates.

It is surprising it’s marginalized everything else.

You’ve got to go back to MTV. It was a rock world. Disco made inroads but in a racist, homophobic uprising rock fans killed it. And then Bob Pittman and his minions declared MTV an AOR outlet. That’s “Album Oriented Rock” for the great unwashed. A misnomer in that the tracks CAME from albums, but stations no longer went deep.

MTV minted new stars. Most famously Duran Duran and Culture Club, which AOR refused to play. As a result, Top Forty stations appeared on the FM dial to fill this gap. This was a revelation, prior to the early eighties Top Forty was an AM dungeon where only the most uniformed went to listen. KROQ, a marginal outlet in Pasadena, broke trend by playing this newfangled music, AOR started to crumble, and then came Michael Jackson.

MJ broke the color line. And after the success of “Thriller,” he called himself “The King Of Pop.”

Notice, not “rock,” not “soul,” but a word dreaded in the heart of every white boy American music aficionado.

But there was a reprieve. Although Michael infiltrated the playlist and other non-white performers followed him, KROQ took MTV hostage. Andy Schuon left Pasadena for New York, he decided what got on. And as a result, we had the great alternative wave, of not only REM, but ultimately Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

But rap gained a toehold. And expensive, effects-laden videos triumphed. And rockers blinked. They didn’t like sacrificing all this power to the director, spending all that money and looking like a doofus all at the same time. That’s when the good-looking nonentity took over. That’s when pop started to triumph.

But radio still mattered and records were expensive to make so other scenes still existed, other radio formats still mattered, pop was something, but it wasn’t everything.

It is today.

And we did not foresee this.

We thought there was room for everybody. That by opening the floodgates the big tent would be populated with a cornucopia of sounds.

But the truth is none of the rock acts that dominated MTV in the eighties can get any traction. Tom Petty and Don Henley can put out new music, but no matter how good, it ultimately stalls. And it’s not much different for those who came thereafter, like Metallica and Pearl Jam. Their audience still comes out in prodigious numbers to hear the classics live, and that’s seemingly all they want to hear, but their cultural impact has not only waned, but disappeared.

What happened?

The audience got younger, it had no reference points. Everything that meant something to both older listeners and the business not only didn’t matter, it was unknown! Credibility, writing your own material, having chops… That was from a different era. Now you can fake it. And when you can fake it, ear candy is everything.

Which brings us to today.

Like I said, pop started to dominate with Michael Jackson. But now, if you’re not on Top Forty radio, you’ve got no chance. You can garner a marginal audience, be on Patreon, sell merch on Pledge, but you just cannot break through.

We think we want choice, but we don’t.

That’s the story of today. One Amazon is enough. One Google too. Microsoft spent billions on Bing! and the only market share it got was paid for. We only have ears for hits, and the young audience that spends, that goes to the show, that builds acts, wants community, a club they can belong to, and today that’s pop.

Even better, anybody can play. You too can win the lottery. Whether on TV, with “Idol” or “The Voice,” or in your home studio utilizing Pro Tools to upload the end product to YouTube so you can gain notice and hopefully money. People go where the money is, and that’s pop.

And the oldsters can’t understand.

Oldsters remember when the Beatles and rock KILLED Top Forty, they believe music must be not only ear-pleasing, but meaningful. How can this be?

It could be something else. Doesn’t have to be the pop music on today’s chart. It’s just that the pop music delivers mass appeal in a way other genres don’t. Jazz is a joke and rock is moribund. Who wants to hear imitations of the real thing? Better to go back to the originals. As for meaning and credibility, we’ve got hip-hop, however long in the tooth that might be, and its most successful acts have gone Top Forty. And country still exists, but everybody in the format laments that not only is it Bro, it’s got elements of pop, the rapping, the sounds, Florida Georgia Line is just one step away from Top Forty. And the biggest country act gave up the ghost, threw away the banjo and went pop completely, and Taylor Swift only got bigger, turns out she didn’t need Nashville whatsoever.

She got it. She knew using Max Martin and singing anthems is more important than plumbing the soul and revealing one’s warts. She used to do that when she wore cowboy boots, but she’s taking no risk in today’s pop world.

It’s not going to get better. The landscape is not going to broaden. You can make it, but they probably won’t hear it. Pop is everything, because the market demands it. It whittles down choices and delivers what people want to hear.

Like I said, eventually they’ll want to hear something else.

Then again, every few years a trend used to come along to wipe the deck clean. Hair bands were replaced by alternative bands and then hip-hop killed them both.

Nothing new is on the horizon. We’re in a period of consolidation. We’ve only just figured out distribution, for ten years we were worried music was gonna be free.

But when the monetization becomes obvious, new forces will come along to dethrone what presently exists. But that hasn’t happened for fifteen years, which is how music lost its relevancy.

But not in cultural forecasting. This is what’s happening everywhere. Only a few movies succeed, never mind apps. This is our future. The big will get bigger, and if the small exists at all, most people will never see it.

“Bedlam Erupts In House Floor Standoff Over Gun Control”

Looks a lot like Napster, dontcha think?

Oh, the history of that file-trading service has been rewritten. Almost two decades later it’s seen as techies running roughshod over institutions, a free for all with free music for everybody. But the truth is its success was evidence of the public’s hunger for change, a populace sick of twenty dollar CDs with one good song and the inability to hear so much of what they wanted to without paying a toll.

And now the Democrats in the House are revolting.

It was a long time in coming, but the truth is Trump and Bernie scared them, proved that if you’re an insider doing business as usual your reign is time-stamped, Either stand for something or you stand for nothing at all.

Kind of like the musicians of the sixties. This is what it was like.

We emerged from a period of relative calm, back then it was the fifties, now it’s the nineties. And suddenly the seams started to crack and truths were revealed. Youngsters questioned precepts and then not only was everybody smoking dope and having sex willy-nilly, they were against the Vietnam war.

And there was chaos in the marketplace. Not only did the younger generation wipe the slate clean of Perry Como and his ilk, the heroes of yesteryear, of the establishment, the bland, safe pop music was thrown overboard too. It was all new, all the time. Almost no one before the Beatles survived after the Beatles. And there was a migration from AM to FM and Woodstock showed how strong our nation was…

And we’ve been coasting on fumes ever since.

Who knew that politics was gonna be the music of the teens?

Tech is dead. You don’t need a new phone and the new apps provide services that might be convenient, might provide titillation and distraction, but despite their ubiquity their necessity is almost nil.

But when it comes to the government…

They tell us in elementary school to believe, to trust, that anyone can become President. And then some fake barely a billionaire bozo wins the nomination and you reflect that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

But that was after they stole your safety net and paid fealty to the rich and pulled up your supposed ladder to the top. The populace is unhappy, on the left and the right. You see their opportunity has been stolen. And they want change.

Which the Republicans don’t want. They’d rather go on a death march. Not only did they lose control of their own nominating process by being beholden to the rich and only paying lip service to the poor, they don’t understand their basic tenets are wrong. Their constituency wants not only Obamacare, but Medicare and Social Security. Republican rank and file want abortion rights and gun control. Check the statistics. But the elected officials who are supposed to represent the electorate can’t go against the NRA and the religious right, they’ve got no cojones, despite their bluster.

And the left wing Democrats have been squealing about bullies on the playground for decades, and their constituency has had enough. Not only have they given up on the working man, stood idly by while unions were eviscerated, they have refused to stand up to the Republicans whatsoever, complaining about their behavior and doing nothing about it.

Until tonight, oh, what a night.

THEY BROKE THE RULES!

Just like Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. He who refuses to stand up for what’s right, despite regulation, is destined to be overthrown.

They utilized Periscope! U2 takes cash from Meerkat when we already knew that service would be overtaken, and these anything but hip legislators who Bono thinks he has influence over but does not leapfrog the entire entertainment business and employ the streaming service in its best application ever.

I know what’s gonna happen.

We’re not gonna return to business as usual. Everybody’s too afraid. Except for the Republicans, who cannot see that by refusing to even evaluate a new Supreme Court Justice they’re just burying their chances, alienating their core. When you do nothing, you’re history.

Just ask the record labels, who’ve lost half of their recorded revenue. They could have made a deal with Napster, but NO, they’d rather teach the upstarts a lesson and lose in the process. And too many with a voice in the music sphere are on the wrong side of the issues. The youngsters use the new tools, they don’t bitch about them. If you’re not making a ton of money from streaming you’re not a hit act, sorry.

But these same youngsters grew up in an era of Mariah Carey and TRL. They never had to worry about getting their asses shot off in Nam. They think it’s all about brand and fans and cash. WRONG! It’s about the work. We’re drawn to the flame of those who testify, who lay down their truth. But there’s little truth in evidence. All we get is old farts like Tom Morello and Chuck D. making execrable music, despite their hearts being in the right place.

No, the revolution is gonna come from the young. But they idolize the moneygrubbers of the CD era, the Tommy Mottolas, they’ve got no heroes.

But now they do. A bunch of renegade representatives who know that doing what’s right is more important than maintaining decorum.

The wheels of change turn slowly. But when there’s no movement, we get frustrated, we flip out, it’s like having a dad who never lets you drive the car, who always tells you to turn down the tunes, who never gives you a break. We get sick of hearing no.

And we’re sick of mass shootings. The problem cannot be eradicated, but something can be done.

That’s what the public thinks. Forget the blowhards at Fox News and the NRA who are working the refs. The people, who control this country, who truly own it, want safety and change.

And it’s happening right now.

A bill might not be passed but business as usual is over. It will never be the same in Washington again.

The same way it was never the same after Napster.

And the Beatles.