It’s kinda like vinyl records.

They make no sense, but there’s a vocal minority whose heartfelt desire is to jet back to the past.

Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist, put your emotions aside, I’ve got thousands of discs, and a turntable to play them, but I don’t, because it’s too inconvenient. But the truth is it makes no sense to listen on vinyl to that which has been recorded digitally.

Sure, there are a couple of rich, high profile acts that record to tape, like Dave Grohl, but everybody else uses Pro Tools. It’s a complete digital chain. And at the end you put the result on a record, where you have to compromise the sound just to make sure the needle won’t jump and compensate for the inner groove being shorter than the outer?

Makes no sense.

But it FEELS right.

Kinda like a return to what once was. When albums were king and listeners couldn’t easily cherry-pick the tracks they wanted to hear.

But there’s a huge contingent of people who love the new system, who use it to their advantage, not only Drake, who releases endless mixtapes, but the wannabes who can now participate, who can record and post their material, options that were unavailable to them previously. You had to have a deal to record, and distribution, both retail and radio, were closed off to you. You still can’t get your product in the record store, that inane place with little inventory the Luddites can’t stop venerating, and radio is still closed, possibly more than ever, but you can get your stuff into the iTunes Store and post it on YouTube and Spotify where people can hear it for free.

ANATHEMA! Those entities are the ENEMY! They’re ruining the business!

So which way is it? Was the past better than the present or do we live in a changed world and the best thing to do is adapt and cope?

Or, to put it another way, if we had a music industry vote, how would it turn out? Would streaming be eviscerated, albums be everything and record labels be all powerful once again?

But we can’t go back, that would be ignoring the digital revolution, which happened spontaneously, with Napster. And when that outlet was closed, new ones popped up, not only utilizing P2P but lockers and…

So one can argue we’ve created some order in a land of chaos.

But it doesn’t FEEL that way.

Now you understand Brexit.

Daniel Ek is the foreigner.

The youngsters are the elite.

And the old farts are the same as ever, unable to fathom a changed world, doing their best to return to the old.

Yes, I think it would be close.

The old acts would certainly vote for a return to the past, their recorded revenue has sunk precipitously. You could tell them that live money has gone way up, far outpacing inflation, experiences being king in a digital world, but they’d say there’s still a shortfall. And that they’ve got no desire to employ social media to enhance their “brand.” They just want to spend 500k to make their albums and drop them every three years, parceling out singles to radio thereafter. They’re sick of the competition, when everybody can play it diverts fans from their work.

And this appeals to a segment of youngsters too. They’ve read about the old days, they want some of that. You can tell them all day long that odds are they won’t get a deal and even if they do they won’t get rich but they don’t believe that, they think they can sell 10 million discs.

But the fans, who get no media, having no house organ, love the new world. They can sample everything for free, dig down deep on websites, learning more about their heroes, even interact with them on social media. Sure, the world is imperfect, one can catalogue the failings ad infinitum, but is it really possible to return to the past, and is the past really that much better?

It’s a global music business. Which means successful acts can make more money than ever, without leaving home their wares are available to stream and buy in far distant lands. But few acts can achieve this ubiquity, shouldn’t we cripple this option so the disadvantaged can get ahead?

I’m fascinated by the Brexit vote. Things haven’t been up for grabs since the 2008 crash. It’s kinda like making Trump President. If you’re bored with the status quo, if you believe you’ve gotten the short end of the stick, put the stick you have left in the spokes of the bicycle and watch the whole thing crash, see how it all plays out.

But then I realized, both of these financial meltdowns were preceded by the music business meltdown, we’ve been coping with change for fifteen plus years.

But I don’t want to give up my iPod.

Which I gave up for my iPhone.

I don’t want to give up my Sonos system, I don’t want Alexa to lose her hearing and be unable to play the music I call out to her.

I don’t want to only be able to play my tunes at home.

I certainly don’t want to go back to recording cassettes.

MP3s don’t sound as good as vinyl. Then again, Tidal allows you to stream in CD quality, as does Deezer, and it turns out most people don’t want to pay for it. Funny how we’ve stopped hearing about the quality issue, the war is over.

So, feel damn lucky you live in today, that the music business has adjusted so much. The landscape is confusing, progress still needs to be made, but if you want to return to the past…

You’re probably playing vinyl records.

Wait a second, isn’t music video dead? Didn’t it bite the dust when MTV went to scripted programming? How many years did we hear musicians bitch about this?

They were completely wrong. Video is bigger than ever. And it’s in your hands as opposed to the gatekeepers’. It’s the same, yet different, as everything is in the future.

This clip is cut from the same cloth as Madonna’s “Sex” book. That’s the appeal, it’ll bring so many looky-loos, but in this case you don’t have to buy it to see it, that’s so last century, it’s free for the taking on the internet. Because in today’s world you don’t charge for everything, you garner your audience and monetize later, like the tech companies.

Now there was a premiere at the Forum. At first I bought the press reaction, to this and the Madison Square Garden reveal, that everybody’s showing up for a non-show. But the truth is when you’re young and dumb with nothing better to do you do. Show up, that is. I remember going to record store in-stores, just to be close to the band. If I were still twenty five I’d pay $25 to go to the Forum. To be part of the experience. Come on, imagine the story you could tell, you could dine out on it for weeks!

And since the Forum is an all music building, little advance planning was necessary. So different from being beholden to sports teams in arenas that view music as a second-class citizen.

And there was little advance notice. When tours go on sale a year ahead of time, locking up that dough, all commerce, this was a whim. It was happening right away. Kanye knows the modern paradigm. Just like advance publicity is history, you don’t want a long lead time, immediacy is everything. And, in a world dominated by screens, hanging with real live people is such a thrill. It’s worth twenty five bucks.

So, you had the event, which was monetized. At a very low price.

And now you’ve got the video.

Unlike in the days of MTV, you can watch it on demand. You don’t have to wait for it to come up. This is what Netflix knows and terrestrial radio doesn’t understand. We want it all and we want it now, and if you aren’t moving your enterprise in that direction you’re headed for the trash bin.

And despite its fame, ratings for MTV were paltry. 100,000 people at a time was de rigueur. Well, right now 70,898 people are simultaneously streaming “Famous” on the feed I’m watching. But they can play it again and again, embed it on social media, spread the word… Today music is a virus, and it can infect broad swaths of the public rapidly.

But then it so frequently burns out. This is a stunt. We won’t be talking about it next month, if we’re even discussing it next week. But that’s okay, Kanye will come up with something else. Whilst radio takes a year to move a track up the chart modern creators know it’s not about reaching every last potential audience member, but satiating the core and moving on.

As for the content, when you marry boobies and fame you’ve hit the jackpot. All but the asexual want to see this clip at least once. Hell, you slow down on the freeway to view an accident, right?

And this is a trainwreck the media can’t avoid covering. The modern media, which has little analysis but loves headlines which generate clicks so they can sell advertising. Kanye is their dream, whether you like him or not.

And Kanye claiming it’s all real just adds fuel to the fire. Come on who would believe this? But the press prints it.

But they won’t tell the story of the up and coming act, unless the performer has an ace PR person. But even if you get ink, there’s no virality, which is the juice that fuels the enterprise today. If it’s not spreading, it’s not happening.

If you were alive back when, when Madonna put out her book, you might claim you’ve seen this before. But not really. Not only is this externally focused, not solely about Kanye in the clip, it’s a demonstration of modern pull, whereas Madonna was all about push. The media and the public are coming to Kanye. Madonna had to push her book down our throats, she’s still utilizing that paradigm, not knowing she appears desperate.

But few can be as hot as Kanye.

But he’s not a creature of the machine, he did all this himself.

That’s what the modern tools will give you.

That’s what the internet provides.

It’s all good, as the kids say.

Watch here:

Kanye West’s “Famous” Video

I heard “Black Dog” at Tony’s Pizza.

I don’t know if students get drunk the same way we did back in college, when they lowered the drinking age to eighteen and imbibing was a novelty, when all we’d ever known was dope. We didn’t go to fraternity parties, the Greeks certainly were not freaks and their entire system was anathema. Instead, every Friday and Saturday night we’d buy a six pack, Schlitz, you never wanted to be a Budweiser person, it might have been the King of Beers but we saw it as pedestrian, and if it was a special weekend we went with Michelob. It’d start around 8, in somebody’s dorm room, no one lived off campus, it was always in the dorm. And at some point as the evening wore on we needed sustenance, and the only option was at the edge of campus, the aforementioned Tony’s Pizza, where the pies were only one step up from edible, back before there was any delivery, never mind Domino’s.

Actually, it was the manager of Tony’s who convinced us to drink Schlitz. Twenty seven, he seemed so much older than us, with a wife and a kid and a Plymouth Duster. We ultimately became friends, he let us make our own pizzas in the back, we spent a lot of time at Tony’s, and we knew everything on the jukebox.

This was the fall of ’71. So there was a lot of “Riders On The Storm.” Morrison had just died, the band had been in a lull, they’d parted ways with their producer, we expected dreck but we got a classic.

And then there was “Black Dog.”

I was done with Led Zeppelin. An early adopter, I’d seen them in the rain at Yale Bowl just before I’d departed for college, just before the release of “III,” which I overpaid for at the Vermont Book Shop, I was just that big a fan. But although I loved “Gallows Pole,” and became enamored of “Tangerine,” I was disappointed, the band seemed to have gone off track, and with only so much money to spend on LPs, I didn’t bother with IV, I felt they were past their peak.

Now if you lived in civilization, with good radio, you were immediately exposed to “Stairway To Heaven,” IV didn’t jump out of the box like “II,” which was an instant ubiquitous hit, but it got traction, amongst the brain dead headbangers who’d finally grown their hair out and been exposed to FM radio. Yes, I had contempt for them, I was a hipster, all I had were my bona fides, personally established, they might not have meant anything to anybody else, but they were oh-so-important to me.

But I never heard “Stairway.” I just got “Black Dog” and then “Rock And Roll” at Tony’s. No one at Middlebury would be caught dead with Led Zeppelin, everybody cottoned to the Dead and the Allman Brothers and you had to be laid back as opposed to in your face. So…

I was out of the loop.

Self-satisfiedly so. I mean “Rock And Roll”? Is that what you sing about when you’ve completely run out of ideas?

And by time I got back to Connecticut, “Stairway” had run its course. I discovered it eons late, looking at that dumb painting in the gatefold cover at a friend’s abode, he couldn’t believe I didn’t know it, so he played it, I got it, but I didn’t need to hear it ad infinitum.

And then IV was superseded by “Houses Of The Holy,” and to this day I can’t take “D’yer Mak’er,” lame English reggae overplayed on the FM. Which now was beyond its salad days, we started to get countdowns, on holiday weekends, especially Memorial Day, with its 500, and “Stairway” always topped the list.

But it wasn’t until ’75 that I truly got into “IV,” after the release of “Physical Graffiti,” which I came to love, hearing it every damn day after skiing at Mammoth Mountain during the month of May. The guy who brings the stereo controls the music, and one thing about twentysomethings, they love to hear the same damn songs over and over again. But I learned of “Kashmir,” and “Ten Years Gone” and “In My Time Of Dying” and…

IV.

It too was on an 8-track tape. That’s what we were listening to, Jimmy had recorded the albums back in Utah and brought his stereo along. I felt superior to his taste, the Zeppelin, the Doobies, but that’s where my love of each was cemented.

I now needed my own copies. I bought “Physical Graffiti,” I bought IV, and during that month of October when I was back home in Connecticut, training for the freestyle circuit, wondering where my life was going, I listened to them every damn day.

I might have been a college graduate, but it was just like high school. My parents would be in bed, I’d put on the headphones, turn out the light and crank it up. And that’s when “When The Levee Breaks” revealed itself to me.

I call it the heaviest track of all time, because I remember the force pounding in my ears, like Bonzo was hitting the skins with baseball bats, like I was on DMT, this cut with absolutely no airplay entranced me, made me feel like I bonded with these madmen.

And then there was “Going To California,” a state I yearned to get back to, this was the promise of “III,” acoustic, but on target, and… This was before the internet, California was a dream, and “Going To California” was dreamy, they captured the essence, that’s the power of music, when done right it exceeds all other art forms.

And now, in context, with knowledge, I could understand the magic of “Black Dog” and “Rock And Roll,” I’d heard them over and over at Tony’s but there was never any penetration, I knew them but didn’t like them, but now I did.

But the piece de resistance was “The Battle Of Evermore.”

I knew who Sandy Denny was. I’d seen Fairport Convention, albeit after she’d left. Her vocals here seemed part of a continuum, starting with Merry Clayton on “Gimmie Shelter,” moving on to Maggie Bell on “Every Picture Tells A Story” and ending up here. All three women’s vocals were secondary elements of their respective cuts, yet it was their work that put the tracks over the top. They radiated a womanly touch absent from their male counterparts’ work, they added sass and meaning and…all I know is I wanted to bring it back. That month in Mammoth, the clarity I once had, the vision, the direction, I only seemed rooted when I was listening to music.

The sound was so ethereal, the track started over a hill and far away, and then it came front and center, like gypsies coming to town, exotic creatures that could not help but fascinate you.

And as much as “Black Dog” and “Rock And Roll” were headbanging headbeaters, tracks to prove that Zeppelin was the biggest band in the land and you’d better pay attention, “Evermore” seemed to be cut without the audience in mind whatsoever, this was the power of the legendary acts, there was a barrier between them and us, we could get a peak by buying the record, but we could never gain access, they were dark, mysterious figures on an aural journey of their own device.

But by this time, with constant FM overplay, it seemed like only the dimwitted and dull still believed. Sure, “Stairway” was a staple, but “Graffiti” had no singles, “Kashmir” was too heavy for school dances, suddenly I was washed upon a shore with people I wanted nothing to do with, the uneducated blue collar beer drinkers…but then I realized, I was one of them too, I started testifying, how great Led Zeppelin was, as good as they ever were, and I just got eye rolls and stares, statements that the band had peaked on their first LP, with their blues influenced numbers.

Which cast me adrift. I was long gone from Middlebury, and I didn’t want to return. My freestyle career was a bust. I belonged nowhere, except in front of the speakers, with the amplifier cranked to the max. And the funny thing is I could never burn out on these tracks, they continued to satisfy.

I bought a ticket for the Rose Bowl.

Robert had that accident and the show was canceled.

I ended up seeing the band at the Forum in ’77. In a seat close to the ceiling. But I was thrilled just to be inside, they played like they meant it, that they were godhead and you were privileged to be in attendance.

Yes, I was there.

And now you can’t even see Led Zeppelin. Bonzo’s dead and Robert can’t hit the notes and doesn’t want to do it anyway, because he doesn’t believe in nostalgia.

And neither do I. If you’re not going forward you’re being left behind. People want to pigeonhole you, put you in a box, but not only is that inner death, the truth is what people want most is something new.

But that does not mean my entire life is not locked up in these records, that when I play them they don’t reveal experiences and feelings, ironically continuing to reveal new truths.

In case you don’t know, the piper’s calling you to join him.

I’m a member of the cult. Listen to the glorious sound, but beware, you’ll soon be a member too.

That’s the power of music.

That’s the power of Led Zeppelin.

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.