Challenge the cult at your peril.

Have you listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast? Can you name two songs from Taylor Swift’s latest album? Can you name one member of BTS? Are you even on Twitter/X, never mind eating up every word Elon Musk utters? Are you one of the 130,000 on the Kamala Harris Zoom call?

Odds are you can’t or you aren’t. Large odds. The above represent cults, and they get overblown coverage in traditional media, giving an inaccurate picture of what is truly going on. And if you question anything about the object of devotion, you will be excoriated, to the point where most people don’t even try, because they can’t endure the hate.

All this news about Joe Rogan having a number one podcast… Most of it is about how much money he’s making. And Bloomberg just ran a story about his impact in Austin. But we don’t have accurate statistics as to how many people actually listen to Rogan. Sure, you can download the podcast, follow him and certain platforms do this automatically, but have you spent the hours every day checking out what he has to say? Probably not. But if you point this out, if you question anything Rogan has to say, good luck, his fans are bonded to him. They live for Rogan. They believe he speaks their language. Someone is standing up for the uneducated bros who were not popular in high school. Rogan’s podcast is full of conspiracies, inaccuracies, and this is a big problem, but not as big as conspiracies and inaccuracies across America.

One of the big stories this weekend was about a Swift show in Europe where people sat on the grass outside the stadium. Kudos to her. Then again, people have been trying to get a free listen forever. It just hasn’t been an international story. I’m not saying Swift isn’t big, but exactly how big is she? There’s this canard that as soon as Swift comes out for Kamala it will change the election, ensuring Harris rides to victory. But in the seven or eight states that matter, how many Swift fans are there? Sure, register them, every vote counts, but what makes you believe her endorsement will swing the election? Springsteen and his music were known by more people than Swift’s, by a huge margin. He was all over MTV, the radio, but his endorsement didn’t move the needle. The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt couldn’t deliver the presidential nomination for Jerry Brown. These three acts still have more penetration than Swift, more mindshare in terms of songs known by the public, but the media and the Swifties have you convinced that she can move mountains, and she cannot.

Not only do you not know a member of BTS, you probably can’t name a single K-pop song, even though you’ve heard all about the overhyped scene. Let’s be clear, the music industry loves this hype. Anything to drive streams and ticket sales, but how big is the BTS Army in America? Or, as someone in the Phish camp once said to me, they don’t know how many Phish fans there really are, is it the same fifteen thousand people going to every arena show? Once again, Phish has a business, kudos. But they outpunch their weight in my inbox. Someone farts and a Phishhead will e-mail me a connection to the Vermont band.

As for Harris… There’s been euphoria since she replaced Biden on the ticket. But 130,000 women on a Zoom call, in a country of 340 million? Even raising 300 million dollars, not insignificant, but that does not mean she’ll win in November. Only seven or eight states matter. What can she do to win there, where Biden squeaked by, on 80,000 votes. Sure, Biden won the popular vote, but the Electoral College is something different.

As for the tech bros… One thing about the musicians, the entertainers endorsing and supporting political candidates, they’re not in it for the money. Whereas the tone-deaf Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen make no bones that a Trump victory in November will benefit them financially. Andreessen is so heavily invested in Crypto that he wants someone in office to support a world which has not shown a practical use other than for ransomware. And Musk? One thing about Musk is he owns Twitter/X, so he outpunches most of the other people I’ve written about above, but have you noticed Tesla sales not only faltered, they helped bring down the entire market last week? But tell this to a bro… The same bros who think they’re winning in meme stocks, the same bros who are buying crypto meme-coins that have no value other than speculation. The tech titans are so myopic, so out of touch, they don’t realize they’ve replaced the cable company as the second most hated entity in America (Ticketmaster is the perennial number one). This is the same blindness that had big time media missing the Trump surge of 2016.

So you’ve got these cults, not tiny by any stretch of the imagination. And there is real power within them, believe me, Taylor Swift is making bank, but people are afraid to question their power, because of the sh*t that will rain down upon them.

People believe in these cults because it’s human nature. It makes them feel good. Especially in a world where the individual has never felt more powerless. And it’s those on the fringe that garner the most belief. It’s no fun pledging fealty to the person or scene everybody else does. This is your identity. No one can cross the object of your belief/fandom.

But once again, these are CULTS! Large cults, but they don’t encompass the public at large, not by a long shot.

Cable news? It’s lucky if it reaches a million people. Walter Cronkite spoke, it moved mountains. We still have one newspaper that can change the course of political history, the “New York Times” brought down Biden. But no other newspaper has this power, none.

But I won’t say that the “Times” has a handle on popular culture, can tell which way the wind blows. Because the “Times” was built for a world where the big stories rose to the top and only the big stories mattered. So we get an endless whipsaw effect, blowing us left and right on entertainment stories that don’t matter. At least everybody knows who J.Lo is, but one of the acts with the most press recently is Gracie Abrams, some might have even heard her name, but her music? And that of Kate Hudson? You’re entitled to make a go of it, but that doesn’t mean we’ll accept it.

Hell, most rockers believe rock is not dead. They’ll point to aged acts and Active Rock acts…talk about a niche. When was the last time a rock act had a track that dominated the culture? Maybe Coldplay twenty years ago. Yes, rock used to be a big tent, including both AC/DC and the Little River Band, but not Olivia Newton-John. Raw belief is not enough, it does not make something true, but it feels good to the believers so they bully others into believing what they say is true, when it is not.

Yes, add up all the cults and it makes a difference. But we don’t have one cult with the power of network television or terrestrial radio in the last century. Things have changed, but the sensibility of the public and the news media has not.

I wrote about the flaws in a Kamala Harris campaign and it was unacceptable. Some people believed I’d gone MAGA, was going to vote for the Orange Man, when nothing could be further from the truth. Blind devotion crosses all age groups these days, all political persuasions, you cannot question the orthodoxy.

Even Biden being too old to run. You took it on faith that the Democrats were trustworthy, you could believe what they said. But that did not turn out to be true.

And it’s hard to be an individual with your own opinion, because that oftentimes leaves you alone, and no one likes the solitary life.

I hope Harris wins in November. But statistics tell us it will be a tight race. Furthermore, the constant attacks on Trump’s character are not working, even criminal conviction couldn’t sway people, the Trump cult is unswayable. But how are you going to bring the independents, the changeable voters to your side? By talking about the future, the issues. But the Democrats have been so busy saying the economy is great under Biden that they can’t acknowledge and sympathize with those who are struggling.

Or to quote Pauline Kael, who didn’t really say it, even though everyone believes she did… How could Nixon win, nobody she knew voted for him! Too many are living in bubbles. And the news media is not helping. The media loves rah-rah, it loves a story that it believes most people support, it sells subscriptions and advertising, But if you’re on “Entertainment Tonight” or in “People” not only will it probably not move the needle, most people will still be unaware of who you are and what you’re doing.

And the music business found out that TikTok stars don’t necessarily translate into mainstream music stars, so now everyone is sh*tting on the platform. But the industry has not found another way to find and break acts, and TikTok is as powerful as ever.

Just like the anti-social media crowd. How much time have you spent on TikTok? How can you be an expert if you’ve never been on the platform?

And the aforementioned “Times,” appealing to its educated older base, talks about the evils of smartphones and social media seemingly every day. Has this put a dent in usage? Do those on social media even hear it? It’s just a circle jerk amongst an elite who think they know better. Completely detached from reality.

And Nate Silver’s numbers can’t be accurate because he’s involved in a new business funded by Peter Thiel. You can’t separate one from the other. Polling is data, but now that Silver is associated with the enemy he’s been taken off the table by those on the left, he’s a pariah.

This is the country we live in. Where what is small as seen as big. Where you can’t challenge anybody’s belief. And you can’t trust the media to get it right even if it’s doing its best not to be biased.

Does that mean I have the answers? Absolutely not. I do my best to take the temperature of America, by reading and asking people questions everywhere I go. I don’t know. But I’m trying.

You should try too.

Trailer: https://rb.gy/dpkx73

They would never make this show in America.

And most viewers wouldn’t get through the first episode, never mind click to see it again.

“The Responder” is dark. There are no characters you can identify with, root for. If you want an uplifting show, “The Responder” is not for you. If you see TV series as entertainment, “The Responder” is not for you. But if you view television as an art form, if you want to be enmeshed in a world that may be foreign, but truthful, if you like to be engrossed in a show sans interruptions…

You might love “The Responder.”

I won’t say “The Responder” is populated by losers. But most of its characters are struggling.

Marco, with his substandard intelligence. He knows he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. He’s just trying to survive, making one bad judgment after another.

As for Casey…

She’s a drug addict. Not to be trusted. We like the “Intervention” model, middle class denizen goes down the wrong path and is brought back to reality by loved ones and does their best to fly straight. But what if you were brought up in a group home? What if you’ve never known your father, never mind who he is, and your mother has mental health problems and…

You end up doing what is right for you, even if it’s wrong. The immediate is more important than the long term. Your life is a constant whiplash from one bad scene to another.

Living on the bottom. It’s glorified if you’re an artist. Don’t believe it for a minute. I’ve done it. All you can think about is money, survival. And let me tell you, desperate people do desperate things. Don’t be surprised if a desperate person steals from you, double-crosses you, because when survival is everything…you are no longer a member of the middle class with traditional ethics.

The star of “The Responder” is Martin Freeman, as Chris Carson. A grizzled cop working the night shift, who is seen as a knobhead by the entire force and can never make it to daytime.

And being a cop means…you compromise. You don’t take every offender in to be booked. You make judgments. You’re not innocent, then again the legal system is not efficient, rendering the proper result in every instance.

But Chris has a good heart. He doesn’t want to see drug addicts assassinated. He wants a modicum of peace. But can you have a good heart if you’re policing the streets?

Chris is no longer sure what is right and what is wrong. And believes that by being bottled up he is protecting his family, whereas in truth his wife feels isolated and has a wandering eye and…

Petty jealousies. People out to get you. That’s in “The Responder.”

And seeing your betrothed with another person… Have you experienced this? It’s mind-bending. It’s done about as well in “The Responder” as I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Rachel. A cop who can’t see the crime inside her own home. One of the best parts of the series is when her boyfriend Steve won’t come pick her up because he’s deeply involved in playing Xbox. You see people on TV being reasonable all day long, but that’s not the way it really is.

What you’ve got here is the people no one ever talks about. The underclass going nowhere. And those who have to interact with them.

Everybody’s got to live somewhere, you should see some of the sh*tholes these people reside in. While abodes get larger and larger in the U.S…we have a huge homeless problem. All these people, they’re making more and more of them, how are they going to eat, where are they going to live?

You probably don’t want to ask yourself these questions. You’re probably looking for escape.

“The Responder” is not an escape, it’s an assault. A world you become entangled in that creeps you out and makes your skin crawl. And this is not some high concept horror film, this is real life.

“The Responder” has a 100/78 rating on RottenTomatoes. I’m interested in anything that gets a 100 in the Critics rating, assuming enough critics have weighed in, in this case twenty two. As for the Audience rating…I can’t see 100% of people loving this show. Then again, isn’t it the shows most people dislike that ring your bell so loudly?

“The Responder” is set in Liverpool. Turn on subtitles to catch the dialogue. And the second season is not quite as good as the first, the concepts are a bit repetitive. But just when you think you have things figured out, believing the plot, the solution, the way forward, is obvious, it is not. And it’s not the unforeseen twist of a mystery novel, but the way life works out, not according to plan.

Now chances are almost nobody reading this is going to watch “The Responder,” because first and foremost you’ve got to pay for it, it’s on BritBox. But you can watch the first episode with your Amazon Prime subscription, and you can get a BritBox free trial, but of those who dip their toes into this series, most won’t even make it through the first episode.

This is gritty television. It has been nominated for and won awards in the U.K.

But this is not HBO. Which makes you feel good about being upper middle class, no matter how “edgy” the production is. “The Responder” is nearly a challenge. Are you willing to go into a world of people who don’t really matter with a story that doesn’t really matter and experience how many in this world live?

Then “The Responder” is for you.

Tune in Saturday July 26th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

Spotify: https://shorturl.at/SYiCV

YouTube: https://t.ly/kC_Na

1

The cognoscenti believe “Countdown to Ecstasy” is the best Steely Dan album. I love “My Old School,” really enjoy “King of the World,” but I am not really enamored of “Bodhisattva” and I like “Your Gold Teeth II” better than “Your Gold Teeth.”

And I didn’t even buy “Countdown to Ecstasy” until years after it was released.

The first Steely Dan album I purchased was “Pretzel Logic,” which I had to return to the Record Club of America because there was so much surface noise. I thought it was ABC, their pressings were legendarily substandard, but only decades later did I discover that the Record Club of America could sell albums so cheaply with no commitment because they pressed them themselves.

“Pretzel Logic” is only 33 minutes and 52 seconds long, and that was even short back in 1974, when it came out. It was a surprise that “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was such a big hit, since nothing on “Countdown to Ecstasy” broke through. Steely Dan didn’t sound like anything else. One could classify them as one hit wonders, maybe two. They came out of nowhere, were on a crappy label and broke on AM instead of FM. Yes, we learned the derivation of the band’s name, but we didn’t expect to hear much more.

And then came “Rikki.” Which was all over the radio during the early summer of ’74. And I love “Rikki,” but “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” felt so personal. And “Barrytown.”

To the point where I purchased “Katy Lied” when it came out. I loved that album. Played it in the Blaupunkt as I drove cross-country.

“Bad sneakers and a piña colada my friend stomping on the avenue by Radio City…”

It was all rushed out as one line.

And, once again, there was no hit on a Steely Dan album, but they’d made their bones, they’d earned their success, not that they were dominant on FM radio.

The real breakthrough was “Aja,” proving the point that the public has no idea what it is looking for and something completely different can stand out and triumph.

It was the reverse of “Can’t Buy a Thrill.” All the action was on FM, when FM ruled, when tracks on the format were ubiquitous, cultural signposts, known by everybody.

But before that came “The Royal Scam,” which I learned every note of as I drove from Salt Lake City to Connecticut listening to the cassette. I loved the line about turning up the Eagles because the neighbors were listening, but my absolute favorite was a track no one ever talked about, which is “Don’t Take Me Alive.”

“I’m a bookkeeper’s son

I don’t want to hurt no one”

Dark. And personal. The opposite of today’s hit records. He’s a nobody, a nerd, soft, not the boasting winner of today’s musical landscape.

And it was more than three years until “Aja” was followed up by “Gaucho,” which had no hit singles and was released in a changing landscape. Disco was demolished, corporate rock ruled, “Breakfast in America” and “The Wall” were the two biggest albums and “Gaucho” appeared out of step, which is part of what made it so great. It lived in its own universe. And it had those two great songs with those phenomenal lyrics.

“Hey nineteen

No we can’t dance together

No we can’t talk at all”

There was a new generation, labeled “X,” could a boomer relate?

Which is what stuns me about people who date those decades younger than themselves today. There isn’t the cultural common ground. They don’t remember the TV shows and the records and…

The other famous lines were:

“Tonight when I chase the dragon

The water may change to cherry wine

And the silver will turn to gold

Time out of mind”

Ultimately it was revealed that chasing the dragon was about doing heroin which seemed unfathomable the same way we didn’t believe the Beatles were on drugs. Steely Dan was two middle class guys, really?

And every one of these Steely Dan albums is great, but for a long time my favorite was the initial one, the debut, “Can’t Buy a Thrill.”

2

My sister owned it. And I borrowed it when I finally moved to L.A. permanently and bought the stereo of my dreams. And the song I loved, my favorite on the album, was one I never saw in print, one no one talked about, “Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me).”

“A tower room at Eden Roc

His golf at noon for free

Brooklyn owes the charmer under me”

The Eden Roc hotel was the apotheosis of the first wave of Miami, I knew that, but as far as Brooklyn owing the charmer…good luck on interpreting that.

But the change, the melody, the vocal…

I was hooked.

And that vocal was by David Palmer, not Donald Fagen.

As was “Dirty Work,” which might be the most famous song on the whole album.

But the hits were sung by Fagen.

“Do It Again” paved the way for “Reelin’ in the Years,” which was played more where I lived, your mileage may differ.

And the only reason I knew “Do It Again” was because my ’63 Chevy only had an AM radio. And the track was dark, when too many were bright and sunny.

And when I went to Nick’s dorm room I always put it on. That used to be a thing, you’d go to a friend’s abode and play the records you loved that they owned and you didn’t.

And yesterday “Do It Again” came up in rotation on Spotify. How many times have I heard this? I debated fast-forwarding through it, just to see what the algorithm would present next, but I would be home nearly instantly and how much longer was I going to listen anyway. And when I opened the front door, I heard the solo.

3

Who played what? Good luck on that. Well, the internet helps with that. Not the liner notes. There is no credit for “Do It Again.” But if you do research, you find out it was Denny Dias. Forgotten in the history of Steely Dan.

People talk about Larry Carlton’s solos. Skunk Baxter joined the Doobie Brothers when Walter and Donald fired the original band. Dias…he ultimately became a computer programmer. I mean how good was he?

Very good, it turns out.

Research told me that not only did Dias cut the solo, he did it on an electric sitar, purchased used for $50 by Pip Williams, working with Bloodstone at the same time at the Village Recorder. You can read the complete story here: https://shorturl.at/dG2xJ

And Dias didn’t use it again, it was one and done on “Do It Again.”

And there are so many famous gunslingers, especially from the sixties and seventies, and Dias is never mentioned. And the style of the solos…

Doesn’t sound like this.

On the album track, Donald doesn’t even start to sing until after a minute intro. Needless to say this was cut for the single. As was the later organ solo. And that Yamaha YC-30 organ gives “Do It Again” that dark feeling. This was back when getting sounds in the studio was key. Before everything was produced for earbuds at low resolution.

Speaking of which, be sure to play “Do It Again” in Ultra HD on the platform of your choice, it may be over fifty years old. but it sounds like it was recorded yesterday.

So Denny starts his solo at 2:38. And it’s not like he’s showing off, it doesn’t stick out from the track, it’s baked in, you know the sound, the licks, but they’re part of the wash until they’re not.

What exactly is happening here? This is not the rhythm of the meat and potatoes seventies FM rock, it’s not what the English bluesmeisters were delivering. It’s mellifluous, yet choppy. As if Dias is whacking at a tree at double speed, swinging independent of what is happening in the rest of the track, yet fitting right in. This is not something you can dance to, move to, but your brain is following along, on a unique trip.

And it’s just part of a record.

4

Now if it were the old days… Well, if it were the old days you wouldn’t even be reading this, the internet, never mind e-mail, didn’t exist. But you’d drop the disc on the platter of your Dual, your B.I.C., hopefully not your Garrard, maybe your Technics, possibly AR or even a Thorens turntable, crank the volume on your receiver and this sound would come out of the big speakers and…

You know exactly what I’m talking about. Sounds would reveal themselves. We lived to get inside these records. But despite all this, Denny Dias’s solo in “Do It Again” didn’t really reach me until yesterday.

Actually, it was Dias who got the band together, via an ad in the “Village Voice” looking for a bassist and keyboard player, writing that they “must have jazz chops and no hang-ups.”

And Walter and Donald drove out to Hicksville and merged with Dias’s band and…

The rest is history.