“And ICE is gonna come, bust down your door

Try to build a house no one builds no more

But I got a telephone

Kids are all scared and all alone

The Boss stopped bumping, the rock stopped rolling

The middle finger’s rising and it won’t stop showing

I got some bad news

The fading of the red, white and blue”

Have you heard about the South Carolina judge whose house exploded?

By time you read this, they may have more news, but as of now…there’s no knowledge of the cause. Then again, how often do houses explode, especially those of people who have been subjected to death threats?

And I’m just about through with my web roundup, my three sets of tab groups in Safari, and Drudge (a font of great links) sends me to this:

“‘ICE Is Gonna Come Bust Down Your Door'” – Zach Bryan Teases Politicallly-Charged New Song, ‘Bad News'”

http://bit.ly/3ILslJY

Subsequent research says the song is entitled “The Fading of the Red, White and Blue,” but who knows for sure, BECAUSE IT’S NOT OUT YET!

It’s only a snippet, and you can see Zach playing the guitar and singing here, and you should:

This is the difference between a pro and an amateur, someone doing it from the heart as opposed to someone trying to cash in. With this one snippet, Zach Bryan has eclipsed all of Jesse Welles’s clips… This is not a lark, this is dead serious, from one of the biggest acts in the land.

But no one e-mailed me about it. Doing research, I find that “Billboard” did cover it…but that magazine doesn’t know whether it’s consumer or industry-facing and it’s no longer a must-read. As for hitsdailydouble…I didn’t see it there, then again…Bryan wasn’t paying them for promotion, so…

My point here is news bubbles up from the underground. There’s a lot of discussion of this new song on reddit. But as of now, the general public can miss it.

Have you been following the rollout of Taylor Swift’s new album?

I think she’s review-proof, but there’s a lot of fodder here for her to react to on her next album.

First I read Amanda Petrusich’s erudite take in “The New Yorker”:

“‘Why Does Taylor Swift Think She’s Cursed? – ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ the artist’s new album, is full of cringey sexual innuendo, millennial perfectionism, and an obsession with haters that wears thin.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/13/why-does-taylor-swift-think-shes-cursed

Now wait just a minute, weren’t essentially all of the initial reviews positive?

Then again, I point you to this clip from marketing guru Rory Sutherland, wherein he claims you get more independent thinking from working class people than those further up the economic food chain. He says:

“The upper middle class in the U.K. is reputationally paranoid. Is incapable of expressing opinions that might get them disinvited from dinner parties.”

@mindset.to.mills

Rory Sutherland argues the middle class are more constrained by social pressure than the working class or aristocrats, calling it “reputational paranoia” and likening it to “mental nudism.” #rorysutherland #class #independentthinking #Psychology #socialpressure

? pop! (tapping the mouth with a hand)(912415) – LEOPARD

Watch this clip, really.

And my point here is all the initial reviewers who were positive, were they afraid to be on the wrong side of the fence, wary of being denigrated not only by the Swifties, but their compatriots in the field?

Because days later you get this:

“Finally, everyone can say bad things about Taylor Swift”

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/06/entertainment/being-mean-to-taylor-swift

Once again, Swift is review-proof. The legs of the album will depend upon hit singles. There’s no middle ground in the Swift camp, you’re either in or you’re out, and it doesn’t matter what anybody has to say about her and her work. But the casual listener/fan can be exposed to a hit track and listen some more.

Then again, we’re talking here about pop music, hit music, Spotify Top 50 music. That’s what the business cares about, that’s what you read about on hitsdailydouble.com

Then again, Zach Bryan is signed to Warner, and has had arguably two hits, but that doesn’t mean you sell the most tickets ever to a gig, 112,408 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.

Are the hoi polloi aware of this date?

I’d say many more are aware of Taylor Swift’s new album, but…where is the heart of today’s music world, is it pop or…

Or to quote Don Henley, “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.” But if Zach Bryan throws it all down, not some ancient classic rocker, does that signify a renaissance, a changing of the guard from the pop dross of the past decades?

And Zach Bryan isn’t easily claimed by one political tribe or the other, after all, he served in the Navy. But here, he’s definitely taking a swing at ICE… Which has more press than any act, it’s number one with a bullet in the news right now. If you heard Governor Pritzker’s speech today…

But this is just a snippet, that’s all. But Zach’s audience is hungry for everything he does.

But isn’t he worried about BACKLASH?

God, you can’t get a musician with traction to stand up to Trump. Tons of nobodies, but they’re just doing it for attention, and when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Are Trumpsters going to burn Zach Bryan records like they did with the Beatles?

Well, there are no records. Sure, there are some physical souvenirs, but everything is available to everyone online, it’s just a click away.

So we’ve got ICE…

And the phone… You can be informed and broadcast right from your palm.

And the reference to Springsteen and maybe rock being dead, who knows, lyrics are up to the eye of the beholder.

But one thing is for sure, Zach Bryan is disillusioned with America.

And one other thing… We’re never going to have an overarching protest song like we had in the sixties. That’s not how it works anymore. Everything is niche, including Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift.

But this kerfuffle, and it is one online, was all started by just a clip, Zach Bryan and his guitar. There were no co-writers, no remixers, none of the b.s. dominating the Spotify Top 50. Zach didn’t need Max Martin to gain the public’s attention, he could do it all by his lonesome, which hearkens back to those “Hotel California” days.

Does the entire song come out and become a national discussion point? Or is it released to a thud and instantly forgotten.

One never knows anymore.

But those who take chances end up the victors. Those evidencing unrestrained humanity, their voice to our ears with no intermediaries, are the winners.

More like this please!

First we had the Swifties, convinced via Taylor’s endless Easter eggs that she was going to play the Super Bowl. You don’t need to be too sophisticated to know that she’s off-cycle, and that would never happen. To start from nothing, create a whole new show, rehearse it…exactly why? She’s got nothing to promote!

And that’s what the Super Bowl is all about, promotion. It’s capitalism at heart. You do your show, and the next day you put your tickets on sale.

Then again, Dr. Dre and Snoop, et al, had nothing to sell. They did it for the victory lap, to illustrate the power of hip-hop, how it dominated. A finger in the eye to the endless classic rock acts who preceded them, along with the popsters. Furthermore, they delivered what could not be bought elsewhere, which is very rare in today’s society. It was one and done, it was special. And there wasn’t even a movie thereafter, like with Beyoncé and “Homecoming.” Then again, how many people watched the Coachella livestream?

But “Homecoming” was a Taylor Swift moment, with the fierceness sans the need to settle scores. It delivered Beyoncé gravitas, which she used to great effect with “Cowboy Carter”… Good luck saying something negative about Beyoncé, it’s kind of like Charlie Kirk. Don’t go against the tide. Don’t even ponder if “Texas Hold ‘Em” was country music…all you’re going to hear in response is that country is derived from Black  music, and you don’t want to double-down and debate that.

As for Kendrick Lamar? His rap beef with Drake was not the all-encompassing cultural event his fans believed it to be, but this appearance was also a victory lap, with a poke in the eye of Drake and a racist society, but the only thing is if you weren’t a fan of Lamar’s music to begin with, you missed it completely. Then again, if you said anything against the performance, you were a pariah.

Which brings us to 2026. Who’s it going to be?

This is kind of like the Song of the Summer, a fake construct that is irrelevant, kind of like another awards show, never mind that our society is so now so fractured and it’s so difficult to reach anybody that no track rose above.

You can only live in the past for so long. Which is why the NFL hired Roc Nation to book the Super Bowl. The players are Black, the owners are white, it’s a bad look, and the NFL is always worried about its image. Pushing anything that contradicts it under the rug, like CTE.

So Roc Nation is thinking about who will play the Super Bowl and…

First thing you have to know is a whole slew of people don’t want to do it, for a multitude of reasons. They don’t want to spend all that money only to be compared to Prince, unfavorably. They don’t want to risk failing in front of over 125 million viewers. Maroon 5 still hasn’t recovered from its appearance.

So, after you narrow it down to who is willing, which is a relatively small pie, since the acts pay the expenses and almost no one is going to do it if they’ve got nothing to promote…

Bad Bunny is a PHENOMENAL CHOICE!

Huh?

Friday night, at the end of Bill Maher’s “Overtime,” Thomas Friedman said: 

“I’ve actually never looked at Twitter, never looked at Facebook, never looked at Instagram, never looked at TikTok, and never smoked a cigarette. And my plan is to die saying all five.”

And Tom did not say this sheepishly, but self-satisfiedly.

Thomas Friedman may be one of the most derided opinion columnists out there, the naysayers declare that he’s out of touch. THIS PROVES IT!

All that anti-tech b.s. in the “Times”… If I read one more article about the perils of the internet and social media…

Let’s get this straight… The internet is NEVER going away. Nor is social media, although the platforms may change.

If you grew up in the fifties and sixties, TV was the devil. Did that make kids watch less? Their parents wanted them to turn off the box and read, like they did. Did it work? NO! And at this point, the highest art form, the most popular art form in America, is streaming television. TAKE THAT!

If you don’t know about that which you speak of…

This is the problem with those on the right deriding the choice of Bad Bunny. They see him as a left-wing, Trump-hating Puerto Rican who does not deserve amplification. HOWEVER, Bad Bunny is one of the three biggest acts in the world, if not the BIGGEST! But they don’t know that.

The three biggest acts in the world are Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen and Bad Bunny.

However, as broad as Taylor Swift’s audience is, her music does not reach everybody, females are overrepresented in her audience.

As for Morgan Wallen… As big as he is in the U.S., and he’s GIGANTIC!, country music doesn’t play that well overseas.

But Bad Bunny? Good time music works for EVERYBODY!

It was hard for many to appreciate Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl appearance without knowing the music beforehand, which was the case for most viewers, ubiquity is history, everything is niche.

But you don’t have to know Bad Bunny’s music to like it. You’ve just got to hear it, and you’re in. It’s usually upbeat with a groove you cannot deny, it’s nearly impossible to keep your body still, the fact that he sings in Spanish is irrelevant. As if most people can even quote the lyrics of their favorite songs…the words may be important, but they come LAST!

So, all those Republicans didn’t just dip their toe, they jumped right into the pool and opined about that which they knew little about.

More people in the world know Bad Bunny and his music than were even aware of Charlie Kirk, never mind his message. THAT’S the power of music. When done right, its reach is phenomenal. Write your screed in the paper, online, even be a talking head weighing in on TV news…you’re no competition for Bad Bunny.

Fox News averages 2.5 million viewers in prime time, 1.6 million viewers during the day. Bad Bunny? He’s got a song with TWO BILLION streams on Spotify. Others with in excess of one billion. His reach is far beyond Laura Ingraham, never mind Corey Lewandowski and Danica Patrick.

This is a fight the right cannot win.

But let’s play it out…

They lean on the NFL… Well, the NFL has plausible deniability, it can easily say music is so far out of their purview that they hired an outsider to make the choice, i.e. Roc Nation. As for final approval…their expertise is football, can you really blame them?

And the NFL does not want to cave, because Democrats watch football too…they don’t want a Jimmy Kimmel situation.

As for Roc Nation… You don’t want to pick a fight with Jay Z, he may not be an elected official, but he’s a titan in America, a billionaire just like Trump, with an army of fans he’s built over decades. He came from nothing and built an empire. Whose side is the public going to be on?

And Roc Nation are never backing down…never ever. Bitch all you want about DEI, the bottom line is being Black in America is still hard, and Jay Z knows it, he’s never going to kowtow to the oppressor, the whites who have enjoyed the fruits of his labor and have kept his people down for centuries.

So the right wing talking heads are bitching about Bad Bunny…

And no one listening. They don’t have the leverage. And like Thomas Friedman above, it’s just illustrating how out of touch they are.

Never mind that Bad Bunny hosted SNL last night. Cancel Bad Bunny and good luck getting ANY performer who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Trumper to ever play the Super Bowl again. Isn’t this what Disney learned, that it wasn’t about Kimmel, per se, but their entire entertainment production, no one would work with them if they didn’t stand up for Jimmy!

And even Nexstar and Sinclair caved.

So this is a bridge too far.

But having said that… One thing we have learned is you can never predict the future. Dr. Dre, et al, did the Super Bowl with nothing to promote. There was no tour, unlike with even Kendrick Lamar.

What I’m saying here is the NFL COULD blink. Nothing is set in stone anymore, everything is up for grabs.

You’ve got to understand that these are people making these decisions. And seemingly NO ONE has a hold on the culture, even though uninformed, head-in-the-sand doofuses believe they do.

Isn’t that what the internet has taught us over these last three decades? That  the newspapers and other media don’t cover every story, and oftentimes they don’t get it right? It’s citizen journalists, the same decried by those who ruled in the past, who are surfacing stories/truth today.

Which is one of the reasons the NFL hired Roc Nation in the first place. Sure, they wanted to avoid responsibility, the plausible deniability referenced above, but in truth THEY JUST DON’T KNOW!

I’m stunned how many puffed-up people bloviate, not knowing what the landscape holds.

And if you’re never wrong…

Hell, I’ve been wrong, I hate it, but it happens. That’s the nature of being a human being. But these talking heads who never apologize, they’ve got feet of clay, they’re depending on their fans to never see the truth.

This is what happened to movie stars. They used to be exalted. But once all their foibles, their personalities, their identities were revealed online, they were seen mostly as two-dimensional and not worthy of adulation.

The internet did that. And the internet made Bad Bunny a STAR!

The starmaking machinery?

That’s so last century.

Like I said above, it’s nearly impossible to reach anybody. TV appearances don’t yield success…active listeners, those who sway markets, create hits and heroes, wouldn’t be caught dead listening to terrestrial radio.

It all exists, FOR FREE, online. Pull up a Bad Bunny video on YouTube right now. MTV is never coming back…waiting for a video, are you kidding me?

My point is it’s harder than ever to be big, and respect those who are. And Bad Bunny is big, REALLY big, and it is his audience that grew him, not the machine…he’s really not obligated to anybody but himself.

Could Bad Bunny go gonzo on Trump in the months before the Super Bowl and lose the gig? Definitely, like I said, the future is unpredictable. But he’s a smart guy and he doesn’t want to, he wants that Super Bowl appearance now more than ever, to stick it to the man, those who believe he doesn’t deserve a chance.

But Kristi Noem’s talking about ICE at the Super Bowl… Have you seen the price of tickets? Do you think this is an event that draws a plethora of undocumented citizens? What next, looking inside the Jonathan Club or the Bohemian Grove for illegals?

And sure, maybe the vendors, the workers are not here legally. But doesn’t that kind of prove the point, that these people are needed to make the whole thing work, our country?

Just like the shut down…

The news media is down in the weeds. Even health care is not the issue. The Democrats wanted their elected officials to take a stand, to say no mas, the details are IRRELEVANT!

And unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans can’t see this.

Or, to use a cliché, you can win the battle and lose the war.

That’s the question in Gaza right now.

That’s the question with Trump.

That’s what the Kimmel fracas demonstrated… Everything is intertwined, no domino is isolated, topple one and even if you war game it out a zillion times there will be unexpected effects.

So if you don’t know what you’re talking about, STFU!

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

Phone #: 844-686-5863

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

FX/Hulu trailer:

I was mesmerized for about half an hour, and then…

We’d been unable to find a satisfying series. Well, we watched “The Empress,” which is an interesting Netflix show about the Habsburg dynasty and the magical Empress Elisabeth married to the young Emperor Franz… I was trying to remember some of the facts from Modern European History, the AP course I took in high school, but the teacher was boring and so was the book and after applying to college…I can’t say that I took it seriously.

“The Empress” was intriguing, although not fast-paced. If you’re looking for a lot of dialogue, this is not your show. But the sets were utterly amazing! And the history…the details may be fiction, but basically it’s all true.

Then we tried the highly recommended Mexican series “The Dead Girls” on Netflix and for the first fifteen minutes it mesmerized me even more than “The Lowdown,” but then…it had a tone problem. Was this a gritty series or a farce? We haven’t watched further to find out.

But the settings of both “The Dead Girls” and “The Lowdown” are similar in that they’re off the beaten path. “The Dead Girls”…I love these shows outside the city in Mexico and South America. The streets may not be paved, there may be an outdoor food stand/restaurant on the corner, it’s extremely visceral. As for “The Lowdown”…it’s set in the outskirts of Tulsa…that’s right, “livin’ on Tulsa time.” And the makers of this show are aware of Tulsa’s musical history, the first episode ended with Leon Russell’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

So…

What we’ve got here is Ethan Hawke as a self-styled “truthstorian”…

Other than the images, which were so rich in hi-def, this was the other element that drew me in, because I know people like this. In that if you enter their lives into a ledger, there’s not much to show, but they’re far from stupid and they truly believe in their ideas and their future. I mean everybody need a code to survive, a belief in a path forward, otherwise you’re just sitting somnambulantly on the couch watching television.

You come to Los Angeles to make it. It’s different from New York City in that there’s no admission fee, no criteria, no C.V. needed to play. You could have dropped out of college for all people care. This is not finance requiring a college degree, L.A. is the land of hustlers, and some make it, most don’t, and then there are others that manage to keep their heads above water in the business, and the business is entertainment.

On the way up everybody’s got a story. Usually puffed-up. They’re selling themselves, their ideas. And most of them are full of sh*t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t tell a good story.

And if you live in the hinterlands, where there’s no delineated game, you make up your own…with your own playing field and rules. That is what Ethan Hawke is doing as Lee Raybon. He’s all about divining the truth and laying it down, meanwhile running a rare bookstore that never seems to make a sale. Oh, he’s got an ex and a kid, and the kid, “Francis,” is fantastic…an early teen with just enough savvy not to have the wool pulled over her eyes, she’s paying attention, she wants to participate, she wants to be involved.

As for her mother, Samantha…she’s had to learn the score, had to learn that as good a tale as Lee tells, he’s not to be trusted, and his dreams are just that, dreams. Samantha is not a femme fatale, but a survivor.

As for Jeanne Tripplehorn as Betty Jo… I thought she was out of action for a while, I certainly hadn’t seen her, but I checked online and she’s been acting…this is no longer the seventies when you’re aware of and have probably seen everything an actor has done.

And Tripplehorn leans into the plot. And this is where “The Lowdown” starts to falter. Because the plot is somewhat traditional. Good vs. bad, righteous vs. evil. If only a more innovative plot could have been devised.

So, as you watch you realize every episode has a formula. Ethan/Lee pokes his nose where it shouldn’t be and ends up in deep trouble, which he escapes from in the end. It becomes predictable and ultimately laughable. The jeopardy, the tension…you’re just wondering how Ethan/Lee is going to be saved, not whether he will be.

And as real as some of the characters are, others are so two-dimensional as to be cartoons. The two ex-cons providing security for the bookstore…nobody is this dumb, even dumb people.

The images are fantastic, and so is Hawke. Until…he gets himself in these situations. He’s got a lot of personality, which he trades on…the educated loser, but then he starts playing too broad with the stupid comedy and…

We only pulled up “The Lowdown” because we couldn’t find another full series to watch. My policy is binge only, I refuse to be subjected to the week by week dribble… what, are we living in the 1980s? Is this “L.A. Law”? Or “thirtysomething”?

Then again, I was thinking about “thirtysomething” while watching “The Lowdown,” because in that eighties show the tone was consistent. Striving baby boomers, dealing with relationships, marriage, children, careers… “thirtysomething” felt real. The more “The Lowdown” plays out, the less real it appears.

Will we watch the ensuing episodes?

We would have if they were all available now, but this show is not good enough to have me yearning to see them, to see what happens, which is clear anyway…ETHAN HAWKE/LEE RAYBON TRIUMPHS! It’s as predictable as a sitcom. Whereas remember when Gary died in “thirtysomething”? There was no way you could see that coming.

So, “The Lowdown” has the elements, it’s just the way they’re put together that is unsatisfying. It’s got interesting characters, but their interaction is so predictable…

Yes, this is FX, and they get kudos for producing higher brow fare, but “The Lowdown” could be higher, but it’s not. When you strip away the images and the character actors you’ve got a retread plot, and what fun is that?