This Dominic Fike song from 2018 is only 1:38 long.

All the focus is on how this eight year old number suddenly gained traction on social media, blasting “Babydoll” to the top of the Spotify chart both globally and in the U.S.

If you do research, you cannot figure out why. Everybody says they’re going to explain it, even Fike himself in an interview, but you listen and ultimately realize no one knows. In a digitized world where we keep hearing that AI is about to eclipse humanity, somehow this ancient number found its way to the top through people, one by one. AI can’t create this virality, only people can. And at this point, AI can’t tell you what caused the trend either, it’s organic.

And it’s the labels’ worst nightmare. Because they’re not in control. For all the hype about the manipulation of social media to break Geese… When you dig down deep, the posts that were made were so generic that sans substance, nothing would have happened.

Then again, one can say that artists are out of touch with the public. I’m less concerned with wannabes using TikTok success to get signed than the reverse, established acts making TikTok friendly songs!

If one listens to “Babydoll,” one can see why it would be good source material for a clip. It’s hypnotic and repetitive. And the title, and its use in the song, fits perfectly in this narcissistic world, where you advertise your wares online, trying to illustrate how great and desirable you are.

The script has been flipped. The person in the video is the star, not the artist that made the music! Today’s hits are fungible, fodder for the public to mix and match. 

Looked at through the lens of musicologists, all those denigrating modern music, “Babydoll” is nearly laughable, there’s not much there. Bridge? Where is that confounded bridge! But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at modern culture. We live in a topsy-turvy world, where the PUBLIC is the star, not those making the music itself.

If the acts were so damn great, the audience wouldn’t spend so much time shooting selfies at the show, they’d be riveted to what’s on stage. But they’re not. Sure, they want to be able to tell everybody they were there, TO BURNISH THEIR OWN IMAGE, to gain bragging rights!

And “Babydoll” is so damn short… It doesn’t need to be any longer, it’s all there in a minute and a half.

With CDs containing 80 minutes of music, everybody stretched out, added more tunes that went on infinitely. But we live in a bite-sized world. I’m not saying people have a short attention span, because they don’t, biology hasn’t changed, but if you want them to binge, to dedicate a ton of time, you have to be consistently great, and almost none of these albums are, never mind many being so long, even a hundred minutes!

How long does it really take you to get your message across?

Do you need a thirty second intro? A stretched-out solo? Are you just doing it that way because that’s how everybody else has been doing it?

My favorite song under two minutes is the Box Tops’ “The Letter,” which clocks in at a blistering 1:52, with all the changes and magical moments absent from “Babydoll.” Then again, “The Letter” is forever, “Babydoll” is momentary trash, like so much of the Spotify Top 50.

Listening to “The Letter” you’ll be stunned it’s under two minutes. Because it’s got a magical intro, lasting a large three seconds. And then there’s Alex Chilton’s vocal, rough and meaningful, intense in a way his work with Big Star was not. And there’s a bridge…which does not lead into a chorus. And there’s a message. Do you find all this in modern music? OF COURSE NOT! Certainly not from people making sub two minute records.

And we don’t live in the old world, which too many young acts can’t accept. An under two minute song pays the same amount per stream as something far longer.

Listeners want to be grabbed right away. They don’t want to hear you masturbate, building an opus that is substandard.

Writing camps. Artists. They need to change their goals. They need to make their music shorter! Excise all the extensions that came along with FM/album rock over FIFTY YEARS AGO! (Well, maybe if you could write “Free Bird”…but even Skynyrd couldn’t replicate that.)

This is not so hard, it’s just that when you leave out the superfluous extras, you must focus on the core elements.

Why should a record not demand attention, hook the listener instantly?

And if there’s a story, however compact the record, it lends itself to social media videos.

Ultimately this is a win-win. It’s a paradigm change, that has already happened, but the industry, and the prognosticators and the press, have not acknowledged it. We want it shorter, we want it instant, we want it comprehensible so the public can chop it up, use it… You don’t want someone trying to find the hook in an eight minute song, you want to deliver the OBVIOUS hook(s) right away.

“The Letter” is infectious, one listen is enough to want, to NEED, to play it ad infinitum. And in today’s money-focused world, a short hit song rains down money…KACHING!

Don’t think you’re still living in the old world. It’s a totally new marketplace. There’s no wall between public and performer. You’re equals, in it together. Think about serving the audience, giving them something that they can use to express THEMSELVES!

That’s what I’d do.

Tune in Saturday May 2nd 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

KID ROCK – FREEDOM 250 TOUR

He hasn’t had a hit in eons.

Even for the show tonight, at the Dos Equis Pavilion, it’s a sea of blue dots on the Ticketmaster app. I’d put it at around 30% unsold.

Now it is an amphitheatre, with its attendant bonus charges…i.e. drinks/food/merch/parking, and it is run by Live Nation (but owned by the city of Dallas), so that means Live Nation may be able to eke out a profit. However…

Odds are not good.

But I will say, at amphitheatres, you must not overlook sponsorship deals/fees. The promoter guarantees a certain number of shows per year, upon which the sponsor makes his deal. So every show does not have to make a profit, the sponsorship fees can make up the difference.

But these are piss poor numbers.

But Kid Rock is a right wing icon you say…

Welcome to the modern era, where big time press is detached from the street. Kid Rock is in the national news on a consistent basis, more than almost everybody in the Spotify Top 50. His house is being buzzed in a flyby by the military, he’s going on an Apache helicopter with Pete Hegseth… But press doesn’t sell tickets. Yes, press might help with awareness, although most of that comes online on other sites, but it doesn’t get people excited to go. You either want to go or you don’t.

Yet half of nation is red, or close to it. But is that a reason to go to the show? This isn’t a political rally, it’s a concert…with some political verbiage.

But it’s not only the press that’s out of touch, it’s Kid Rock himself.

There’s unlimited money/adulation/perks from Republican insiders if you’re a right wing entertainer, because there are so few of them. Rock is in a bubble, he too has lost touch with the street.

And he hasn’t had a bonafide hit since 2008.

This ain’t the Eagles… “Peaceful Easy Feeling” may be forever, but “Bawitdaba”?

Live by the hit, die by the hit. Which is why so many of today’s Spotify Top 50 will be unable to sell many tickets when their chart numbers decline. But it’s even worse, the music doesn’t mean the same thing in the culture.

And don’t confuse Kid Rock with metal. Metal has a bedrock audience based on alienation, being the other, that no other mainstream music possesses. So hits are not as important, and the length of time since your last hit is not  as important.

POST MALONE/JELLY ROLL

Rocker goes country!

That’s not a new paradigm, but the difference is Post Malone does a good job of selling it live and on record, he delivers.

But the truth is before he switched genres all his numbers were going in the wrong direction, he hadn’t had recording success in eons.

But it feels like Post Malone is a superstar, because that’s the way the press treats him (assuming you’re paying attention to the press).

So Post’s previous audience, do they really want to go to this stadium show? It’s not their kind of music…or they fear the set list won’t be their kind of music.

As for the new audience, the country audience, Post does not have a string of country hits, he’s not fully accepted in Nashville.

So who wants to overpay for a stadium show?

Not many!

A stadium show is less about the music and more about a celebration. You just want to be there, feel the vibe. But this requires hard core fans. And if Post has any, that number is not large, and then you have the switching genre issue above.

As for Jelly Roll, who is also on the bill… He’s been everywhere, and has been very likable in interviews, but he’s still a novice act, without a string of hits. I don’t think sales have been hurt by his use of the n-word, but it’s head-scratching how his multiple use of this word has not hurt him in the way Morgan Wallen’s one utterance has.

So what we’ve got here is a sea of blue dots. There’s no way this show is making money, as a matter of fact, they just canceled a concert in Waco… He says it’s to finish new music, what a laugh. No one wants to buy tickets!

Well, some people do. But there are fixed costs and an advance and… I don’t know how much dough they’re guaranteeing Post, but there’s no way in hell they make money on so many of these shows. Deals are predicated on the promoter giving almost all of the face value of the ticket to the act and making their profit on the ancillaries, i.e. food and drink/merch and ticket fees. But for these shows, there are already tickets on sale for below face value!

And that’s the reason I’m writing this screed. We can debate all day long whether Live Nation guaranteed concerts with Ticketmaster deals, or the lack thereof if there was no deal, but there is this canard that if the two are just broken up, ticket prices will plummet. That they’re artificially high and the public is getting screwed.

But the truth is no one puts a gun to a person’s head and tells them they must buy a ticket, that’s a personal choice. And until the on sale, there’s no guarantee the ticket sales will be good. It’s a bet. With a lot on the line, all the startup/production costs for the act, the guarantee by the promoter to the act, it’s a crapshoot. And for every high demand show with tickets resold at exorbitant prices online, we’ve got this tour, where they’re offering student discounts and… In other words, the prices are going DOWN!

It’s all the law of supply and demand. Prices can come down as well as go up. And when they’re up, that means demand outstrips supply… How come nobody not in the business can’t understand this?

What do Democrats stand for?

I was driving in my car, listening to CNN on the satellite, and there was a gentleman saying that all the protesters, those at the No Kings rallies, those at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, were the same people…a small subset of the population made up of those on the extreme left who should be ignored, because they don’t represent America. As a matter of fact, he went on to say they were UNAMERICAN!

He was not being histrionic, nor was he exasperated, rather he was stating his message in a grandfatherly way, kind of like Ronald Reagan saying “there you go again…”

And I’m thinking of how the right has defined so many things in America.

California is a hellhole, so bad that you’d better not leave the house because of the homeless population, and there are trans kids all over the schools and taxes are too high and why would anybody live there?

But it’s not only California… The Republicans have had a years-long campaign of denigrating, of labeling negatively, unions, mail-in voting, welfare…never mind taxes. To the point where taxes are now anathema even on the left. What am I getting for my damn money! And I could do a better job of disbursing it. (This is the claim of the richest class…how did that work out with DOGE? Where cuts were made by AI, enforced by those wet behind the ears with no insight. This has been well-documented, but if you only follow the arguments on cable news, the argumentative sites you go to online, you may not know this.)

The enemy is the elite, the university, the takers… They’ve all been demonized to the point where unless you’re a member of these groups, you too believe it.

So what do the Democrats stand for?

WE’RE ANTI-TRUMP!

But that’s not enough, not if you want people to believe in you, there must be more. There used to be a party platform, those are now meaningless exercises. Furthermore, many old Democrats are disillusioned by the party and have now become independents.

Used to be clear prior to the nineties, you knew what Democrats stood for:

1. The working man (and woman!)

Not a hard concept. But so many of these people are now Republicans. Because they were overlooked by the Democrats. The party was run by economic grifters trying to get closer to the money. Can you say EPSTEIN? Irrelevant of whether they were on the right or left, what we learned was the rich want to hang with other people with status and benefit from those relationships and the entire enterprise is encased in a cone of silence. But if you’re a working person?

You have no access. Even worse, you have no access to the best educational institutions, because the elite has locked them up with not only legacies and donations, but enrichment programs and…

So who is looking out for you?

You could say George Soros, but the right has labeled him to the point where just uttering his name makes people wince, he’s toxic…the Democrats never rose to defend him, for fear the right’s labeling of him would rub off on them.

2. Unions

The right has completely changed the narrative, unions are evil. The tide turned with the air traffic controllers being excised by Reagan in the eighties. If anybody goes on strike… Oh, they’re overpaid and selfish. Yup, these teachers educating your kids. Meanwhile, the company has you on part time, oftentimes with split hours, so you get no benefits. As for health insurance, it’s got “Obama” in the name. Only it doesn’t! The right slapped the Affordable Care Act with the moniker Obamacare to ensure negative perception. But it’s even worse, there’s the code word “Democrat” party as opposed to “Democratic.” The only person I’ve seen stand up to this is Bill Maher, and he is anything but warm and fuzzy, and therefore not changing minds as much as elected officials who could blow back every time they hear this label. It’s like being called a pejorative on the schoolyard. You can either walk away or punch back. But the Democrats stand there and take it.

3.Social safety net

Are there some people breaking the rules, getting undeserved pay? Of course, hell, there are people in Congress, our President is breaking rules constantly. But the truth is the system works quite well. I don’t care who your parents are, whether they’re drug addicts or not working, children deserve to have food on their plate and a roof over their head. Just like we believe when you experience a national disaster, you can count on the government to come rescue you, to a degree anyway. But now even that is in question. And, if you don’t take care of those at the bottom, they undercut the entire society. They not only camp in your streets, they break into your home and… Even if your house is behind a gate and you fly private…do you want to live in constant fear, do you really want to be this isolated from the population?

4. Taxes

Our nation runs on them, but they’re a dirty word. Even worse, the richer you are the less you proportionately pay, if you pay at all. As for corporations, many don’t even pay taxes, irrelevant of the statutory rate. But they’ve convinced us of the trickle down theory. Yeah, like if you caddy for a fat cat in your town he’ll tip you…exactly how much? It’s a pittance compared to the bank account of the player, even of the price it costs to get out on the course and play!

Where is the campaign stating that taxes pay for road upkeep, the police and fire departments, national defense… Does the public really want those to be kneecapped?

5. Reasonability

The Democratic party is supposed to be a big tent, but the end result has become no one can say no to anybody. Trans good, but tell me again why we should have trans women in women’s sports? How this even became an issue… There are very few of these people anyway. But come on, I’m not tall enough to play in the NBA, I don’t ask for a waiver. I didn’t go to medical school, I can’t practice medicine. Even Martina Navratilova came out against trans women in women’s tennis. But those who’ve never even played the game know better. It’s a matter of principle. Really? And if you don’t agree with this you’re excoriated, said to be unenlightened. Yes, I’ll say that trans women should be able to use the women’s bathroom, but… The most salient point here is the right has made a major issue out of something quite minor. Where are the elected officials on the left stating how few people are actually involved? Rather they just take the line that it should be allowed. People are reasonable, if you reason with them.

6. We’re all in it together

Ain’t that a laugh. The wealthy elite want nothing to do with the great unwashed, they have contempt for them. And the working and underclasses know this, which is one of the reasons they voted for Trump. It’s not about the issues so much as it is a matter of principle. I don’t care if you’re the smartest kid in the class, I can even handle you being rich, but if you’re lording it over me, being an a**hole, I’m against you in principle.

7. The rich don’t rule

Look at all those tech titans who used to be Democrats who are now Trumpers. Because their wallet comes first, not the public. To let these people make policy for the nation is anathema.

8. Public school

We should all start out equally, on the same foot. And we should fund our institutions accordingly. But the right calls them “government schools” and goes on and on how bad they are and wans government money for their private schools, which in many cases are anything but neutral. I won’t say they’re madrassas, but so many are religious and…

9. Sacrifice for the greater good

Today everybody is out for themselves, as for the rest of the people…SCREW ‘EM! You’re dumb if you don’t bend the rules. I’m out for myself and if in the process you’re hurt, or you fall behind, it’s your own damn fault. The right has convinced so many that it’s the poor’s fault that they’re economically challenged. I won’t even bother to refute this, it’s self-evident it is wrong, but many regular people now believe this.

10. We’re all in it together.

Income inequality is the scourge of our nation. And rather than hide with their riches, the wealthy say THEY EARNED IT! Exactly how? By creating a product that the public or government buys? Without a customer, without the population at large, you’re dead on arrival, you’ve got nothing.

Meanwhile, those “in power” on the left tell us their hands are tied and to trust the system. Yeah, the same system that is not giving me my FEMA money, the same one that took away my benefit so I can no longer afford health insurance? Go to the ER…yeah, like the public doesn’t pay anyway.

As for elections… Believe in the same process that Trump denied in 2020 and is still denying, never mind pardoning the January 6th protesters?

The left says “watcha gonna do…” And then does nothing. The right turns over the table with impunity.

Never mind the left being the party of science, of innovation, it’s the right that wants to return to the past. But we’ve got old officials who don’t understand the new technology and it’s laughable. It’s the Democrats who should kick the oldsters aside and let the youngsters in. We live in a completely changed world and in Congress they act like it’s 1926. Or maybe even 1826.

So you stand for something, or you stand for nothing.

Religion had it right, with the Ten Commandments.

And then you had the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

We know what the Republicans stand for, but the Democrats? It’s amorphous at best.

This is not rocket science. You could come up with a platform and hammer it. But that would mean you might piss off some people in your own party by speaking the truth. You might antagonize lobbyists. Elected officials are the absolute worst…they’re supposed to represent their constituencies, but it’s been proven time and again that they’re only out for themselves.

But how come I know all of the above and those in control of the Democratic party do not?

Because they’ve got their heads so far up their a**es that they’re out of touch. They’re just hoping that Trump alienates the public so much that they’ll gain some power. This is like trying to win a boxing match without throwing a punch. It’s fruitless.