Albums where the second side is better than the first side.

Tune in tomorrow, October 5th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz or @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: siriusxm.us/HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: siriusxm.us/LefsetzLive

Now that’s a rock star.

You remember rock stars, don’t you? Probably not if you’re a millennial or younger. Rock stars were musicians who channeled the truth, who stood up to corporations and bad behavior around the world. They were explicit, not complicit. And they and their messages were so powerful that money rained down upon them.

But it hasn’t been that way for a very long time.

First we had MTV. Which soon made looks more important than the music. Good luck getting signed if you weren’t beautiful. They had whole teams of people to help write your songs, to groom you, because there was big money at stake, and the executives wanted it. That big money was based on technology, i.e. the CD, which sold for two times viny and cassettes, yet to “help the format” artists halved their royalties, with promises they would be raised once the CD got traction, and this never happened. It was a game, the major labels, MTV, radio and print media were in cahoots. They built beautiful stars, who became more and more vapid.

And then came the internet. The paradigm was blown apart. But within the last decade a new order has been established, akin to the old one, but this time on steroids. Now the major labels sign very few acts, and don’t release any music from said acts until they’re sure they’re going to be hits. Furthermore, they have untold power at the streaming services, because they provide the lion’s share of their product, not only new music, but catalog, which represents in excess of 50% of streaming by everybody’s calculation. So every major label priority gets priority at the streaming service. It’s put on banners, it’s put on playlists, it’s given a chance. Good luck with your indie record. And as was proven in the movie business over the last forty-odd years, if you don’t have a library/catalog you can’t pay the bills, you end up selling or going out of business, because it’s the already paid-for assets that generate reliable income at essentially no cost while you do your best to make new hits. And now it’s even easier, it used to be impossible to get all your catalog in the retail store, you’d be lucky to get a greatest hits package, but today every one of the label’s owned songs appears on streaming services, and a lot of the past is better than what we’ve got today, but no one on the inside will say so. And don’t expect a whistleblower in the music business, where loyalty is everything.

So “The Wall Street Journal” did a series on Facebook based on documents received from a whistleblower. But not only were the lengthy, detailed articles behind a paywall, they were in print, and most people don’t read, at least not beyond the headlines and captions on news or social media sites. It was big news amongst the intelligentsia, but that leaves out most Americans. But today the whistleblower went on “60 Minutes”: 

https://cbsn.ws/3l7Z4KY

It’s less than fifteen minutes, you can afford the time, and it’s fascinating.

First and foremost Ms. Haugen. She’s a 37 year old woman. She’s the antithesis of Elizabeth Holmes. She’s the antithesis of today’s social media influencers, the Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian paradigm, where it’s only the exterior that counts and money trumps everything. Haugen went to the not even 25 year old Olin College, an engineering specialty school, and ultimately got an MBA at Harvard. Should you listen to the uneducated nitwit in your neighborhood or Ms. Haugen? It’s no contest.

“Ms. Haugen was initially asked to build tools to study the potentially malicious targeting of information at specific communities.”

That’s from the one hour old “Wall Street Journal” article on Frances Haugen, now that she’s revealed herself, they’re detailing her history. You can read about it here:

“The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It – The former Facebook employee says her goal is to help prompt change at the social-media giant”: https://on.wsj.com/3oCEynw

But that’s behind a paywall. It took twenty five years, but that’s where the internet is going, I point you to this article centered around Patreon in “Bloomberg Businessweek”: 

“Patreon Battles for Creators by Investing in Original Content – Ahead of a potential IPO, the $4 billion startup is transforming itself as competition from tech giants intensifies”: https://bloom.bg/3D8hEIN

It used to just be Patreon. Then came Substack. Now all the usual suspect platforms want to be gateways for content provided by citizens that sits behind paywalls so the creators can get paid. So what we’ll end up with is a bunch of niche creative providers, forget whether they get paid or not, who will reach tiny slivers of the public as the big outlets get bigger, then again will the big outlets gain dominance? This is still up in the air. Sure, the “New York Times” has just under 10 million subscribers, but we live in a country of 330 million, and those subscribers aren’t all Americans. Ditto music, the big acts might be bigger than the indies, but in the aggregate, the indies are quite large. Never mind that there’s only so much money to go around. Everybody wants to get paid, they’re sick of giving it away for free, they’re going behind paywalls. And if you don’t pay, soon you’ll be in the dark.

But not on Facebook or Instagram, because there you’re paying with your attention, the time you’re logged-on, during which they can serve you advertising.

That’s right, Facebook changed the algorithm a couple of years back such that content that delivered a reaction was favored. Because you’d interact with said content and you’d stay on longer, it was a win for Facebook, but a loss for society.

Haugen says that Facebook turned on safety systems before the 2020 election, but once the contest was over, they turned them off, end result being the 1/6 insurrection.

That’s what everybody was saying on Workplace, the Facebook intranet where everything was available to everybody.

So Haugen wanted to move to Puerto Rico. Facebook said she couldn’t work there. So Haugen decided to quit. But during the month she transferred her projects to new people, she downloaded as much information as she could from Workplace. She was stunned what she could see and she was stunned that no one saw her looking, especially in areas outside her purview. Bottom line, Facebook commissioned internal studies that detailed over and over again the negative effects of the service. Instagram’s negative influence on teenage girls. The trade of drugs and human beings in plain sight. How people who posted frequently or were famous were whitelisted and could say anything with impunity.

And then she contacted the SEC and provided this information to “The Wall Street Journal.”

Now what happens?

Well, even Haugen says that breaking up Facebook wouldn’t work. She says there must be governmental regulations because the company prioritizes profits over safety.

But it’s worse than that. Facebook is not a manufacturer of physical goods. Half of the world is on Facebook, and the bottom line is the service is now out of the control of the company. As bad as it is in America, it’s a free-for-all in most countries. And, once again, it’s Europe cracking down on the service, saying it’s interfering with government, not the U.S.

“a betrayal of democracy.”

That’s what Haugen says about Facebook turning off its restrictions after the election. And democracy does hang in the balance. It’s been three and a half years since the Cambridge Analytica story broke, but now the anti-Facebook movement is gaining momentum.

But don’t expect Workplace to be available to all Facebook employees in the future, they’re gonna close that loophole posthaste, never mind already shutting down internal operations that deliver information the brass doesn’t want to hear. If you don’t hear it, it doesn’t exist, right?

Wrong!

But you knew that.

But you also thought the power resided in the public. Like yesterday’s inane anti-abortion/women’s rights marches. I sympathize with the sentiment, but not the method. We marched all the way through Trump’s term, did it make a difference? Of course not. It’s the twenty first century, not the twentieth. Battles are fought online. That’s where you make your statements and organize, a person behind a computer is much more powerful than a person at an evanescent rally.

But really, we need the big players, the government, the investors to get involved or no change happens. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not. That’s what voting rights are all about. At least you get a say in theory, but if the rules make it too hard for many to vote, and a partisan legislature is in charge of the results, irrelevant of the public’s will, look out.

This is what is happening right now.

And what is everybody doing?

Looking to make a buck for themselves. Everybody’s deep in their hole, trying to elbow out others to get ahead. They’ve got contempt for others, there is no common good. That’s what “Squid Game,” the most popular show in the world, is all about. It’s not a revelation, it’s reality. People will do anything to survive, to keep the world running how they want it to.

Meanwhile, people are addicted to social media. At least there are alternatives to Amazon, but no boycott of the operation has ever worked. But California has instituted warehouse workplace rules targeting Amazon. Good luck working in another state. Where odds are you’re going to get hurt, with repetitive stress injuries if nothing else. Oh, Amazon provides aspirin and band-aids, but the truth is you’re just a cog in the system, disposable, while the company and Wall Street make ever more money. That’s another message of “Squid Game.”

So one individual has already had a huge impact. What are the odds other major tech companies will be reaching out to hire her? NADA! She’s white hot, untouchable, let’s hope she gets a big whistleblower settlement, but even if she does, that takes years.

Meanwhile, our nation, our world, is being run by a college dropout with tunnel vision. And his number two is leaning into him, not the public at large, screw the public, it’s all about money, isn’t that the essence of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos?

But there’s a lot more truth in “Squid Game” than any of today’s music. And the goal of “musicians” today is to sell out to the corporation, or become a corporation, to sell crap to brain dead listeners. That’s to be lauded?

No, Frances Haugen is to be lauded. She will be remembered, the Spotify Top 50 will not. Because Haugen did something important, took a stand, risking her career, her future. Who else is doing this?

And if this were the pre-internet era, this “60 Minutes” story would be known by essentially every citizen, if they didn’t see it, they’d hear about it, but “60 Minutes” no longer has that kind of reach, nothing on network TV does anymore. Then again, Facebook hate knows no political boundaries, it can appeal to both right and left.

But not really.

Did you see that YouTube shut out anti-vaxxers? Trump wants back on Twitter. Trump had more reach than anybody in the world, now it’s been scaled back, but he’s already convinced his troops that Democrats are socialists who will ruin society and they must fight to protect their way of life, however bogus it might be. That’s what 1/6 was about. And the word was spread on Facebook. And despite all the doublespeak of Nick Clegg and the rest of the Facebook press team, we know it’s true.

In reality, Mark Zuckerberg needs to lose his job. He can keep his money, but he can’t have his hands on the steering wheel of Facebook anymore. But that would require the board to have balls, which it doesn’t possess. Unlike Uber, where Travis Kalanick was exiled for bad behavior, Facebook throws off a ton of money, and since profits are everything, there is no change unless the government insists. But you can’t get agreement on anything in D.C. And not only is there no longer any trust in Congress, there’s no trust in the Supreme Court. And Ted Cruz is single-handedly holding up the appointment of 59 ambassadors, how does that help us exactly? https://nyti.ms/3Abb5Ds

But welcome to the modern world.

Where what happens online supersedes everything else. And it happens so fast that elected officials cannot keep up with it. And the internet itself is fluid, so you end up playing a game of Whac-A-Mole.

Meanwhile, China is clamping down.

But Evergrande has revealed the country’s economic underpinnings are shaky. But Xi is trying to minimize the bad influences of the internet, he’s trying to tamp down celebrity culture, he’s trying to return China to the past, and ultimately that will never work. What did the Rascals say? “People everywhere just want to be free”?

But things have to get really bad before they react.

They’re really bad at Facebook. This is the first shoe dropping.

What’s next? 

Mandates work.

That’s the story this week. Fewer than 1% of United Airlines employees refused to get vaccinated when told they needed to get the jab to keep their jobs. That’s right, out of 67,000 employees, only 593 refused to get the shot. Two months ago, only 70% of the airline’s employees were vaccinated, now only 1% are not.

But it’s not only United. Tyson Foods reported that 91% of its employees are now vaccinated, and the deadline has not yet arrived. As for the New York health system, it went from 75% to 92% today. Many individual hospitals are even higher. St. Barnabas in the Bronx went from 80% to 97%. Mohawk Valley went from 70% to 95.6%. https://wapo.st/3uyvp0p

What drove the increase? Economics!

“Of Vaccine Mandates and Facing Reality”: https://nyti.ms/2Yo3a8V

“The point is that most vaccine resistance isn’t about deep concerns, but it often involves assertions of the right to give (misguided perceptions of) self-interest priority over the public interest. So, luckily, many resisters fold as soon as the calculus of self-interest reverses, and refusing to take their shots has immediate, tangible financial costs.”

Turns out when it comes to money, people will bite the bullet, get the shot. You read about people sacrificing their jobs, but they’re a distinct minority.

As for the mentality of the true believers, you must read this article in “Vox”: 

“Why people who don’t trust vaccines are embracing unproven drugs – Inside the upside-down world where Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and ivermectin is saving lives”: https://bit.ly/3FfVaay

“‘People listen to people “from their group” and whom they think they can trust,’ David Dunning, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, told me. ‘People really don’t know what science is, and so do you feel you can trust the person giving you advice, rather than appraising their expertise, becomes the thing.'”

It’s about cults. You always twist the facts to support your position. The doomsday cult waits for the world to end, and then when it doesn’t they’re joyous, because of their belief the rest of the world was saved!

“In communities of hardened vaccine skeptics, new information isn’t necessarily treated as an opportunity to reassess their beliefs. Instead, new facts are seen either as affirmation of what this community already believes or as a distraction that should be dismissed because it doesn’t neatly sort into their anti-vaccine narrative.”

And:

“That theory holds that, within the American right, the concepts of loyalty and betrayal are more influential to their worldview than on the American left. Staying true to your group is a powerful pull for conservatives.

‘For these folks, facts mean nothing; membership and identity, everything,’ Bernstein said over email. ‘Groupishness, in-/out-group differentiation … is much stronger on the right.'”

In other words, there’s no chance of convincing these hard core deniers with logic, it just won’t work, they’re invested in their position, facts don’t matter.

But money does.

As does the ability to function in a society. If you make life hard enough, people will get the shot. You can’t smoke in a theatre, in almost any public place, and you shouldn’t be allowed inside one if you’re not vaccinated. Turns out most people want vaccine mandates, it’s just that politicians lack the will.

And then we have the strange case of California…

The Republicans thought they would dethrone Newsom and turn the Golden State into a Covid-19 free-for-all like Florida or Texas. But their efforts resulted in a debacle, Newsom won almost three-quarters of the vote. And thus emboldened, he declared that all students must be vaccinated. Elections have consequences, the people spoke and it turns out the Republicans are in an even worse position in California, whose inoculation rate is so high and Covid prevention laws so tough that the state’s infection and death rate are consistently amongst the lowest in the nation.

We need more politicians to do what is right as opposed to what is wrong because they’re afraid of a minority of their constituents.

We need more vaccine mandates.

We need to make life so hard for the unvaccinated that they decide to get the shot to their benefit.

Mandates work, we need more!

(Spoiler alert: Yes, some plot points of “The Many Saints of Newark” are revealed below, but they’re not super-significant and if you bother to watch this turkey you won’t care. As for “The Squid Game,” I haven’t finished so don’t be a jerk and e-mail me about it, STAY SILENT!)

It’s terrible.

The hottest show on television today is “The Squid Game.” Netflix expects it to be the most viewed show on the service ever! But I didn’t see an iota of advance publicity, there was no hype, its popularity is being driven by word of mouth, unlike “The Many Saints Of Newark.”

I’ve watched some Korean TV. It’s different. It’s slower, the characters can be stylized, and if you asked me if it had international appeal, that Americans would be tuning in to see this dystopian drama in a foreign language, I would have said NO WAY! And to tell you the truth, I’m only halfway through and I still don’t get the mania, but I’m going to finish it, because I want to be part of the discussion, in a world where the only communal touchpoints are generated by politics, it’s good to have something available to all that we all watch and talk about.

No one will be talking about “The Many Saints of Newark,” unless to remark how bad it is, if that.

So for over a year, we’ve been subjected to hype on this prequel to “The Sopranos.” Did we need it, did we want it? No. But we were certainly intrigued. The hype centered over the casting of Michael Gandolfini as his father, Tony Soprano, at a young age, and contrary to the sledgehammer of publicity his role is pretty small, he pulls it off somewhat believably, better than most of the scene chewers in this two hour waste of time.

It’s almost a comedy. NONE of the performances ring true. Oh, they did a good job of casting people who look like their elder selves, but they’d have been better off focusing on their acting ability. Especially laughable is the young Silvio Dante, who has got all of Little Steven’s mannerisms down, but ends up looking like a cartoon.

As for Ray Liotta… His plastic surgery has settled in and he no longer looks like a goon and he’s okay, but really as the brother, not as “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti. And Liotta’s performance is better than every other one except for Vera Farmiga’s as Livia Soprano, but even she has scenes that ring completely untrue, like when she’s speaking with the guidance counselor.

So the film begins with Hollywood Dick returning from Italy with his new bride and you’re already confused, WHO IS WHO? It takes half an hour or more to realize Hollywood Dick is Christopher’s grandfather. And Christopher’s father “Dickie” not only doesn’t ring true, you can’t understand what is going on in his life, he’s got Giuseppina in an apartment but is he still married and then when Johnny Soprano comes home from prison he’s talking about a new baby as if it’s his and if you’re not confused, you wrote the damn script.

And the focus is on imagery rather than script or performance. Then again, it doesn’t always ring true. There’s a cab ride where the meter stick is so worn out it couldn’t possibly be contemporary, it looks like the relic it is.

And we don’t even know what year we’re in!

Sure, it starts off in 1967, but then Tony is a teenager and there’s no mention of year and you’re really not sure, not that you care.

James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano had an inner anger that was always visible. And he was rarely over the top, unlike Big Dick and Little Dick. As for Junior… I love Corey Stoll, he was great in “House of Cards,” but he looks like a Jewish accountant here, not a member of the Mafia.

And they all hang out but the context, what they’re doing, is never really explained. The other Mafia families, the Blacks moving in on their territory. Actually, the only performance that rings true most of the time is Leslie Odom, Jr.’s, after he’s back from down south, he’s got that edge, that inner anger. As for Little Dick, aka “Dickie,” killing people… He looks like a guy who’d confess instantly, weary of a nervous breakdown, he’s not a cold-blooded killer.

So what we see here is David Chase is not the genius.

I was always surprised that the guy who took over “Northern Exposure,” which resulted in a step down in quality, could generate something as good as “The Sopranos.” Obviously it was the peripheral people, like Terence Winter, who was not involved in this abomination.

I never would have gone to a theatre to see this. Covid or no, especially with the bad reviews. This is just an expensive TV movie. That no one really wants to see. A curio. You truly can’t go home anymore. Thank god James Gandolfini is dead and couldn’t participate in this piece of crap, it would stain his legacy. It remains intact. Unfortunately, James is still dead.

Big Pussy, Paulie Walnuts, Christopher… All the original characters had a core of evil. It might be wrapped in niceness when out in public, but there was no doubt these people would do what it took to protect their business, to survive. And they were a family, and Tony was quite obviously the boss. Who exactly is the boss here? Dickie doesn’t live up to the role, certainly not hothead Johnny, who seems to be modeling his role on James Caan’s in “The Godfather.”

This movie was promoted in a positively old school way. And the old school is dead. Word was out on this turd long before the average citizen could see it. The hype didn’t matter, it was instantly disregarded, you can’t pull the wool over the audience’s eyes today. You’ve got to focus on the product. TV is still not like music. Sure, there’s a lot of product, but nowhere near the amount there is in music, where 60,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every week. So if you’re on the big platform people will give you a chance and if the show is any good they’ll tell others and you’ll have a viral hit. This is what has happened again and again and again, from “Stranger Things” to “Tiger King”…

It’s hysterical to watch old Hollywood burn right in front of our eyes. They’re gonna blame it on Covid, but the truth is everybody is accessible online, and it turns out two-dimensional actors are not that interesting, we don’t want to model our behavior after them. And then the Silicon Valley titans disrupted the old industry, built on fraud, not paying investors and profit participants, and not investing in the future either. The old Hollywood moguls were crooks, playing a game of street ball. It wasn’t about education, it was sharp elbows, how else does a hairdresser like Jon Peters get to run a studio and ultimately lose billions?

So now the studio heads are faceless. And when they try to move forward, the rest of old Hollywood freaks out. Yes, your product has to be on the flat screen, day and date, wake up to the present. As for the agencies bitching… Their money doesn’t come from movies and music anymore anyway, it comes from sports and other non-Hollywood elements of their behemoth operations. Sure, they prepared for the future, give them credit, but the glamour of the movie business does not pay the bills. As for the leverage of the stars… For years they’ve been unable to open pictures. Scarlett Johansson was lucky she was in a superhero movie, and did you see that Disney settled with her? They don’t want a precedent.

The action is in series, not movies, and it’s all on the flat screen. “The Many Saints of Newark” even leaves us hanging in the end. What we really needed was a series, thank god we didn’t get one.