This is society’s Napster moment.

They never could kill P2P with the legal system. It took a bright twentysomething from a foreign country to save the record labels’ lunch. And now said labels are trying to survive by purchasing the distribution systems of much younger companies led by entrepreneurs. NO ONE running a major label today has ever had skin in the game, they’ve always worked for the man. They don’t know how to be nimble, they’re tied to the balance sheet.

But when you’re starting with a blank piece of paper…

All the brass at Apple is over 60. Any wonder that the company missed AI? It was so busy trying to squeeze money out of the App Store and subscriptions that it missed the future.

I woke up today to a story in the “Washington Post” about a 25 year old running for a Congressional seat:

“Democrats face another split over age and values in Arizona – Adelita Grijalva is the front-runner to replace her father in Congress but faces an unexpectedly competitive primary featuring a young social-media-savvy newcomer.”

Free link: https://wapo.st/3GI7h63

The money quote?

“Her campaign has been fueled by her large social media following”

I’ve yet to find a boomer testify positively about social media. Record execs will reluctantly admit records are broken by TikTok, but they don’t know how to do this. As for boomers and Gen-X’ers? Social media is THE DEVIL!

Oh, some are still on Facebook, connecting with their high school buddies and showing off, not knowing that TikTok is something different. TikTok is creative, it’s about connecting. And to anybody over fifty, it’s ANATHEMA!

There’s a gap as wide as the culture in between.

Not that Trump is in touch with youngsters either. In fact, if you’re on TikTok or Instagram Reels you’re constantly chuckling at the AI depictions of our President. He’s being mocked on a regular basis, and his team doesn’t even know it!

@rev_repeat_offender

*Tuba noises* Our fearless leader got a bill of clean health.. #aitrash #comedy #trump #grifterinchief #repeatoffender #fat #chonky #caloriedeficit #perfecthealth

? Fat – “Weird Al” Yankovic

As for the bros on X… That’s about dissatisfaction over their inability to get laid, inability to get a reasonable job, leaving them with all this time to waste on the service which has a very narrow appeal.

The culture has moved on from the political system. Trump’s only hope is he can control the youth via autocratic methods, because the penny is about to drop.

Tucker Carlson? He’s 56 and made his name on TV, do you think youngsters care?

So oldsters said Napster was stealing, they sicced the legal system on the service and the end result was that new decentralized services erupted to replace it. Talk about Whac-A-Mole.

Then the brass tried to teach the users a lesson by suing them. And then installed rootkits in the CDs.

Not only was there backlash, NONE OF THIS WORKED!

The MP3 didn’t sound good enough, physical product was everything. But the younger generations cottoned to streaming, saving the record labels. They know that access is everything, that ownership is passé. Youngsters don’t care that concerts replaced records, they’re into the EXPERIENCE!

Meanwhile, my inbox is still filled with people waiting for the old, pre-internet world to come back… IT ISN’T!

This is akin to the youthquake of yesteryear, the one in the sixties. The old guard was just too out of touch. No one wanted to be shipped to Vietnam to be killed.

Today’s driver is economic death. Not only can they not get a reasonable job that will allow them to buy a house, the government is adding debt that will hobble their future AND THEY KNOW IT!

Enough of the canard that the youth are ignorant. They’re online all day AND THAT’S WHERE THE NEWS IS! Never has a generation been so well-informed, and able to interact with its peers all around the world, instantly, FOR FREE!

Just like you can record in your bedroom for free. The old record label model has been demolished. Recording is cheaper and a broader swath of product is being consumed and the majors’ market share is declining. The old model of being able to control the marketplace is gone, NO ONE can break an act. Because today breaking an act means starting so small the old pros can’t even see it. It’s done in the bedroom using the new tools, communicating with your brethren. Forget polishing it, just PLAY!

That’s another thing the politicians can’t understand. Stop being measured and start being out there. The past is plowed under by the future nearly instantly. If you don’t play you can’t win. Making a mistake? It happens! Best to be in the game. Not every TikTok post is good, not every one gains traction, but that does not make people self-conscious, they continue, waiting to catch lightning in a bottle. And on TikTok, as opposed to YouTube or Instagram, the algorithm will allow nobodies to gain instant traction. The past is only prologue to a degree. The youth are used to new heroes constantly appearing and disappearing. Society has never been more fluid. But the oldsters insist it is moribund.

And like Napster all this is happening right in front of our eyes, in plain sight, but oldsters refuse to see it.

This is much bigger than Trump posting on Twitter and now Truth Social. The ball has moved, in typical modern media fashion, and not only are the Democrats behind, so are the Republicans. To succeed in modern society not only do you need to be agile, you must be willing to throw out the past and jump into the future on a regular basis.

Not only are the youth disillusioned, they are growing in number, EACH AND EVERY DAY! It’s only a matter of time until their values rule. They’re sleeper cells all over the country, just waiting to erupt. And oldsters can’t even see them!

Streaming has eclipsed network yet oldsters still ask for money to advertise on linear TV. Who is watching? Furthermore, youngsters HATE ADS!

This is not a right or left issue, Democrat or Republican, this is a societal issue.

Then again, the young lean left.

But it’s more than politics. It’s culture. And culture drives society.

The markers of change are out there, but in today’s multifarious world the obvious can be ignored, until…

Now wait just a second. There’s a flood in Texas and over a hundred people die and it was an unforeseen  act of God, but fire destroys homes in California and the fault lies with the mayor and the fire department and…

I’m not saying I don’t care about the people who lost their lives and their loved ones, but I am saying America has devolved to the point where if it’s not good for me, screw you!

Yes, it used to be different. As evidenced by the Youngbloods hit “Get Together”: 

“Come on people now

Smile on your brother

Everybody get together

Try to love one another right now”

That ethos is long gone. Then again, the people who experienced it are so busy protecting their nest eggs that they’re not worried about selling youngsters’ futures down the river. It’s mine for me.

As for Mamdani…

Are you catching this? The Democratic brass, Silicon Valley and the major news outlets are FREAKING OUT! Instead of evaluating why Mamdani won, they want to take away his ability to change a city whose government is deeply flawed, where it’s too expensive for the average punter to live in Manhattan, and even Williamsburg!

The young…

The government may not care about climate change, but the younger generations do. If you want Gen Z to buy your products not only must they be green, you must give back! Yes, there are a lot of right wing trolls on X, but just because someone yells loudest that does not mean everybody thinks the way they do.

And then there’s Elon Musk trying to start a third party. Not a bad idea, if he didn’t rape the government willy-nilly with DOGE. He lost the left who loved his cars. Now all he’s got is his bros on X and his AI bot that is literally trained on his tweets!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve checked out.

What I mean by this is I read the news, it affects me, but I don’t do anything about it and I don’t expect anybody else to do anything about it. We are already living under authoritarianism, but what is most confounding is people are accepting it. I thought if America turned into Hungary, run by the right wing hero Orbán, there’d be riots in the street. But we’ve got little more than crickets. Oldie leftists are disillusioned and living in the past and youngsters have been battling a negative future outlook for nearly their entire lives.

Don’t ask me to protest. To show up with a sign. We did that and it had no effect. It’s not 1968, never mind 1972 when the Republican Senators stood up to Nixon, who looks like a left wing saint compared to Trump.

And even Obama just excoriated the Democratic brass:

“Democrats Must ‘Toughen Up’ Against Trump, Obama Tells Donor – Frustrated that prominent Democrats have not fought harder, former President Barack Obama said in a speech that his party’s leaders needed to step up.”

Free link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/us/politics/barack-obama-trump-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk8.N4_H.V9k_dnJ6AklH&smid=url-share

And please stop asking me for money. What are you going to do with it, buy TV ads like Andrew Cuomo? Today it’s not about money, it’s about marshalling the troops online with sincere messages delivered in a clever way. But the fearful Democrats just can’t understand, never mind accept, the new rules. Mamdani’s their Napster.

So Kristi Noem insists she must sign off on every expenditure over 100k, which is like Jamie Dimon needing to approve the purchase of anything more than a cup of coffee at JPMorgan Chase. And as a result, the FEMA phone lines went unmanned, the contractors having been laid off/not renewed. I didn’t see this story on Fox whatsoever and then Kristi Noem goes on a Sunday TV news program and denies calls weren’t answered. Hell, in the Trump administration you just fake it ’til you make it, lie until you get caught. And then you have constituents/fans who will support you no matter what you say.

Should I get into RFK, Jr. and vaccines? I can’t get the MMR shot because of an immune issue, hopefully my fifties immunity will hold. As for those keeping their kids from being vaccinated, they don’t care about herd immunity, they only care about themselves!

Like the corporations who killed easy cancellation. Is there a soul in America who doesn’t want to be able to cancel a subscription easily with one obvious click?

OF COURSE NOT!

But the individual not only has no power, Trump signed a bill that hurts the little guy and gal and the people who are aware of its contents are against it, overwhelmingly, but Congresspeople are afraid of their leader. What next, firings and suicides like in Russia, with Transport Minister Roman Starovoit?

I’m lucky. I live in California. You can denigrate it all you want, but it’s the world’s fourth largest economy and you can get an abortion and sure, it’s imperfect, but when you lose your home to an act of God you get more than thoughts and prayers.

And the public just wants to anesthetize, things are so bad. “Superman” gets bad reviews but does boffo at the b.o. Then again, try getting something new noticed by the public, it’s nearly impossible.

I don’t have any kids. But I was watching a video about skiing the Vallée Blanche earlier today and the glacier in Chamonix had shrunk so much in ten years it was a strenuous climb to where you used to walk right into the gondola.

Check the video out here, you can see the shrinkage starting at 9:20 (and back up before to see even more of a dramatic change):

But instead of addressing these climate disasters, let’s just cut the weather service. Ignorance is bliss.

But that’s what underlies so many of the world’s problems, raw ignorance. Hell, the newspapers have been delineating all of Trump’s faux pas, but the right has done a good job of marginalizing anything but Fox News and a bunch of websites those on the left have never even heard of.

And you want me to love my brother?

Yes, I keep hearing that from those on the left. We don’t fight like they do, we go high when they go low. Well, that never worked on the schoolyard and even though MLK, Jr. preached nonviolence, he was a leader who riled up an agitated public as opposed to Schumer, et al, who throw their hands in the air and say, “Who me, coach?”

Everybody lies on the stand, why should I tell the truth.

The January 6th perps got pardoned. So what does the rule of law mean?

And then we’ve got the immigrants as scapegoats. God, you’d think they were an invading force about to take over the government, when the truth is they’re doing all the jobs white citizens refuse to do.

Then again, under the rubric of rip-off, poor whites are going to lose their local hospitals. Let’s make it more simple, why don’t we have the government stop supporting ANYBODY! You’re all on your own. Enough with this social safety net pioneered by Roosevelt. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, go to work at Walmart and…

GOOD LUCK!

“These Days”

1

He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

I decided to play some new music. I’ve been reading this new novel and my eyes were starting to glaze over. I’m not sure I’ll ever recommend it, because it’s kinda dense with highfalutin’ words, but a lot of it centers on Berlin club culture and I can relate to that. “Good Girl” is about a young woman of Afghan heritage who is troubled by her heritage and there’s great insight into Muslim culture and on the surface even I didn’t want to read it, but it’s very intriguing.

But maybe it was the Sunday afternoon blues. I found myself checking out. So I decided to get my iPad and listen to some new music as I surfed the web. And first I listened to the new Wet Leg album, which is surprisingly good, and if it was the seventies I’d be a fan. Back then if you purchased an LP you played it enough to know it and like it but in today’s hit and run world you don’t listen that way anymore. But I played about half the album. I liked where it was coming from. They were thinking about this music before they made it, this is the punk ethos of the seventies, in this case the antithesis of the Spotify Top 50. But halfway through I decided I’d heard enough and…

I pulled up Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, which can yield some gems, but is too often littered with old stuff I already know, and then I went to Release Radar and it stimulated some further listening. I heard that Bob Dylan duet with Barbra Streisand which made me research the album and see that she did a duet with James Taylor on “Secret o’ Life,” a genius song, but then I pulled up the duet and the worst part was Streisand herself, I was never a fan. She’s the antithesis of what the rock revolution represented back in the late sixties and seventies.

And then I saw a duet with Buddy Guy and Joe Walsh, which I had to listen to. We’re going back to the old days, where you make the album because you want a recorded document, which you issue into the ether, if you’re banking on sales forget about it.

But Release Radar wasn’t satisfying either, so I went to Amazon Music and couldn’t find a playlist that resonated with me, so then I went to Qobuz and found this playlist entitled “New Releases”:

https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/2049430

And what appealed to me was that this was a multi-genre playlist, I wanted a taste of everything, which I got, there are 105 cuts on it.

And the tracks weren’t by the usual suspects, at least not those at the beginning, and some I listened to and some I skipped through after thirty seconds or so and then…

I’m catching up on “Bloomberg Businessweek” in Apple News+, I’m not concentrating on the music, but I hear something that stops me, stops my reading and makes me take a moment to listen, to then research.

The cut was “These Days” by Tanner Usrey.

2

“A heart like mine is a hard one to love

‘Cause I’ve gotten real damn good at really f*cking things all up

Now I’m fighting demons in the dark

I don’t know where I should start

Oh lord I’m spiraling again”

This is why country music is having a moment, YOU CAN RELATE TO IT!

The Spotify Top 50 has become a caricature of itself, it’s TMZ music, made for the penumbra, gossip columns and brand endorsements more than the music itself, oftentimes bluster and braggadocio, little different from a Marvel movie. It’s relatively narrow, and then I hear someone like Tanner Usrey and he’s totally outside.

This is not what the newspapers are writing about. There are genius acts plying the boards far superior to the overhyped dancing nitwits. How do you find them? Let me tell you, I rarely check out these playlists so don’t see this as a ringing endorsement of them.

“Oh and I’ve been sinking down

Try to scream but can’t make a sound

Tell me is it all just in my head

And I’ve grown so numb to it all

Oh God here comes the fall”

This is in the vein of singer-songwriter acts of the early seventies. Then again, James Taylor could not only pick and create songs with changes he had a way with words, and studying those of Tanner Usrey I had to admit that they weren’t quite in JT’s league.

Does he have it in him? When someone reaches this age, seemingly around thirty, and has been in the game for over a decade, usually not. Then again, there are some producers who can push them into their interior and squeeze greatness out of them.

Then again, there are very few great ones out there.

But the magic of “These Days” is more than the downtrodden lyrics, there’s Usrey’s vocal…THIS AI cannot reproduce. This is the magic. It’s got nothing to do with “The Voice,” that’s got nothing to do with art, this guy’s voice is soulful in that you truly get the impression he’s singing from the heart, that it’s truly him. And it’s sweet with just a bit of whiskey/rough and can sustain a song all by its lonesome, sans effects.

And speaking of no effects, the instrumentation makes magic. The subtle piano, never mind the acoustic guitar, and some organ notes…

“These Days” is in the vein of those Stephen Stills songs on those Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young albums, like “4+20.” Nobody seems to be trying to replicate that formula, even too many of the vaunted Americana artists who are overwriting their songs for gravitas and don’t have voices as magical s Usrey’s.

3

Now further research tells me that Usrey had a song in “Yellowstone.” And I know “Yellowstone” is a phenomenon, but middlebrow soap is not for me, I watched enough “Bonanza,” where’s that at, if you want me I’ll be in the bar.

And it seems that the initial “Yellowstone” placement got him a deal with Atlantic. Turns out it’s from the pre-Grainge hip-hop all the time chasing online momentum regime. It didn’t make cognitive sense, but Usrey is on Atlantic.

And doing deep research I see that Sacks & Co. is involved, what a waste of money. It’s no longer about hype, about print, it’s about LISTENING! No amount of press is going to get me to check out Tanner Usrey, another Texan cowboy who is a product of the Red Dirt scene and likes Skynyrd and… Now, more than ever, you’ve got to hear it to get it, and it’s nearly impossible to get someone to hear it. But if something is good, despite not flying on the mainstream radar, someone is listening, Usrey’s got four tracks with double digit million streams on Spotify, and they’re not from “Jellystone.” How did everybody find out? What accounts for the 49,393,234 streams of “Come Back Down”? Damned if I know.

Maybe it’s those endless gigs, multiple recordings… If you’re good enough you gain traction, and if you don’t either you’re doing something wrong or you and your music just aren’t good enough.

4

Then I decided to check out some more Usrey songs. First I started with the most popular on Spotify, but I figured it would be best to go to the new album, also called “These Days,” which was released on Friday, that major label big money can oftentimes be heard in the recordings.

And the opening cut, “Do It to Myself”…was a rocker, nothing like “These Days.” At first kind of pedestrian, not that memorable, but then I could lock into the “Smuggler’s Blues” vibe, but still… This was not magical.

And then I wondered if “These Days” was an anomaly, whether it was really a rock record with only this one introspective track. So I started sampling songs and I came across “Better Weather,” which was even more intimate than “These Days,” I thought it was superior to “These Days,” but then going back to the latter I decided it was not, but it’s pretty damn good.

Let’s be clear, I don’t see either of these tracks burning up the chart, whatever chart that might be. This is not appropriate for the flashy too often mindless in your face country chart, and it’s more mainstream than the Americana niche, this is the type of music with broad-based appeal, this guy is one step away from BLOWING UP!

I mean I checked out Reddit. People who’d seen him were testifying, and I got it. This was completely different from the production of today’s arena show, in this case just the man (or woman) and his music is enough. You’re sitting there and the sound sets your mind free, adrift, you’re in your own movie, we call this life.

5

There is definitely something here. Neither of these tracks are going to make Tanner a household name, then again, who is these days? But he could build a career and become…

Zach Bryan?

Well, Usrey is less country. It’s the difference between Oklahoma and Texas. Then again, Bryan sells out stadiums, instantly. Could Usrey do the same? All I’ll say is these two songs will ignite the average punter more than anything Bryan’s done.

All you’ve got to do is listen.

“Better Weather”

Tune in Saturday July 12th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

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