Every day my father used to wake up my mother saying “Muggs, guess who died!”
Well, not every day, but often enough that it became a regular joke in our family. My father read the obituaries assiduously, after all, he grew up in Bridgeport and he knew most of the names.
Not anymore. Today you can die and most people are unaware. Oh, you can purchase an obit in the paper…then again, who reads the paper? No, at this point very few purchase obituaries, but the papers publish their own words for significant people. And it’s interesting who makes the cut, who they choose.
Of course Dolly Parton gets reams. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember this much passion and furor about anybody dying since Elvis. (Of course, except for John Lennon, who is in his own category, I’m still not over that.)
So Dave Marsh earned an obituary. But more well-known people do not. Seems the more idiosyncratic your success was, the more impact you had in a certain field, however narrow, the greater the odds you’ll be featured. Just being rich is not enough. Although if you reach a certain amount of fame, you’ll get some words.
But the thing about obits is they come after you die. So you can’t bask in the admiration. It’s kind of like that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode with Albert Brooks watching his own funeral. That’s what you want, to hear the accolades before you pass.
And the funny thing is obits are not always consistent. Like with Jaye P. Morgan. The “Los Angeles Times” said this:
“Morgan was class treasurer of her California high school, and her peers nicknamed her J.P. after the 19th century financier J.P. Morgan. She later feminized it by changing the initial J to Jaye.”
The “New York Times” this:
“‘My name was Mary Morgan, and at the time there were a lot of singers with the last name “Morgan,”‘ she said. (Their ranks included Jane Morgan and Marion Morgan.) It was Mr. DeVol who came up with Jaye P., a play on the name of the Gilded Age financier J.P. Morgan.”
What is the truth? I tend to trust the “New York Times,” its obits are usually more in-depth, but when it comes to entertainment figures, the “Los Angeles Times” is occasionally superior.
Which raises the question whether Barrett Strong, singer of the song, was one of the composers of “Money (That’s What I Want),” the first hit Motown single, albeit on Tamla.
Here’s what Wikipedia says:
“Singer Barrett Strong claimed that he co-wrote the song with Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford. His name was removed from the copyright registration three years after the song was written, restored in 1987 when the copyright was renewed, and then excised again the following year. Gordy has stated that Strong’s name was only included because of a clerical error.”
(Wikipedia was determined to be almost as accurate as the Brittanica…)
So that’s who Janie Bradford is/was. She co-wrote “Money.” You know, that song that every garage band played back in the sixties, never mind the new wave version by the Flying Lizards in 1979.
Of course the Beatles covered it. Was that our inspiration? “Money” just seemed to be a song in the air, the kind that was always there, the concept of someone actually writing it seemed if not unfathomable, at least superfluous. It was bigger than its composers.
Now depending on which obit you read, Janie Bradford either got a gig as a receptionist at Motown and worked her way into becoming a songwriter or Gordy Berry was introduced to her by Jackie Wilson as a songwriter and she was regarded as such from the very beginning.
Does it matter?
Yes, only because the story is so unique. For all the stories of Carole King and Cynthia Weil, the truth is successful woman songwriters were a rarity, especially in the Black soul music world. Hell, we’ve heard about Holland/Dozier/Holland and Smokey Robinson, as for Ashford & Simpson, their first hit didn’t come until 1966, with Ray Charles’s version of “Let’s Go Get Stoned.” But “Money” was released in 1959.
Now anybody can get a credit once. Maybe you were just in the room. But to do it twice?
We all know “Money.”
But we also know “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby.”
I became fascinated with airplanes when I was 13 and my family made a cross-country trip.
Our first flight was on a 720B to Chicago. I’d never heard of that plane. It was the 707 that was famous, the epitome of the jet age.
But on the tarmac I saw planes with three engines in the back, and found out they were the latest and greatest, they were 727s.
And on one leg of the trip we took a Lockheed that was not a jet, we were lucky to get on it, for there was an airline strike.
And then from L.A. to Phoenix we took a DC-9. With only two engines in the back. What I remember most about that flight was it jumped into the air very quickly.
And descended just about as fast.
Now Lockheed and Douglas ultimately released their own jets with three engines in the tail, to compete with the wide-body 747. But Lockheed’s L1011 was the last commercial plane the company built, they couldn’t compete with Boeing. As for what was then known as McDonnell Douglas…an engine fell off the DC-10, and in the resulting financial mess, the company was sold to Boeing.
So only Boeing was left. It was the big kahuna. It won.
And we were proud of it.
But then there was a fakokta consortium formed to build the supersonic Concorde. It had an “e” at the end at the behest of the French, their British partners capitulated.
This was truly the jet age.
But when a tire blew out on the runway and the plane took a dive, the Concorde was sidelined and only Boeing was left.
But not really. A competitor emerged with the moniker “Airbus,” a consortium of European powers: France, Germany, Spain and Britain. A plane built by committee? We didn’t expect technological breakthroughs from the continent, those were the domain of the States. And calling it an AirBUS? We were in the jet age, flight was still relatively exotic. People might not have still dressed up, but they weren’t quite wearing shorts and flip-flops as they do today.
Then again, the reduction in sartorial fare coincided with the deregulation of the airlines, which caused a concomitant drop in the price of flights, and seemingly everybody took to the air thereafter.
2
Now the bumpiest flights I encounter are flying east, over the Rockies, to land in Denver. You’re cruising along, smoothly, looking down at the snow in the mountains and then…
The landscape immediately flattens out and this causes airflow to change dramatically, and as a result…if you’re afraid of turbulence, get ready for a white knuckle ride.
And on one of these flights, with the plane going sideways, wondering if we were even going to make the runway, my friend leaned over from the seat behind me and said:
“Freak out all you want, but the plane is never going to crash.”
And I embraced that. It’s carried me through a number of sketchy flights thereafter. Plane crashes used to be a regular feature. But now, it’s really only private craft. Until…
The 737 Max.
Now the 737 is a plane that was launched in the sixties. Relatively low to the ground, so you didn’t need jetways, you could just roll up a set of stairs. No one expected it to become a workhorse, to even fly cross-country, but it turned out carriers wanted smaller planes, not bigger ones. To the point where Airbus came out with the double-decker A380 and despite being the smoothest experience ever, it’s like flying on your living room couch, demand was de minimis and it went out of production.
Seeing that the demand had switched to smaller jets, Airbus created the A320. And other than on Southwest, which famously flies only 737s, you started to see them around.
But then Airbus saw the future, and created a smaller, more fuel-efficient version of the A320 called the A320neo, which was much more fuel-efficient.
And Boeing was caught flat-footed.
3
Covid taught me nobody is in control. The fact that the world runs at all is staggering to me.
But I was brought up to respect experts, my elders, and if you follow the business press, the biggest hero of the nineties was Jack Welch. The accolades were unending, he was the CEO of the century, making GE the most valuable company in America.
How did he do this?
I won’t quite say he cooked the books, but it’s something like that. He sold divisions that were not very profitable and got into finance.
But when the bubble burst…
If you follow GE, you know that today it is a shadow of what it once was. Slimmed down to nearly nonexistence to keep the company alive.
But back then… You could not stop hearing about Jack Welch.
And with all this publicity, corporations fought to hire those from his team. Which they did at Boeing.
It was utterly ridiculous. The headquarters was moved from Seattle to Chicago, and…corners were cut.
Like with the 737 MAX.
What Boeing needed to do was design a new plane from scratch. But that would cost billions and take years. Boeing had been asleep at the wheel. So, they decided to upgrade the 737 to compete, ergo the “MAX.”
Which was a technological marvel, but not in a good way. You see the new, bigger engines, had to sit more forward, and they threw off the balance of the plane, and as a result, software was needed to compensate for this.
But Boeing didn’t tell the government there was a big change, for that would require pilot-retraining, they wanted it to be easy.
Now this new software system was called MCAS. But everybody did not get the same system, you had to pay more for two sensors instead of one. Two created a fail-safe system. With only one…it could ice up and give false readings and the MCAS would take over and the pilots would be overwhelmed, if for no other reason than they weren’t trained for this, never mind having so little time to react, and the jet would crash.
Which happened twice.
4
Then it came out. Ad infinitum. Boeing had been cutting corners. They grounded the 737 MAX, And there was a deep dive and…
They found all kinds of flaws. Caused to a great degree by outsourcing production.
But it looked like the problems were finally solved, the planes took back to the air and then…
A door plug blew out.
And then an engine cowling fell off.
But Boeing blamed it on maintenance.
But really, you thought the company had changed.
But then you watch this documentary.
5
Actually, I wasn’t planning on seeing it, having followed the story so closely, but I came home from hiking one night and Felice was glued to the set, absolutely horrified, and you will be too.
Forget the workers who won’t fly on the planes they built.
Forget the details about mistakes that were not fixed. Metal shavings in the wires.
What really blew my mind about “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing” was the culture.
And it’s not only in aircraft, it permeates American business and society. It’s all groupthink, you don’t want to be an individual in today’s world. And it’s as bad on the left as it is on the right. If you don’t adhere to the orthodoxy on trans rights and Israel, you’re pilloried by the left, even if you’re a Democrat. As for the other side, it’s all about paying fealty to Trump, no matter what he does.
But he’s a businessman…
AND THAT’S EXACTLY THE POINT!
Here you see it in action. These overpaid wankers employing financial engineering to make the stock price go up. After all, the reason a corporation exists is to reward the shareholders, right?
That’s cockamamie crap. That’s not the way it used to be. Then again, we no longer have supersonic commercial air travel and we haven’t landed a man on the moon in half a century. Today it’s all about wealth, and flaunting it.
Used to be you owned the company, and even if you were CEO, you felt a responsibility to your employees. No longer. You don’t want workers to unionize, and you’d rather not pay them benefits at all. It’s best if you can outsource the work, as Amazon does with its delivery drivers, so you can say it’s not your fault when it’s revealed these drivers are woefully undercompensated.
Look at AI… All the investments are off the books, so the stocks of Meta, et al, don’t fall. And then there’s Nvidia, on both sides of the deal, selling its chips to companies it’s got a stake in.
But the market keeps rolling along.
And if your holdings are in stock, you can borrow against them and not pay taxes! What a country!
So what we’ve got here is corporate brass doing everything in its power to lower costs and the quality control workers flagging the problems that result, whereupon they are ignored.
The worst thing is employees are afraid to go to HR. Because if you do, at best you’ll get reassigned, but there’s a good chance you’ll just be fired, and then good luck getting another job in the field.
But they use scrapped parts.
And the mistakes keep happening. I didn’t know about the problem with the faulty oxygen tanks. It is said that 25% of them don’t work. So, when the door plug blows out of the Alaska Air plane, fliers don their masks and…they don’t work.
6
Now you may or may not be following the latest news about football and CTE. One in four players will get it, if not more.
But our nation blindly champions the game.
This is like Russian Roulette. And I’ve got to ask you, do you feel lucky?
But the players get paid well (although few of them have guaranteed contracts, get hurt and you don’t get paid), and it’s their own choice.
But is it really?
That’s like me telling you to jump off the bridge. You might die, but if you don’t, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars. Are you going to take that risk? And believe me, having CTE is worse than dying, which is why so many with the disease commit suicide. Being locked into a non-functioning body, one with pressure and pain, is just too much.
Just like it is standing up to the man. You can blow the whistle, but they’re going to put you through hell before there’s any change, never mind getting your reward.
And they don’t only question the work, but your complete identity.
So, you can watch this doc and ask yourself, what is better, to shut up and be the company man, overlook bad activity so you can maintain a paycheck…
Hell, that’s what we see in the music business. Everybody turns their head, especially when it comes to MeToo… Blow the whistle and you’ll never work in this industry again. Are you really going to take that risk?
7
We live in a two-tiered society, the haves and the have-nots. And the haves believe they’re smarter and are entitled to their riches, when this is usually not the case, if for no other reason than if the public doesn’t buy the product you’re going to go out of business, no matter how good it is.
And, in truth, with even a grifter President, who ignores the law with impunity, the average citizen no longer believes. They know the game is rigged against them. They know the winners are breaking the rules, so why shouldn’t they?
And if you say anything negative about Trump it’s like being on the left and not falling behind every tenet of democratic socialism… There can be no questioning involved. Either get with the program, or get out.
Now the reason I brought up the CTE study is how fast it was off the front page. With so much coming down the pike, worthy news falls by the wayside. Furthermore, there are those who no longer believe in facts and science, and if I die this week you know it will be from the flu shot I just got at Costco, that’s what many would say.
That’s the world we live in.
So I don’t have much hope that this Boeing documentary will have a big impact.
Because you just can’t fight the system. And if you try, it takes forever and you still may not win.
The corporate powers have deep pockets and can outlast you.
But if you watch “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” you’re not going to be so complacent the next time you get on a Boeing plane.
But everybody else is!
That’s what they want you to think. But watching this documentary you discover that these are just time bombs in the sky.
But it’s nobody’s fault, except maybe yours. You can’t fly private. You should have known better than to get on the plane in the first place. And one thing is for sure, whatever happens, really no one is going to be held accountable.
That’d be a step in the right direction, if bad actors went to jail.
But they think they’re above that, that it’s an impossibility.
Hell, if you want to fight social media practices, don’t fine Meta a quarter of their net profit, put Mark Zuckerberg in jail.
But he went to Harvard and he’s rich, he’s inviolate.
Occasionally I’ll hear a negative word, always from a non-subscriber, but very rarely. People are not as passionate about Netflix as they are about Spotify, but USERS feel very positive about both platforms.
As for Hulu and HBO Max and Disney+ and Paramount+ and Peacock…
Not so much. Eh, at best.
I’ve gotten a few e-mails pointing me to fakokta studies about all at once vs week by week strategies, saying statistics say the latter is better.
They’re completely missing the point.
When it comes to streaming, it’s not how many people watch a show, BUT WHETHER THEY RENEW THE SERVICE!
It’s all about the subscription, baby.
Now when it comes to data… At best it’ll tell you where you’ve been, it’s not definitive on where you’re going. Even worse is polls. They come down to the questions asked and the weighting and right now polls are historically inaccurate and everyone is losing faith in them.
Now I could argue statistically about the benefits of dropping all at once vs. week by week, but that is really not the issue. But I’ll give you one example.
The best streaming television show of 2025 was “Adolescence,” on Netflix. There was a bit of hype at the beginning, reviews, as there is with all major Netflix projects, but after that…bupkes. At least until long after the debut, when the phenomenon was apparent if you were looking, then there was some analysis and focus on the performers.
Now at the very same time “Adolescence” played, the third season of “White Lotus” dropped, week by week. And when “White Lotus”‘s run was done, more people had seen “Adolescence,” despite weekly update stories about “White Lotus” in the press, all kinds of hype.
Hype. That’s what entertainment journalism is all about. It’s a game, you’ve got PR on one side and media outlets on the other and they feed each other. The article in advance, the review upon release, then features on the actors if the project gets traction. Assuming you’re studying all this, which most people are not, a lot of projects appear much bigger than they truly are.
This is a prevalent issue today. All this talk about Paramount having control of CNN…
Last week, 584,000 people watched CNN in primetime.
It was a little higher earlier in the month, 624,000 and 667,000, but the bottom line is the outlet almost never ever breaks a million viewers in primetime, in a country of 340 MILLION!
As for influence… If you watch any of the TV news outlets, they all share one thing in common, they lead with “‘The New York Times’ says,” or “‘The Washington Post’ says” or “‘The Wall Street Journal’ says”… These outlets, from Fox to MS Now to CNN do almost no reporting, they’re almost all analysis/opinion. Watch them if you want to, they all have small audiences, with Fox’s the largest, but most people ARE NOT WATCHING THEM!
So where do these people get their news?
Online. Most especially on TikTok. Which the same people worried about Paramount devouring CNN categorically hate and won’t go on. It’s not only opinion on TikTok… “Times” reporters speak to the camera, a lot of journalists have their own channels and they opine, as do the not so famous. This is where ideas and campaigns are cemented.
I won’t go too deep, but I must tell you that being an influencer is oftentimes more lucrative than being a musician, and an actor too. (And don’t complain that music doesn’t pay, these influencers have zillions of views, and that’s what advertisers want, that’s what pays…in addition, they have INFLUENCE! Makeup influencers get all the ink, but there are lot of solid people distributing solid information.)
The puck moves, and when it comes to TV news…it’s a dying world, everything has a lifespan.
But back to the plot.
The record labels were rolling in dough. They cared not a whit that they were selling CDs with one good track for more than ten bucks. Look at those numbers! And then Napster comes along and the public steals with impunity. Because there was pent-up anger, and as soon as there was an alternative…
My inbox is full of people frustrated that they have to wait another week for the final episode of “Furious.” Does it endear them to Hulu? Is anybody passionate about Hulu? I haven’t found them yet.
This is like a band. These duplicitous acts are so worried about their public image that they rant and rave about ticket fees. When the truth is almost all of the face value of the ticket goes to the act, and the promoter and other players can only make a profit as a result of ticket fees. Ticketmaster is paid to be take the heat, and it’s one of, if not the most hated companies in America.
But not Netflix, which started from zero and charges the most.
All you’ve got to know is the 2025 churn rate at Netflix was 2.1%.
Isn’t it interesting that Netflix has the lowest churn rate?
WHY?
Not because it necessarily has the best product, but it is the most consumer-friendly. It’s got the best interface, even better than Apple’s. It does have a plethora of product too, but that’s part of the overall strategy. Give people SOMETHING to watch, what it is exactly is irrelevant. AND, if you like a show, it’s fully available for you to binge or watch at your leisure, which is what everybody expects in this on demand culture.
People are satisfied with Netflix. As for the other services…they can take them or leave them.
Apple’s got its fanboys, which makes up for its lack of product, then again it’s a laggard when it comes to the number of subscribers.
As for Amazon… TV is baked into Prime, however… Amazon pissed users off by switching them all to an ad-based service, and charging $4.99 more per month to get rid of the commercials.
I watch much less Prime than I used to. Five bucks doesn’t mean that much, but it’s a choice, and I want to see if a show is worth it. And why even start, when the other services are ad-free.
People hate Amazon. They’re just waiting to take advantage, they love to see the company fail. They’d go to a competitor in a heartbeat.
But not Netflix.
So don’t look at the modern world through old metrics. It’d be like looking at the music business via sales as opposed to streams. And as a matter of fact, physical albums are unduly weighted in the charts, ultimately rendering them meaningless except to the labels who manipulate their way to the top. The real charts, the ones everybody truly pays attention to, are the Spotify ones. Because they are raw consumption. Either people are listening or they’re not.
It’s no longer about initial sales. It’s about how long an album stays alive, how long do people want to listen to it prodigiously.
Used to be a brand name act could drop an album and sell a million copies the first week and then the record could disappear. Yet the label had already made their money, despite consumers rejecting the music. That doesn’t happen anymore, because the initial drop is much less significant, it’s a matter of whether you can keep the project alive
But one thing you’ve got to know is Spotify has even a lower churn rate than Netflix. And 70% of those who leave the service come back within 45 days.
Now music is not identical to video, but…
All this negative press about Spotify… USERS LOVE IT!
How often do you experience passion about Spotify’s competitors?
Never about Amazon, Apple…
Spotify is not hobbled by legacy thinking. It started from scratch. Ditto Netflix. They’re both forward-looking and nimble. And their users LIKE THEM!
