The Git Up – Blanco Brown + Lainey Wilson – YouTube

The Git Up By Blanco Brown – Spotify

It’s not number one.

There’s all these hosannas about Blanco Brown’s “The Git Up” going #1 on the “Billboard” country chart…BUT THAT’S NOT THE CHART THAT MATTERS!

Country is driven by radio. And “The Git Up” is not in the Mediabase Top 30, which means at best it’s a footnote in Nashville.

In case you’ve been in a media blackout, the song of the summer, the song of the YEAR, is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” At this late date, we can all agree that it was built by two things…TikTok and a false controversy. This is the kind of thing Shep Gordon did in the seventies, create a false press story around Alice Cooper. But you’d think in the internet era that would be impossible, but not only are there multiple fact lanes in the straight news business, but media too!

“Rolling Stone” launched its charts.

Right now, they’re meaningless, and will probably stay that way.

Why?

First and foremost because they blew the launch. They said it was gonna be one day, and then it was delayed over rights issues. To the point where when the charts finally went live, people had already moved on to other things. I was fascinated at first, because I thought “Rolling Stone” had a chance, after all, its charts were based on the best data in the business, provided by the company formerly known as BuzzAngle.

But NO! “Rolling Stone” launched with a weighted chart, eviscerating any credibility!

It’d be like counting discussion of Facebook on Twitter in addition to impressions on the Facebook app. Who can make sense of that? NOBODY!

That’s right, the internet is based on 0’s and 1’s, facts, and music is all about obfuscation.

Forget sales…STREAMING IS ALL THAT COUNTS!

Steve Jobs kills legacy ports back in the nineties, and the record companies are still counting physical and digital sales. The only people I know who watch DVDs are nonagenarians, literally. I’m tossing all mine. Why should I keep them? Oh, I’ve got a DVD player, but I haven’t turned it on in years. And neither of my computers have disc drives.

Computer software is a service, there is no physical product, but in the antiquated music industry?

So, “Billboard” endured a lot of heat, Nashville endured a lot of heat, as as a result of the pseudo-controversy over “Old Town Road.” Which, if you listen to it, is not country. That’d be like saying ZZ Top is country because they wear cowboy hats!

So now another track comes along by an African-American performer and “Billboard,” with a backbone of silly putty, caves.

And there’s a huge difference between “The Git Up” and “Old Town Road”… “The Git Up” SOUNDS country. It’s got the overused drum machine that somehow country has embraced even though it was last hip in the eighties, and Blanco sings in a twang.

But Nashville and country radio aren’t buying. So is it number one or not?

You can go on Spotify, and see that “The Git Up” has 28 million streams. Which isn’t even a hit in the pop world. Blake Shelton, whose “God’s Country” is #1 on the Mediabase chart only has 33 million streams. Meaning, your mainstream country fan…has not embraced streaming yet. It’s like saying you’re the best quarterback in Vince McMahon’s XFL… Maybe one day the XFL will rival the NFL, but it’s doubtful. But there will come a day when everybody is streaming and we’ll have better insight into what is truly popular, but now “The Git Up” is a niche product, driven by TikTok. Nothing wrong with that, just don’t tell me it’s #1.

P.S. Adobe switched from a sales model to rental. At first, revenue dipped, then it went through the roof, the customer was happy, being served updates regularly, not just once a year, and they had to pay every month, lining Adobe’s coffers. But music just can’t let go of that sales model…

Grace Slick hates it.

I didn’t like it when it was released, when they inserted the name of every local city for radio stations, but all these years later…it kind of cracks me up, anthemic rock, with exuberant vocals.

But the band didn’t write it.

So I’m just back from the Malibu hills, where I was talking with Grace Slick. You know, the untamable woman who was the sexual zenith of rock and roll, an icon of her era.

She doesn’t look like that anymore. But the personality…it remains intact. Opinionated and direct, if you close your eyes it’s forty years ago.

Not that Grace is trying to hide her age, she’ll be eighty in the fall. And although she had some plastic surgery way back when, in her forties, saying it was necessary if you were on stage, she has let her body age, and at first you’re shocked, but then you’re mesmerized, it’s her! What was it like being in that body all those years ago?

Actually, Grace doesn’t want to talk about it. She thinks none of the songs she wrote were perfect and at times she was so inebriated, she can’t remember. But she lived it, it’s all about being in the moment, having fun, and she did. Grace said if you’re talented and having fun, go for it. But you’ve got to be persistent, there can be no gaps in your resume, you’ve got to pursue your goal.

And after “Red Octopus,” which she considers Marty’s album, even though I LOVE “Play On Love,” Grace stayed with the outfit as Marty and Paul faded away and…

She didn’t like singing other people’s songs. It’s not like being in a band, living it together, having experiences…

And that’s another thing, the band did own that three story Victorian, but they did not all live in it together, maybe Paul Kantner slept upstairs for six months in between relationships, but really it was for business. And despite the reputation, the band was all business. Constantly on the road. And then…

It was the Jefferson Starship and they sang this song.

So Grace starts going on a rant. THERE’S NO CITY BUILT ON ROCK AND ROLL! AS A MATTER OF FACT, ALL THE CITIES PRE-DATE ROCK AND ROLL!

It’s like she’s sitting in the audience, she agreed with “Rolling Stone,” which called “We Built This City” the worst track of the eighties, or something like that.

And Grace is testifying, what do the words mean? Who can relate to them?

And then she reveals the nugget, the essence, the lyrics were written by Bernie Taupin, about the closure of bars in Los Angeles…you know, which was BUILT ON ROCK AND ROLL!

Whew, I never knew that!

And then Grace starts saying how that was stupid. Because bars are driven by people, and if nobody goes, they go out of business, but if the desire is strong enough, they’ll grow again, it’s kinda like Whac-A-Mole, the town elders/police are against them, but the people are for them.

But now?

I’m sitting in Grace’s house overlooking the ocean. She doesn’t hate L.A. She says her generation, OUR generation, was built on the movies, and they were all made in Southern California. She likes to talk on the phone, she doesn’t send e-mail, she uses her iPad as an encyclopedia, and her eyes bug out as she says what a great encyclopedia it is! We lament the passage of all those music clubs/bars, but is today’s generation demanding them?

You know what Chris Rock says, men surrender, they get married because they don’t want to be the oldest person in the bar. And I can relate to that as in I never go to a bar anymore, and it’s not just because I don’t drink, I can stay at home and interact, and old people are into lifestyle, being taken care of.

But I’d go to a music club to see name talent. That’s what brought me to the Whisky, the Roxy and the Troubadour way back when. But then the clubs all had seats, you contemplated the music, as opposed to it being an assault. Today you go to a club and it’s all about you, the audience. The music is not the draw, but the ability to interact with each other. People will pay to hear bands, but they’ve got to have a name, pub-crawling to see developing acts is dead, as dead as most of the places they used to play!

So Grace says Bernie’s a great lyricist, she respects him, but not on this one.

So she quit.

Nobody quits a good thing anymore, they’re too into the MONEY!

And “We Built This City” went to number one, it was a hit all over the world. But it was still dreck.

Ain’t that interesting in an era where if it makes money, it’s good.

But hearing the backstory, from someone who was there, who’s not into self-mythologizing…THAT’S PRICELESS!

Academy Award winner for “20 Feet From Stardom,” as well as director of last summer’s surprise hit “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” Morgan Neville is the go-to documentarian. His Rick Rubin docuseries premieres on Showtime on July 12th. Morgan’s a huge music fan, listen to how he got from there to here, I could have talked to him all day!

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You know you’re striking a nerve when you get a reaction.

This is an analog of “all press is good press.”

In the attention economy, it’s nearly impossible to get attention. But Elizabeth Warren has figured out how to do this, and the heads of those on the right are exploding.

I know, I hear from the right whenever I write something vaguely political, even if that’s not the point.

My point with Warren was not her politics, but her marketing, her declaration of positions, how she was doing it.

But as soon as you say WARREN you touch a nerve on the right.

And the blowback is fascinating.

Yup, I’ll go on record, your and you’re, they’re and their…I see these mistakes on the right more than the left. You’d think naysayers would at least get their spelling/usage right.

I’m gonna tell you something, people judge on spelling/usage. Especially women.

That’s right, I know a woman who decides who to go out with based on spelling errors. As for sending pictures of your junk, isn’t that like whistling at a woman passing by? When did that EVER work?

And what those on the right are most afraid of is someone is gonna take what they’ve got. As if what they’ve got they acquired in a vacuum. You work at a company, your customers are keeping you in business. And same deal in tech and energy and…

But somehow on the right there’s this canard that the left wants THEIR money.

So let’s say there are no taxes. Who is gonna take care of the roads? When you call the police because of hooligans, who is gonna respond?

It’s every person for themselves in right wing America. I’ve got mine, SCREW YOU! That attitude is separating right to begin with, we live in a society, we all have to get along.

And then there are the inaccuracies in facts. That’s right, the right wing disinformation campaign is rolling 24/7. You could go to Snopes, but now, like the “New York Times” and the “Washington Post,” that’s considered fake news. The only real news is Fox and the blogs and the self-appointed nutcases spewing online. It’s amazing, someone will e-mail you a screed…didn’t they even google before they accepted it as fact, sent it in defense of their position? Yup, right there in Wikipedia it’s revealed that the site is biased. But you can’t trust Wikipedia, right? After all, our President is busy claiming everything he says is true and any corrections/opposite opinions are fake. Mick Jagger stood up to Trump’s claim about the airports two hundred odd years ago

Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger mocks Trump over blunder in Fourth of July speech

remember when we were all on the same side, rallying around the music? But that was back when music had meaning.

And the facts say that despite claiming minority status, Warren never benefited from it. But the right wing says otherwise, and keeps repeating the falsehood. Meanwhile, Trump is regularly accused of rape and he’s an all right guy. He took the biggest tax write-off in history and initiated a tax cut that has resulted in a shortfall in collections.

But all of that is too deep in the woods, let’s separate the wheat from the chaff…

The right is freaking out, the same way the left did in 2016.

The right is convinced Trump’s a shoo-in, just like Hillary in 2016.

Somehow, Democrats have lost the war of messaging. They’ve been saying for years, put faith in the elites and everything will work out. BUT IT DIDN’T!

Meanwhile, the right has been saying not only that it’s your money and you should be able to keep it, but gays are bad, abortions are bad, immigrants are bad, women don’t deserve equal rights…they’re trying to scare you into submission.

Then Elizabeth Warren comes out and speaks truth, which resonates and…

That’s how Trump won, by speaking to people’s anger and frustration.

But Elizabeth Warren is more intelligent and more experienced.

And what about Trump promising all that stuff he hasn’t delivered. We still have Obamacare, which the country overwhelmingly wants, we’re in insane trade wars messing with the vaunted farmers, and there’s still not a wall, he couldn’t even deliver it when Republicans controlled all three branches of government.

So the pendulum has swung.

And never forget it, they hate African-Americans, other than the ones who speak just like them. They hate Asians for taking their spots in the Ivy League. They hate Jews, because they control entertainment and money and are the root of all evil. And they think you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps, just like them, even though tons of them haven’t and are living off the largesse of the government, not only via Medicaid and other social services, but the disproportionate spending in red states as opposed to blue.

But let’s not get mired in facts, this is a war of EMOTION!

And believe me, the right is riled up, unified behind someone even foreign countries think is incompetent.

But now that the left is riled up, they don’t like it, it’s unfair.

So don’t nominate a wuss, that’s just what the Republicans want, someone blah who they can declare irrelevant. You need a fighter. After all, not only has Trump kept the tax man at bay, but Congress too.

So now I’ll be inundated with e-mail saying I’ve got it wrong. That those on the right LOVE minorities, that it’s all about finances.

But this is obfuscation. Which can be ignored.

That’s right, the press calls foul every day against Trump and McConnell and the right laughs and ignores it, why shouldn’t the left ignore the calls of foul on the right? Yup, the right’s defense is always decency.

We need leaders, screw the parking meters. And now that there’s one on the left, a dreaded woman to boot, the right is going insane.

THAT’S FUNNY!