That’s the only thing that unites Americans, that’s the only thing that moves the needle. I’d say it’s the economy stupid, but it’s deeper than that, if you want meaningful change, people have to be suffering, it’s got to be a matter of survival, if not outright starvation, it’s got to be literally life or death before all people will get on the same page and effect meaningful change.

The problem with ICE and the immigration issue is it doesn’t make sense mathematically. I’m here legally, they are not…why should I carry them, why should they get a free ride?

I don’t want to discuss the particulars, the facts, because then you’ve already lost the battle. Yes, illegal immigrants pay taxes (oftentimes one way only…as in they don’t reap the benefits, like Social Security), and yes, immigrants are disproportionately law-abiding, but they are here illegally. And you’re never going to convince everybody that a crackdown is not justified.

Now I thought protests like No Kings were a joke. And isn’t it interesting that the younger people did not participate proportionately. They’re wiser than their elders, they see that Trump doesn’t listen and change course, they’re’ disillusioned with government, both sides, right and left.

As for spontaneous reaction to the killing of Renee Good? I think that has an effect. When protest happens as a result of an event. The public was charged and Jonathan Ross pulled the trigger. But does what is happening in Minneapolis affect people in rural areas? In southern states where ICE is not focusing its efforts? No. Furthermore, people are reluctant to put themselves in the line of fire. For that…you can’t only be protesting the mistreatment of others, it’s got to be you, you’ve got to feel desperate. And what makes people desperate is the lack of cash, the inability to make ends meet.

Now the wheels are starting to turn. With the California billionaires tax. I’m not saying it should be passed, I’m not saying that Newsom is wrong in opposing it, I am saying that this represents the anger of the populace. Furthermore, it shows the true stripes of the billionaires, who are weeping like babies, threatening to end the game by taking the ball to their own court.

The billionaires still think we live in the last decade, or the one before. That we hold them up on a pedestal, that we revere them. But the tech giants… The public hates the social media companies. Not as much as Ticketmaster, but a lot. Elon Musk has been revealed to be myopic… He may be good at cars and rockets, but he’s terrible when it comes to people. Not only did DOGE not save money, Musk got into a snit with Trump and ended up coming back to the man with his tail between his legs.

Furthermore, the billionaires have shown they have no backbone, kissing Trump’s butt for money…as if a corporation’s profits were everything, that it’s only the Street that matters.

This is how we got into this mess. Biden and his cronies kept telling us the economy was good, with the lame term “Bidenomics,” when anybody who went to the grocery store could see otherwise. It’s not that people loved Trump, it’s just that the Democrats were out of touch with the public’s true feelings, mostly their economic feelings. And when Kamala lost…Democrats didn’t own it, they called the nation racist, they said the system was flawed… This is not a recipe for victory, it’s a recipe for alienation! I mean if you want a big tent with people on your side…

So when you look for a spark… It always happens when you don’t expect it, that’s the message of Renee Good and Minneapolis. That’s what we learned with the Arab Spring.

But the man who lit the match for the Arab Spring was a college educated fruit vendor, despite his degree, he could not get a good job. Which is what many Americans are fearful of right now… They’re already laying off coders… America is so afraid of AI and all we’ve got is the billionaires saying TRUST US! As they run up the economy building data centers that require more power than we’ve got in a race for…

Ironically, the only billionaire who looks somewhat reasonable is Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who says even if a billionaires tax is enacted, he’s staying in California, that’s where he lives, that’s where he likes it, that’s where the talent is located.

We keep reading about people moving from the Golden State… But the truth is it’s no longer the middle of the last century, most people can’t afford to move at all! And most know it, despite all the articles that are part of  an offensive trying to demonize Democratic states. Then again, the Republicans are smarter than the Democrats, at least they’re focusing on economics.

So the lesson here is Iran. It’s not like it’s been kumbaya over there since the shah lost power nearly fifty years ago. You’ve had a religious dictatorship and…we’ve only seen meaningful rebellion, THREATENING rebellion, when it became a raw economic issues. There was a currency crash. Inflation in excess of 40%. And this is when the people took to the streets. This is the only thing that will bring Americans of all stripes to the streets.

High prices… We hear about concert tickets. But let’s start with the basics, grocery prices, automobile prices… Recent news tells us that only the wealthy can afford new cars, the rest of the public has to buy used, after all, in December the average transaction price was $50,326. And to reinforce the point, this is not an issue for the wealthy, but most people just don’t have the money.

The problem with high concert ticket prices is not the fees, it’s the demand! There are people willing to pay high prices, which creates a secondary market.

And if you’re living on a fixed income, the economic situation is insane. You’re not making any more, but the prices keep going up and up. Forget oldsters living on a pension, on Social Security, if you’re earning a salary and can keep your job… Not only are you having trouble making ends meet, you’re not getting a pay increase! Meanwhile, the wankers in government say you should be happy, because you’ve got a flat screen TV and a smartphone, that your standard of living is higher than that of people past. It’s like telling people a hundred years ago to ignore the stock market crash…after all, they’re traveling in automobiles as opposed to by horse!

I could ask who is channeling our anger, but it’s worse than that… Nobody in power seems to know what is truly going on with the public, the Average Jane and Joes. We’ve got leaders who are tech-ignorant. There’s a detachment between generations. But what is going to push it over the edge…

Is when everybody is suffering.

You can be horrified about Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis, but the truth is most people don’t live in Minneapolis and just don’t see and feel the danger. It’s when they see and feel the danger that they react. And the government is doing a good job of chilling the public, making people afraid to go out and protest. What is going to motivate them to step outside the door? Money.

And how do the hoi polloi connect?

Via the excoriated internet, which was utilized in the Arab Spring. As for Iran, they shut it down. Yup, the winners of the world want their kids off smartphones. They don’t want youngsters in front of screens. But they can afford child care. The truth is the internet links Americans together, it’s doing the opposite of isolating us. So we’re supposed to believe in the holier-than-thou leftists telling us to put the phone down?

As for leftists… They continue to let the Republicans define them… You don’t want to be woke, you need to move to the center, it’s the extreme that are bringing this nation down. It’s got nothing to do with pronouns and trans women in sports… But Democrats are always on the back foot. Meantime, defending some minor group that the majority doesn’t agree with. The bottom line is most Americans don’t want trans women in sports. It’s kinda like illegal immigration, it just doesn’t feel right to most people.

But let’s not debate trans rights, that’s what those in power want us to do, to take us away from the major issues.

So until the focus is money, there will be no meaningful change. And if you want revolutionary change, the financial situation for the average person has to get worse.

Then again, it’s pretty bad. After the November election there was all this talk about an affordability crisis… But the truth is it didn’t happen suddenly, it was percolating, people were struggling, it’s just that an election surfaced the issue, that’s when the major news media and Trump started to take notice. What other pain points, especially economic ones, are there in plain sight that are not recognized by those in power?

The upper middle class wants to get rich, the rich want to stay rich, as for the rest of the people, the true majority, you’re screwed. You can’t get rich, the opportunity is not there, and those in power are not listening to you.

If I were a Democrat I would talk about money all the time, people are driven by their wallet.

Then again, I no longer believe in the system. A free and fair election in 2028? Give me a break.

What is it going to take for this country to crack?

Economic hardship. Money.

There, I’ve said it.

You have to hear this in hi-res.

I was listening on Spotify and it sounded like the music was filtered through steel wool, but when I pulled it up in Amazon, in what they call ULTRA HD, all the detritus was cleared away and the music was pure.

Then again, I wasn’t listening on earbuds, but through my Genelecs…studio quality for studio quality music.

Now this used to be the paradigm, we bought the vinyl (prerecorded cassettes were inferior, having been replicated at high speed) and played it back on the stereos we worked all summer, for years to buy. We spoke of specs, THD (total harmonic distortion), talked about the merit of certain matchups…amp and speaker…speaker and cartridge…and when we dropped the needle we weren’t doing the dishes, talking on the phone, we sat or stood in the sweet spot and experienced the music washing over us. And it wasn’t always revelatory, but it was a pact between the act and the listener, they would do their very best, not only in writing and playing, but in recording, and then serve it up to us for evaluation.

That’s not how the oldsters do it anymore. Most of them don’t even bother to make new music.

As for the youngsters…when they’re not busy thinking about their brand extensions, leaving the creativity in the hands of others, they’re selling hedonism, not the intellectualism of Peter Gabriel.

So at this point, is Peter Gabriel the last man standing?

He wouldn’t do a podcast with me because I criticized his dripping out of his last album track by track, a formula he’s repeating with this LP. The problem is the landscape keeps changing… Track by track worked fifteen years ago, maybe ten, but not anymore in a world where it’s nearly impossible to gain someone’s attention, never mind keep it. Believe me, if I had more tracks I’d be listening to them right now.

As for “Been Undone”… I knew he was putting out this album on maybe a monthly basis, having to do with the moon or something, I could Google and get it exactly right, but the point is the press registered…at least on some level…the details? The point being I didn’t know ” Been Undone” had been released.

But it has.

And it came up in Jeff Pollack’s weekly playlist of five. And to tell you the truth, at first I wasn’t enamored. It’s not that ” Been Undone” was bad, it just reminded me too much of the experimental sounds of the initial solo career. And the sotto voce vocal was not riveting. It wasn’t quite “Moribund the Burgermeister,” but I wanted to be taken away, I wanted to like it, and at first I didn’t, it was kind of blah.

And Spotify told me the song was nearly eight minutes long and I laughed to myself…he’s still doing it the same way, he’s not compromising, he’s still being Peter Gabriel.

And while I was watching a non-sound video on the 2027 K2 skis, something changed, there was an intensity, a driving beat, very different from the fake 808, the song had started subtly, but it was building, and I was becoming enamored.

So Peter Gabriel is in his own business and his own business only. This is not the way it used to be, it used to be all about radio and retail…get it on the radio so people buy it, create numbers that got people’s attention, do your best to start a juggernaut.

But can a guy with roots in prog rock who’s over 70 create a juggernaut today? Can anybody create a juggernaut today? And those who do, like the Weeknd and Bruno Mars…they may be in the same business, but they’re in a completely different stratosphere when it comes to music.

It’s hard to create in a vacuum, sans feedback, most people need context, need to see the route to success, and without that they lose the drive. Never mind if you’ve been to the mountaintop, looked around and realized your achievement didn’t solve all your problems, most people can’t get up the gumption to climb again.

You’re listening to ” Been Undone” and you realize this wasn’t written and done in a day. It’s layered. The individual sounds are important. Getting the vision down is important.

For me the song comes alive just before the six minute mark, with the industrial sounds and then Peter’s full-strength emoting, he’s giving it his all, the faders are pushed up and it might not appeal to you.

Or it just might.

That’s what we’re looking for, something that appeals to us. Me-too is good to dance to, but to listen we’re looking for something unique, more than a pretty voice, more than the ability to play…we’re looking for exploration, a statement.

“Time to let go, just listen and feel

Just listen and feel”

P.S. It’s not as simple as paying for hi-res from the service of your choice, you’ve got to have a DAC (digital to analog converter). That will get you full resolution, in many cases in excess of CD quality, but all stereo mavens know that as good as the source material is, the end result is colored most by the speakers… You must have enough power for full sound, to avoid distortion, and your speakers must be able to replicate the bottom…not the fake one from the car next to you at the stoplight with the pounding bass, but one with accuracy.

P.P.S. Most creators are no longer concerned with audio quality, because it costs too much, and most people don’t have systems that can reproduce it anyway. But sound is sound, and you want to hear it replicated as accurately as possible. And you want to be able to turn it up loud enough so you can feel it, so it squeezes out all other thoughts.

P.P.P.S. By the end of the song, you’ll either be intrigued or you won’t… I will say, the more you play ” Been Undone,” the more you get into it. However, let’s be clear, this is definitely an album track, ” Been Undone” is not “Sledgehammer” or “Shock the Monkey,” but that’s another problem with the modern marketplace, everybody’s trying for hits all the time.

P.P.P.P.S. There’s nothing rote about ” Been Undone.” What you’ve got is an artist, delivering his work, you can either accept it or not, but it’s clear it’s uncompromised.

I was driving in my car earlier today and I ended up on the 10s Spot, SiriusXM’s station that features music from the 2010s.

That wasn’t my intention. Actually, I was switching from the news band to one of the music bands, I wanted to dial in John Mayer’s channel, but I must have hit something by accident, and I ended up on this station. And they were playing Halsey.

And I heard the thump. Is that the defining feature of today’s hit music? The bass, the beat, the 808? You even get it in country. Never has an era of music been confined to such a narrow paradigm.

The Halsey track was okay, but then they played “Rude Boy” by Rihanna. I seem to be the only red-blooded male who doesn’t have a thing for Rihanna, as a matter of fact, most of her career slid right by me, because by the time she had hits… MTV & VH1 were no longer a factor, you didn’t have to hear the Top 40 hits if you didn’t want to. So “Rude Boy”…I recognized it as one of the songs Rihanna played at the Super Bowl. And if you were a fan, if you listened to Top 40, you were thrilled and sang along, the rest of us were nonplussed.

So I’m driving down Santa Monica Boulevard thinking about how we got here.

Well, during the MTV eighties, and the fumes of music television thereafter, it was about the single, but the single was promoting the album. A label might put out a single for a minute, to gain traction in the marketplace, but as soon as the track hit, they’d delete it, forcing the consumer to buy the entire album if they wanted to hear the hit.

This was concomitant with the rise of the CD era… Suddenly you were paying twice as much and oftentimes you found out that the song you liked was the only good one on the album.

But other times you dove deeper, and got into the rest of the act’s work on the album, maybe then went and bought albums from the catalog.

Whereas today, it’s about the hit and the hit only. There might ultimately be an album, but all you’ve got to look at is the streaming numbers on Spotify, the hit has been played disproportionately, oftentimes the album tracks’ streams are de minimis.

But who would want more from the Top 40 artists, whose songs are oftentimes written by committee, whose productions go through layers of mixing and… These are commercial products. This is the business the major labels are in, this is the business that gets all the press, but never has it been such a sideshow.

Now Top 40 ruled for years before the late sixties. FM radio made album rock burgeon. Along with “Sgt. Pepper” (maybe it started with “Rubber Soul” or “Revolver”). The act was making a full-length statement, that you wanted to hear. And FM started off free-format, not only would they play the obscure, they’d play entire album sides…it changed the culture of music, suddenly rock was a serious art form that deserved respect, that ultimately the entire nation, the entire world, cottoned to.

Now FM became formulated, thanks to Lee Abrams, there was a tight format, but it was understood that it was still all about the album, the track on the radio was just the sample, excised from an opus you needed to consume.

And then MTV took this formula into the stratosphere.

Now when Napster came along, suddenly you could pick and choose the songs you wanted, and only the songs you wanted. Which was the business model of iTunes and then Spotify, et al. At first the labels hated this, because they were baked into the old model, they thought they could only make money via albums…Daniel Ek proved to them that this was untrue. As for the acts…they were pissed, because they didn’t want their full-length opus messed with, you were supposed to listen to it the way they wanted you to. Remember when acts were concerned about leaks, of not only albums, but work tapes and live tracks? That’s fallen by the wayside, your deepest desire is that people will find you at all, listen to you at all, and it’s your hard core fans who are keeping you alive, and you want to superserve them.

And then there were acts who said they were going to give it one last shot and then they were no longer going to make albums, like Sheryl Crow. But the problem was that no matter how much hype there was, you could not get the public to consume an entire album by someone from the prior century, it was nearly impossible. Then those acts stopped making new music at all…why put in all that effort if no one would hear it?

So today we’ve got the Top 40. Which is akin  to the heyday of MTV, but the acts have no depth, the album isn’t where it’s at, it’s only the single that counts, that people are interested in (of course there are exceptions, but don’t nitpick).

There are acts doing it the old way, not on major labels, oftentimes complaining they’re not being paid by streaming outlets and… Do they deserve to be paid? Is their music such that masses of people want to listen to it?

Oftentimes no.

So what we’ve got here is a sphere of Top 40 vapidity, and too many acts that don’t deserve attention on the other extreme. And the business won’t be healthy until it starts promoting those acts who are creating bodies of work that are worth listening to.

The major labels don’t want to do this, the lift is too hard, never mind the amount of time it takes to break through. They just keep repeating the formula of dreck. To the point where music has never gotten this little respect in my lifetime. It’s seen as ditties, entertainment, warring camps of fans, there’s no there there.

But music used to be the bleeding edge, that’s where you went to find out what was really going on.

In the old days, with so much less music, great would surface. Not anymore. And even if it does, it may take years to shine through. Such that the thinkers who can create this music that deserves attention don’t. They oftentimes don’t even start. They go into tech or finance, where the odds of success are much, much higher. And even if you do play the game and gain success you get no respect. The intelligentsia laugh at you, whereas the intelligentsia used to have to take notice… Everybody watched MTV, EVERYBODY! Those were universal hits.

Today’s hits are niche.

We can talk about distribution platforms, a changing market, but we can also say that we’re not inspiring artists, and that those who are inspired are not given a leg up, are not promoted because they don’t sound like what’s on Top 40, as if most people want to pay attention to today’s Top 40, which is really the Spotify Top 50.

It starts with the artists. How do we encourage them, how do we get them to take their work seriously, how do we get them to say no to opportunities that will hurt their image?

Today music is dominated by the lowest common denominator who have no options, they’re going nowhere fast, the model is the Kardashians, not the Beatles, never mind the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, the Eagles…

But after we inspire the acts, we much change the focus, to those who are creating a body of work worth paying attention to.

We need to realign the vision of the labels, the press, we have to stop celebrating the penumbra and go for the nougat, the essence. Enough with the fashion and the brand extensions, how do we make music number one?

There are examples, most notably Rosalía with “Lux,” but experimental, limit-testing music used to be the standard, the goal, the mainstream, by time we hit the seventies Top 40 was a sideshow.

But to the casual listener, and it’s the casual listeners who need to be corralled to lift the status of music, the Top 40 is tripe, they’re listening to oldies (keeping the major labels’ coffers full). The music business has successfully marginalized itself. And no one will take responsibility, especially the major labels, which will tell you they’re businesses, first and foremost.

But excitement about quality new music lifts all boats.

But right now we’re sunk.

You don’t want to read this book.

I’m only bothering to write about it because it’s been on the best seller list for months.

Books are not like music, you don’t get to experience it before you buy it, so with the accolades and sales many people are purchasing this book, and I won’t say as few are completing it as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” but I think most people never make it to the end.

The bottom line is first and foremost a book must be readable. Information is not enough, you must have a narrative, you must pull the reader in. But “1929” is a pastiche of facts, of research, it reads like a college thesis, and you know how many people read those when they’re done…ZERO!

I’ve got no problem with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Then again, when you spread yourself this thin… Ryan Seacrest might be doing many things, but he’s got as much gravitas as a box of Cheerios. It’s mindless. Whereas Sorkin is on CNBC, helped create “Billions” and is a writer for the “New York Times.” As for taking the time to write a book? When? With not only these gigs, but three children to boot!

So you’re scratching your head saying he writes for the “New York Times,” how bad can he be?

Well newspaper writing is different from book writing. Newspaper writing is about information laid out clearly and concisely. Furthermore, in a paper like the “Times,” opinion is relegated to a different page, so there’s no attitude, no real perspective, just the facts.

If you want someone to take the time to read a book…

The dirty little secret is most books don’t sell. Maybe a couple of thousand copies at best. And in a country of 300+ million, that’s bupkes. But we’re subjected to hype about these tomes for months, and reviews and… Kara Swisher talked about her lame book for months, as if anybody cared, and it came out and face-planted…it wasn’t good, I tried to read it. But she gets a pass from the others in the information industrial complex.

As for the book business… If you want to talk about people with a lot of self-respect, it’s not down and dirty like the music business. And those who work in it hate that lowbrow stuff is keeping the lights on.

So “1929” was billed as a deep dive into the crash, with lessons for today.

Well, at first I could see the parallels, but those died pretty quickly. It was a different time with different regulations, or lack thereof. Are there still crooks in finance? Yes, but they’re not really doing it the same way. (Although you did see that Jamie Dimon made $770 million last year…and this is heinous, no one deserves that much, especially when people are hurting, having a tough time making ends meet, never mind getting health care.)

What I wanted was drama. What it felt like when the market actually crashed. And at that point, Sorkin is writing about the market day by day, I’m waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never does narratively, you feel like the market went down and then down further and…whatever is happening on Wall Street is detached from the rest of the country in “1929.”

At the end of this book, Sorkin thanks Erik Larson for advice. I’ve read all the Larson books, the best one is still the one I read first, “Devil in the White City.” But as good a researcher as Larson is, and decent with narrative too, his books are flat, there’s no arc, just endless information. As for Sorkin’s “1929,” it’s a pale imitation of Larson.

Only when you get to the end of the book does Sorkin say he wanted to flesh out the personalities. Well, the focus of the book kept on switching from the people to the market and…you can’t do everything, focus on one or the other, or write about one person, or the crash itself, a secret of writing is you sometimes have to leave the best stuff out, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative. But Sorkin throws in the words of a preacher from Massachusetts at the end…someone without profile who had no connection with the players, why?

Because Sorkin was determined to see all his research in print.

The most amazing thing, the true lesson for me, was that so many of these people ended up broke, they were gamblers, they never saved for a rainy day. And most of their names have been forgotten. And you will read a bit about the individuals, but you’ll tell yourself there’s got to be a better book about this out there, and I’m sure there is, probably one of those Sorkin credits as a jumping off point.

Writing is hard. And I’ll also say, writers are born, not made. As a matter of fact, the more you teach someone how to write the more you risk squeezing the creativity out of them. We don’t need me-too, we need unique.

So I finished this book, even though at times my eyes glazed over and I had to reread passages, but not only was it disappointing, I just couldn’t get over the fact that this was the book everybody was hailing, everybody was talking about, that was selling.

It doesn’t deserve it.