Totally aside from your point - perhaps - note that The Who have announced their 2025 North American Farewell Tour. My immediate thought was: I won't get fooled again.
They never announce it right away, but a few months after the farewell tour ends comes the announcement that they're playing 10 dates a month at the Sphere in Vegas for X months. VIP packages are available!
How did I find The Honest Broker? Via YouTube, the Rick Beato interview.
How did I find Rick Beato, did someone told me you need to watch his videos?
Nope, but wait a sec: Well, the algorithms of YouTube did present me his channel a couple of years ago. But I knew immediately, that he has something to offer for me, because I was educated in music already. With his channel, I could learn even more.
Why was I musically trained already?
Because it was cool to be in band in the 90s and to write good rock and pop tunes. This is what I tried to do, I played in such a band. Plus, the popular music was great back then - just go ask Beato.
Are young people today equally musically trained and do they have the same intrinsic motivation to play in a band?
Unfortunately, I doubt it. One of the reasons: I haven't been able to find great music for a long time that gives me goosebumps while simultaneously exuding genuine pop-cultural relevance and financial success. Where are the young bands that tour the world with great live shows, sell records, and look good in magazines?
My (dark?) counter narrative to this current, inspiring and uplifting post in Honest Broker is, what I call, the "pearls before swine"-theory: Now, when no one has to pay one cent to listen to music 24 hours a day, you realize, how much most people really care about good music.
So perhaps it was just a happy coincidence, along with hard economic factors, that mass appeal and genuine musical finesse repeatedly came together in bands, show acts and superstars between, let's say the 60s until the late 90s.
I agree, and I also grew up in Europe during a generation that experienced a cultural boom in many dimensions. The difference between us and the currently mobile-addicted twenty-somethings is that we were curious and had a benchmark for what good looks and sounds like, whereas they do not. The last few generations have been trained to consume low-quality content without questioning its value. It's disheartening and depressing. I hope Ted is right and that there will be some sort of renaissance again, but I don’t believe it will come from the current young generation.
Young people I know seem to uniformly like the greatest music of the past, and also a lot of good more recent music, so I don't know why you say they don't have the benchmarks. It's never been easier to be exposed to great culture. I have high hopes for the next generation once we sweep aside the current dinosaurs controlling distribution, as Ted suggests is already happening.
There actually could be a lot of great new music and bands out there. It would just be hard to find out about them. Some years back, there was an article by a guy who was working as an apprentice accountant at a slate mine in Wales and discovered the Beatles when they were still playing in a club in Liverpool. They had just gotten back from Hamburg. He spent the next several years touting the band and trying to convince record stores to stock their records. He usually had to special order. Then came the breakout.
There are still a lot of people making music, but it has always been a tough business. It's hard enough to just get a local following and manage to make a living at it. Breaking out and having real cultural influence is a whole other story. As a boomer, I'm expecting the cultural turnover to start when we boomers start dying in earnest. People are getting sick and tired of the monopolist cultural arbiters like Google, Spotify, Netflix and the like. As our host here has pointed out, their move to AI, which eliminates any human connection, is likely their bridge too far.
On an individual level, our mistakes are opportunities for us to grow—and for anyone we’ve inadvertently harmed to learn patience and resilience as well. This plays out on a macro scale too. When we make societal mistakes, we have the opportunity to learn from them. Bad ideas often need to play themselves out for us to truly understand the consequences. But once those consequences are felt, the lessons can truly be learned. Thank you for this—big changes are indeed coming.
And if you look at a broader picture of human history, weve generally been increasing misery for the past 10k years(at least for the majority, so a small minority can have better and better lives with ever increasing and increasingly cooler stuff). I think weve been continually trading down, and that process isnt anywhere near reversing or even slowing down.
If we are smarter now than we were before, we're sure doing the dumbest shit with those smarts
Very true! Universities are full of people who are supposedly intelligent but often just idiot savants or one-sided, emotionally stunted boffins. Ultimately, what's the point of cleverness if you can't think or speak in a human way?
A hypertrophy of the mind and a soulless intelligence are leading us to the destruction of other species (and maybe our own). As you rightly say, agrarian and industrial civilisation have a lot to answer for.
Are we really more miserable than we were in the Bronze Age or under Ancient Rome or Han China? If nothing else, since the Industrial Revolution, more people are getting fed. There has always been a small minority running things and getting more than their fair share of the good stuff. The idea of mass prosperity and basic human rights was a 19th century thing.
No. Im looking at a bigger picture. We were happier when we didnt have masters.
And there hasnt always been a minority elite. Its the creation of that elite, and the growing disparity between them and the rest thats been steadily increasing misery for the majority.
Was there ever such a time? Women had masters in the Neolithic. Most men had masters then as well. I'm not sure there ever was such a time. It's a wonderful thought though.
I don't think that's true. Domestication and hierarchy probably came in with agriculture (surplus). James C Scott (Against the Grain, Hugh Brody (The other side of Eden) and John Zerzan are good on this.
Not sure. Have’t studied it but I'd be surprised if the means to kill so many people were available before. Do think Hans Jonas is correct to say that our age is unprecedented in that our actions now reverberate much further in space and time. I mean, how many people were killed in Hiroshima with just one bomb? Surely that's unprecedented?
In any case, you'd have to argue that with progress the killing or the ability to kill has reduced. That doesn't seem to hold (at least for the 20th c., at least the absolute number). Maybe you're right in relative terms. I have no idea.
The atomic bomb killed almost as many people as the conventional bombing of Tokyo a few weeks before. It was impressive, impressive enough to convince the Japanese high command to surrender, but an atomic bomb doesn't kill you any deader than ordinary high explosives or an obsidian dagger.
Well, I wouldn't know since I haven't died myself but I suspect a lot of people, if asked, would prefer to be stabbed than burn alive. Some deaths are deader. Also, a “pointless” death compared to the death of the martyrs?
In any case, wasn't talking about the individual experience- only the numbers. But even if we stick to your point, surely the concentration camps were unprecedented in their barbarity?
This is all true but I think you also need to add in the politicalization of every aspect of culture, in terms of overreach and enshitification. This happens especially from the Left right now. I can't count how many tv shows I've stopped watching because they were lecturing me and try getting fiction published if you're a normy white male, regardless of the book's quality. All that produces mediocrity, at best.
If the Right had cultural power, they'd do it too. My point is that I'd love to see the arts, high and low, denatured of political coding or posturing. If political statements happen here and there, fine, but when it's a requirement you get art-by-politburo.
I'm not sure if this is going to change. Politics have changed but the gatekeepers of the arts--the editors, agents, publishers, directors, producers, gallery owners, art writers, the vast majority of them all, aren't suddenly changing their stripes. But that's what I love about Substack--it's the one big opening we have to change the entire frame we all create in. And this time, let the best creativity win.
I'm starting to see a change in science magazines,though not in mainstream journalism. For 30 years the big science mags were solely devoted to BURNING CLIMATE EMERGENCY! Every story had to include a lecture about carbon. Now they've decided to softpedal the CLIMATE!!! screaming. I don't know if it was caused by the threat of bankruptcy as people stopped reading, or their Prophet Elon deserting to the other side. In any case the change is noticeable.
Agreed. They alienated many people and now wonder where everyone went. It’s not hard to figure out from a unbiased perspective. This happens on the other side as well … Musk being a prime example . He alienates people and then wonders why people no longer want to buy his cars. People don’t like being constantly preached at… the rocket scientist and art gatekeepers didn’t figure this out when it’s obvious as could be .
Very well put Mr. Gioia, I would only add that people who lost interest in arts and culture are gone for good, unfortunately. They are going to be the target audience of Big Tech's A.I. generated entertainment. They are already. On the other hand there's a whole new wave of underground brewing. People who are going back to RSS feeds, newsletters, digital downloads. The last decade was ruled by globalized cultural fascism, the next one will see the rise of independent micro-cultural communities.
“and it’s why slavery, colonialism, child labor, human sacrifice, etc. no longer have influential advocates”: Sadly, child labor does have influential advocates in the US today, with restrictions on child labor being restricted in a small but growing number of states.
Here’s the thing: the powers that be have now co-opted the very notion of success. I can’t envision “success” in any creative arts without them being right in there making bucks off it some way. For far too long what modern society sees as success equals financial reward, cultural reach and relevance and a certain level of ubiquity. I’d like to hear you talk about what a successful album or novel or film looks like that manages to sidestep the big corporations. What would that even look like?
…it is an interesting anecdote the song test…would seem that humans in general don’t prefer steaming earfuls of lies…hard to explain politics then though…
As much as I wish you were right, I’m not holding my breath. You said yourself it is “beyond anything ever imagined in the history of human society”. Surely this may portend the old rules won’t follow suit, at least not in the way they have before or in the same timeline.
i concur, ted. i haven't given the booty of a rat about the academy awards or academy award winners for the last 30 years. i keep up with new releases, read reviews, see lots of movies, and decide for myself which ones i think are good, bad, or in between.
Intriguing. I think you're right in the long run -- I like listening to Top 40 countdowns from the '60s, when there was tons of memorable pop music, but there are numerous songs that got into the Top 10 (especially pre-1965) but are completely forgotten now.
And then there's the great line from Mel Brooks' "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst": "You could be Tolstoy / Or Fannie Hurst." (Hurst was a bestselling author of the '20s and '30s who's completely forgotten today, except maybe for the movie version of her novel "Imitation of Life.")
Still, there's a lot of money to be made in the short term, hence the deluge of slop. We'll just have to keep pounding away or exchanging samizdat ...
Read Richard Rohr's "Falling Upward". Also book, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity."
Ascribed to A Lincoln, but not his: " You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Hitler was not the most powerful man in europe, certainly not a few months before his death. That went to I.V. Stalin.
Anyway, it is one thing to talk about people, another to talk about technological and economic forces, which are a lot more resistant to the vagaries of fortune. Even if, say, Alexander Berkmann had managed to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, it is not clear what really would have changed.
There is an old saying in the Western Marxist (not Leninist) tradition: "Capitalism knows that it will have enemies, but, if it must have enemies, it will make them itself and in its own image." What you describe so well is the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser) in the ascendence of Big Tech. Art demands freedom. Capitalism will not allow that even if profits are falling. Corporate culture is about management of unruly spirits. If AI slop fails, capitalism will simply move on to another strategy. But I doubt that it will need to have another strategy when every young person under 30 is addicted, literally, to its products. Like Lou Reed sang, they're all "waitin' for my man." Waiting for the next dopamine hit from whatever "drops" from the aether and into their earbuds or onto Instagram.
Totally aside from your point - perhaps - note that The Who have announced their 2025 North American Farewell Tour. My immediate thought was: I won't get fooled again.
How many farewell tours can one band have?
I loved the Who but that's not the who
Why many call them The Two now.
They never announce it right away, but a few months after the farewell tour ends comes the announcement that they're playing 10 dates a month at the Sphere in Vegas for X months. VIP packages are available!
" The Who " - Won't get fooled again.
I saw their FINAL CONCERT in Toronto , 1982.
There's another final concert this year ( 2025 )
https://youtu.be/Al3qlST6lnI?si=nU0MyDP824_cQIFT
I love the Dubya Bush version:
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice....(pause) won't get fooled again.
or be a pinball wizard for that matter!!
My wife asked me if I wanted to go.
I said I enjoyed the real farewell tour which was broadcast on cable in the 1980s.
From a European (German) perspective:
How did I find The Honest Broker? Via YouTube, the Rick Beato interview.
How did I find Rick Beato, did someone told me you need to watch his videos?
Nope, but wait a sec: Well, the algorithms of YouTube did present me his channel a couple of years ago. But I knew immediately, that he has something to offer for me, because I was educated in music already. With his channel, I could learn even more.
Why was I musically trained already?
Because it was cool to be in band in the 90s and to write good rock and pop tunes. This is what I tried to do, I played in such a band. Plus, the popular music was great back then - just go ask Beato.
Are young people today equally musically trained and do they have the same intrinsic motivation to play in a band?
Unfortunately, I doubt it. One of the reasons: I haven't been able to find great music for a long time that gives me goosebumps while simultaneously exuding genuine pop-cultural relevance and financial success. Where are the young bands that tour the world with great live shows, sell records, and look good in magazines?
My (dark?) counter narrative to this current, inspiring and uplifting post in Honest Broker is, what I call, the "pearls before swine"-theory: Now, when no one has to pay one cent to listen to music 24 hours a day, you realize, how much most people really care about good music.
So perhaps it was just a happy coincidence, along with hard economic factors, that mass appeal and genuine musical finesse repeatedly came together in bands, show acts and superstars between, let's say the 60s until the late 90s.
I hope I'm wrong and those glory days return.
I agree, and I also grew up in Europe during a generation that experienced a cultural boom in many dimensions. The difference between us and the currently mobile-addicted twenty-somethings is that we were curious and had a benchmark for what good looks and sounds like, whereas they do not. The last few generations have been trained to consume low-quality content without questioning its value. It's disheartening and depressing. I hope Ted is right and that there will be some sort of renaissance again, but I don’t believe it will come from the current young generation.
Young people I know seem to uniformly like the greatest music of the past, and also a lot of good more recent music, so I don't know why you say they don't have the benchmarks. It's never been easier to be exposed to great culture. I have high hopes for the next generation once we sweep aside the current dinosaurs controlling distribution, as Ted suggests is already happening.
There is a rising wave of homeschool children that will reimagine the way things should be… look for them 🙌🏼
There actually could be a lot of great new music and bands out there. It would just be hard to find out about them. Some years back, there was an article by a guy who was working as an apprentice accountant at a slate mine in Wales and discovered the Beatles when they were still playing in a club in Liverpool. They had just gotten back from Hamburg. He spent the next several years touting the band and trying to convince record stores to stock their records. He usually had to special order. Then came the breakout.
There are still a lot of people making music, but it has always been a tough business. It's hard enough to just get a local following and manage to make a living at it. Breaking out and having real cultural influence is a whole other story. As a boomer, I'm expecting the cultural turnover to start when we boomers start dying in earnest. People are getting sick and tired of the monopolist cultural arbiters like Google, Spotify, Netflix and the like. As our host here has pointed out, their move to AI, which eliminates any human connection, is likely their bridge too far.
On an individual level, our mistakes are opportunities for us to grow—and for anyone we’ve inadvertently harmed to learn patience and resilience as well. This plays out on a macro scale too. When we make societal mistakes, we have the opportunity to learn from them. Bad ideas often need to play themselves out for us to truly understand the consequences. But once those consequences are felt, the lessons can truly be learned. Thank you for this—big changes are indeed coming.
We get smarter as a species?
Not sure. After the 20th c (the gulags, the camps, the trenches, the bomb, the beginnings of climate catastrophe) I don't get how anyone can say that.
And if you look at a broader picture of human history, weve generally been increasing misery for the past 10k years(at least for the majority, so a small minority can have better and better lives with ever increasing and increasingly cooler stuff). I think weve been continually trading down, and that process isnt anywhere near reversing or even slowing down.
If we are smarter now than we were before, we're sure doing the dumbest shit with those smarts
Very true! Universities are full of people who are supposedly intelligent but often just idiot savants or one-sided, emotionally stunted boffins. Ultimately, what's the point of cleverness if you can't think or speak in a human way?
A hypertrophy of the mind and a soulless intelligence are leading us to the destruction of other species (and maybe our own). As you rightly say, agrarian and industrial civilisation have a lot to answer for.
Are we really more miserable than we were in the Bronze Age or under Ancient Rome or Han China? If nothing else, since the Industrial Revolution, more people are getting fed. There has always been a small minority running things and getting more than their fair share of the good stuff. The idea of mass prosperity and basic human rights was a 19th century thing.
No. Im looking at a bigger picture. We were happier when we didnt have masters.
And there hasnt always been a minority elite. Its the creation of that elite, and the growing disparity between them and the rest thats been steadily increasing misery for the majority.
Was there ever such a time? Women had masters in the Neolithic. Most men had masters then as well. I'm not sure there ever was such a time. It's a wonderful thought though.
I don't think that's true. Domestication and hierarchy probably came in with agriculture (surplus). James C Scott (Against the Grain, Hugh Brody (The other side of Eden) and John Zerzan are good on this.
Youre misinformed:/ Im sure its a wonderful comfort though.
Because you didn't look at what went before? Maybe? We have always been able to kill great numbers of our fellow humans.
Not sure. Have’t studied it but I'd be surprised if the means to kill so many people were available before. Do think Hans Jonas is correct to say that our age is unprecedented in that our actions now reverberate much further in space and time. I mean, how many people were killed in Hiroshima with just one bomb? Surely that's unprecedented?
In any case, you'd have to argue that with progress the killing or the ability to kill has reduced. That doesn't seem to hold (at least for the 20th c., at least the absolute number). Maybe you're right in relative terms. I have no idea.
The atomic bomb killed almost as many people as the conventional bombing of Tokyo a few weeks before. It was impressive, impressive enough to convince the Japanese high command to surrender, but an atomic bomb doesn't kill you any deader than ordinary high explosives or an obsidian dagger.
Well, I wouldn't know since I haven't died myself but I suspect a lot of people, if asked, would prefer to be stabbed than burn alive. Some deaths are deader. Also, a “pointless” death compared to the death of the martyrs?
In any case, wasn't talking about the individual experience- only the numbers. But even if we stick to your point, surely the concentration camps were unprecedented in their barbarity?
This is all true but I think you also need to add in the politicalization of every aspect of culture, in terms of overreach and enshitification. This happens especially from the Left right now. I can't count how many tv shows I've stopped watching because they were lecturing me and try getting fiction published if you're a normy white male, regardless of the book's quality. All that produces mediocrity, at best.
If the Right had cultural power, they'd do it too. My point is that I'd love to see the arts, high and low, denatured of political coding or posturing. If political statements happen here and there, fine, but when it's a requirement you get art-by-politburo.
I'm not sure if this is going to change. Politics have changed but the gatekeepers of the arts--the editors, agents, publishers, directors, producers, gallery owners, art writers, the vast majority of them all, aren't suddenly changing their stripes. But that's what I love about Substack--it's the one big opening we have to change the entire frame we all create in. And this time, let the best creativity win.
I'm starting to see a change in science magazines,though not in mainstream journalism. For 30 years the big science mags were solely devoted to BURNING CLIMATE EMERGENCY! Every story had to include a lecture about carbon. Now they've decided to softpedal the CLIMATE!!! screaming. I don't know if it was caused by the threat of bankruptcy as people stopped reading, or their Prophet Elon deserting to the other side. In any case the change is noticeable.
Well Michael Mann, the IPCC, and east Anglia fraudsters didn't help their $ide.
Agreed. They alienated many people and now wonder where everyone went. It’s not hard to figure out from a unbiased perspective. This happens on the other side as well … Musk being a prime example . He alienates people and then wonders why people no longer want to buy his cars. People don’t like being constantly preached at… the rocket scientist and art gatekeepers didn’t figure this out when it’s obvious as could be .
Agreed. We got tired of their constant nagging.
Very well put Mr. Gioia, I would only add that people who lost interest in arts and culture are gone for good, unfortunately. They are going to be the target audience of Big Tech's A.I. generated entertainment. They are already. On the other hand there's a whole new wave of underground brewing. People who are going back to RSS feeds, newsletters, digital downloads. The last decade was ruled by globalized cultural fascism, the next one will see the rise of independent micro-cultural communities.
I'm gone for good & I certainly am not a target audience for AI use ... ever
And Bitcoin/Nostr
“and it’s why slavery, colonialism, child labor, human sacrifice, etc. no longer have influential advocates”: Sadly, child labor does have influential advocates in the US today, with restrictions on child labor being restricted in a small but growing number of states.
And as for ethnic cleansing and genocide, they’re endorsed and enforced at the highest level….
Here’s the thing: the powers that be have now co-opted the very notion of success. I can’t envision “success” in any creative arts without them being right in there making bucks off it some way. For far too long what modern society sees as success equals financial reward, cultural reach and relevance and a certain level of ubiquity. I’d like to hear you talk about what a successful album or novel or film looks like that manages to sidestep the big corporations. What would that even look like?
…it is an interesting anecdote the song test…would seem that humans in general don’t prefer steaming earfuls of lies…hard to explain politics then though…
Actually, it does explain politics. The largest voting bloc in the last election was people who did not bother to vote.
As much as I wish you were right, I’m not holding my breath. You said yourself it is “beyond anything ever imagined in the history of human society”. Surely this may portend the old rules won’t follow suit, at least not in the way they have before or in the same timeline.
i concur, ted. i haven't given the booty of a rat about the academy awards or academy award winners for the last 30 years. i keep up with new releases, read reviews, see lots of movies, and decide for myself which ones i think are good, bad, or in between.
Intriguing. I think you're right in the long run -- I like listening to Top 40 countdowns from the '60s, when there was tons of memorable pop music, but there are numerous songs that got into the Top 10 (especially pre-1965) but are completely forgotten now.
And then there's the great line from Mel Brooks' "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst": "You could be Tolstoy / Or Fannie Hurst." (Hurst was a bestselling author of the '20s and '30s who's completely forgotten today, except maybe for the movie version of her novel "Imitation of Life.")
Still, there's a lot of money to be made in the short term, hence the deluge of slop. We'll just have to keep pounding away or exchanging samizdat ...
Read Richard Rohr's "Falling Upward". Also book, "Teaching as a Subversive Activity."
Ascribed to A Lincoln, but not his: " You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Hitler was not the most powerful man in europe, certainly not a few months before his death. That went to I.V. Stalin.
Anyway, it is one thing to talk about people, another to talk about technological and economic forces, which are a lot more resistant to the vagaries of fortune. Even if, say, Alexander Berkmann had managed to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, it is not clear what really would have changed.
There is an old saying in the Western Marxist (not Leninist) tradition: "Capitalism knows that it will have enemies, but, if it must have enemies, it will make them itself and in its own image." What you describe so well is the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser) in the ascendence of Big Tech. Art demands freedom. Capitalism will not allow that even if profits are falling. Corporate culture is about management of unruly spirits. If AI slop fails, capitalism will simply move on to another strategy. But I doubt that it will need to have another strategy when every young person under 30 is addicted, literally, to its products. Like Lou Reed sang, they're all "waitin' for my man." Waiting for the next dopamine hit from whatever "drops" from the aether and into their earbuds or onto Instagram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99og_g7rXnA
They hook us on junk but we got da funk....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od-5gCO_PGE
Gosh, hope yr right, Ted -- especially regarding that evil orange fella at the top of the heap right now