who is Bob Lefsetz?

what a fuckin dildo

Served up on a pu pu platter.(xps)

Unbelievable this Lefsetz blurb for the Rap Capital book:

“You’ll be dining out on the book for a week. Telling all the incredible stories to your friends. Atlanta is hiding in plain sight, still most people don’t see it. But if you read Rap Capital, you will.” --Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz Letter

I've said it in this thread before. I definitely — on a primal level — *agree* with Lefsetz's underlying viewpoint that the monoculture is dead. In contrast to life in the '70s and '80s, fewer people have a grasp on an agreed "music narrative" because there's so fewer universal music narratives everyone can agree on, thanks to the ala carte nature of the streaming landscape + death of genre tribalism + record labels only betting on sure things post-recession + death of mtv/omnipresence of rock radio.

But to sit here as a grown man being like, "You know there's a secret little diamond in the rough called "Atlanta hip-hop"

Like it feels like fake naïveté, but just might be ... naïveté?

loved his column yesterday when he explained that most people don’t realize that atlanta has a big rap scene

― comedy khadafi (voodoo chili), Tuesday, September 13, 2022 10:50 PM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tell us more, Bob, about this...Watergate thing?

If you weren't of age back then you have no idea how big the Watergate story was. Not only did they write a book about it, "All the President's Men," they made a first class movie based on the book.

what a fuckin dildo

LOL

They mentioned it in a Skynyrd song!

A book has never been written about a real life subject before! It was all made up before!!!!!

If you weren’t of age then, you have no idea how big the balloon boy story was!!!!

nothing lives up to its billing anymore. i first noticed this phenomenon in 1974...

https://frinkiac.com/img/S04E17/1010809.jpg

You see I know these billionaires. To be in their orbit...let's just say there's a lot of largesse.

Fuck Musk/Zuckerberg. I want a Lefsetz/Steve Hoffman duel to the death

"threads is napster"

got a kick out of this exchange on cnn dot com

Armani White 00:24:50

… of the things that happened as far as challenges, people remixing it. And people were like- like there was like a Latin version of "Billie Eilish." That that happened at one point. And like, there's a lot of these things happened after the song already came out.

Audie Cornish 00:25:13

BUT did you freak out and say, hey, that's my song, don't mess with it?

Armani White 00:25:17

NO, no, no, no, no. I think, so there was this there's this guy named Bob Lefsetz. I used to I used to be a part of his newsletter that used to get sent to my email every Monday. And one of the things he's talking about was how Prince used to fight the music industry so much his entire career. He fought the music industry. And one of the things that happened, like in the Napster era, in the early Internet era, he just fought to have his music off of the Internet … etc

I think Bob's dictating his newsletter into his phone these days. the entries are interminable

Not with his take on the Aldean controversy

But he's moved on to the anti-Semite at a ski resort who's sending him hateful emails

lefsetz and ted gi*ia are diametrically opposed on the issue of artist catalog sales. idk who to reflexively disagree with!

What's his take?

What's Gioia's take? (Is this the same guy who wrote a book on jazz history?)

lefsetz: artists are dumb for selling their catalog because their money won't grow
gioia: artists are sly foxes for hoodwinking vc/pe money men and selling high on their catalog before the value of the music depreciates

or you can interpret for yourself here

gioia: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/investment-funds-are-now-selling
lefsetz: https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2023/09/19/katy-perry-sells-catalog/

Why are people down on Goia?

Goia Trance

he's fine in his jazz wheelhouse but pretty dunderheaded when he tries to talk about any other genre or the modern music business

lefsetz: artists are dumb for selling their catalog because their money won't grow

i'm going to take a wild guess that lefsetz has never had a couple hundred million bucks to invest with. because based on my anecdotal knowledge of people who do, that pile tends to grow!

right

Jann Wenner on the podcast today. I don't think I could bear to listen, but wanted to pass that along.

A true meeting of the minds

oh God

lord why must you tempt me?

I dunno. Yasi Salek is discussing the Smiths over on Bandsplain, so I got better things to listen to, but it's there if you want it.

FWIW, there's a note on the Lefsetz pod that it was recorded prior to the he publication of the NYT interview.

Costco

Every rich person needs to go. Not to one in the tony suburbs, but the inner city, where all classes meet.

All this talk about a loneliness epidemic, men having no friends, I understand it. But we can’t demonize the internet, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, we can reach out and touch so many, we’re never completely alone. But the human touch is important too. We no longer bowl together, and who even bowls anyway? Hanging with the masses, those you don’t know, is anathema. We all live in the country, but we are not all in it together.

Unless you’re at Costco.

FWIW, there's a note on the Lefsetz pod that it was recorded prior to the he publication of the NYT interview.

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, September 21, 2023 8:58 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sickos: no...ha ha ha...no!

lol

We no longer bowl together, and who even bowls anyway?

i met some friends a huge bowling alley about a month ago and it was PACKED, like there was a wait to get a lane

That's because they knew Lefsetz wasn't going to show up

i bet he's really bad at bowling

sudden bowling non sequitur is sweet cuz presumably an echo of robert putnam whom you don't hear constantly invoked anymore

i kept excerpting stuff from the little monograph on costco but there was too much stuff and the flow is so important. it doesn't even start at costco: first he's across the street at the tire shop getting rung up by an eastern european and wondering if the guy enjoys his job. there's a wait and the marisesque felice is unavailable so he wanders over to costco and the reader follows. highly recommended.

Oh, I’ve been to Costco a number of times. It’s not like I’m completely inexperienced.

And then I’m debating the time. I love a casual visit to Costco, but what if I had to go regularly?

The deals were amazing. About sixty cents on the dollar compared to Amazon. And it’s cognitive dissonance, I’m blowing thousands in one shot on dentistry and I’m saving dollars on household products? I mean we all want to save money, but is it worth it? I mean is the time worth it. Or should you have it all delivered for a bit more. And you’re saving gas money and helping the environment.

He sounds like a Raymond Carver character or something

You're helping the environment by making someone else drive the stuff to your house?

narrator: you're not

I go to Costco about once a week and I'm usually the only one there in a mask, and one of the few not speaking Russian.

i love costco lol; really is an essay to be written about class in america thru the lens of costco and he really is consciously trying to write it on his blog for janns but he is so oblivious and distracted that the piece becomes a strange manifold on the surface of which the reader can see reflected their own distorted idiot face

if all this guy did was stuff like the costco post, i would totally read his blog all the time