Stomping the Blues by Albert L. Murray w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

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Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and

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this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

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episode number 181.

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181. We’re on the

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countdown to 200. Only 19 more of these episodes and we’re going to get to

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the 200th. It’s going to be— going to be a humdinger and a

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shindig. Actually, I need to start emailing people. To figure out who’s going to, who’s

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going to come on the show for that recording.

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This is a little behind the scenes there for those of you who are listening.

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As I said, I’m going to open up, uh, from our book today,

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which is a, a non-coffee

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table book, which has coffee table level

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photos and images and even coffee table level

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ideas. Inside of it. It’s a book that

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is about a great American art form, and I don’t

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think that Mr. Murray would have a problem with me using this quote

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right here. And I quote, sometimes it

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all begins with the piano player vamping till ready, a

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vamp being an improvised introduction consisting of anything from the

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repetition of a chordal progression as a warm-up exercise to an

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improvised overture. Sometimes the vamp has already

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begun even before the name of the next number is given. Some singers,

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for instance, especially those who provide their own accompaniment on piano or

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guitar, use it much— use it as much as background

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for a running line of chatter, commentary, or mock didactism

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as to set the mood and tempo for the next selection.

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Also, sometimes it is used to maintain the ambiance of the occasion

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and sometimes to change it. Then the

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composition as such, which is made of verses, optional

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choruses, refrains, riffs, and breaks, begins. Some blues

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compositions, such as Handy’s Yellow Dog Blues, have an introductory or

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verse section which establishes the basis for the choral refrain. Many, like

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Bessie Smith’s Long Old Road and Big Joe Turner’s Piney Brown

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Blues, do not. And in practice, perhaps more often than

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not, the verse is omitted by singers as well as instrumentalists.

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But whether there is a vamp and/or a verse section, the main body of a

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blues composition consists of a series of choruses derived from the traditional

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3-line stanza form. There may be

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as many choruses as a musician is inspired to play,

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unless there are such predetermined restrictions as recording space,

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broadcast time, or duration of a standard popular

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dance tune.

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That is a direct quote from the book we are going to

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cover today, a book from an author we’ve

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talked about on this show before, and it is one of

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the best authors we’ve covered. We’re actually

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revisiting him a second time

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because here’s the thing. America

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as a nation state has very few things that are specifically

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unique to our people. Regardless of our ethnos

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and our racial background. We have apple pie, of course.

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We have baseball. I think my guest host would agree with me about that.

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And of course, we have the highest pursuit of

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material freedom and liberty in the world possible. Now, that

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doesn’t mean we reach it all the time. It just means we have the pursuit.

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That’s all we’re promised, by the way. We’re not promised the attainment.

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But we also, and I think the author today would make this point,

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he would want to throw this in, we also have the blues.

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The blues, or jazz as it is more commonly known,

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exists as a mixture, a mashup, such as it were, of the

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influences of European, Native American, and African

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music traditions. But it also represents the soul of

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a people. We talk almost incessantly about

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race in this country. We actually can’t shut up about it.

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And I believe fundamentally we have stopped saying really anything

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meaningful over the last 50 years. There’s really been no new

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ideas. It’s just been a consistent rehash of the same

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old stuff. But jazz,

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jazz has nothing to do with race. It has to do with

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ethnic pride, musical accomplishment, and the willingness,

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as I opened up there, the willingness to swing and improvise if

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necessary. Our book today

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is the single best book I’ve ever read on the history and the

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background of a type of music that I started a festival

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in my local town to celebrate. By the way, as of the release of this

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recording, um, by the time you hear this, the

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5th annual jazz festival will

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have come and gone, on our way to our 6th

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annual Jazz Festival, which is kind of amazing,

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actually. It started from improvisation with 6 people around a

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table. Oh, and by the way, no money.

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And has wound up being— well, it’s wound up being quite a thing.

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Sure, other musical genres in America matter. I don’t want to give other people short

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shrift or other genres short shrift, uh, from rock and roll to country and from

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rap to salsa. And from classical to heavy metal, but jazz

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music, jazz music itself is America.

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I fundamentally believe that. And in a time of

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restoration, uh, particularly a time of upcoming

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restoration, a golden age, I believe we are indeed entering in

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fits and starts and, and somewhat against our will,

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as is usual. I think we need to tap out our work

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of rebuilding what we have lost to the soundtrack of the music

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that made us, to paraphrase from VH1 back in the day.

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Anybody remember that channel? I know I do.

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So today on the show, we’re going to take a tour, a jazz tour, a

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blues tour through the great book by Albert Murray,

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Stomping the Blues. And I have a

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40th anniversary edition. I would encourage you to pick that one up.

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Leaders, all our efforts at restoration won’t mean a

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thing if it ain’t got that swing.

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And today on the show, we’re going to improvise, we’re going to jazz,

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we’re going to rift or riff, we’re going to vamp a little

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with my usual accompaniment, my usual accompanier,

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the guy who’s on the trumpet. Actually, if he were in a jazz band, he

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would be on the trumpet, I’d be on the sax, because Well, that’s just how

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I roll. We’re none of us, neither of us are in the rhythm section. Uh,

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Tom Libby, how you doing today,

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Tom? How’s it going? Um, I’m, I’m doing really well, doing really

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good. I was, I was kind of excited to get this invite because of The

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Omni Americans, and I think I remember very,

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very clearly when I, when I started doing the research on,

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um, on Murray, on Albert Murray, in the first, when we were doing The Omni

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Americans, I just remember myself thinking, like, I

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just want to go to lunch with this guy. Like, I really just want to

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go out for a beer or like, like, or maybe sit in the, like, in

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the, as a fly on the wall as he’s maybe playing

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something or teaching somebody or whatever. Like, I just thought, I

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remember very clearly thinking this would have been a guy I would

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have loved to have been around. So I was very excited when

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I saw the invite that it was back about Arthur, uh, Albert Murray. Albert

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Murray is— he, he was, he was in that.

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So the, the jazz critic, um, Stanley Crouch, uh, we did a,

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did an episode last year on, uh, Considering Genius and,

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um, about his writings on jazz. And, and Crouch was influenced

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as a jazz player, um, obviously by jazz music, but then as

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a jazz critic and a cultural writer, he was very much influenced by Albert

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Murray, um, and He even said, and I

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have a quote from here, in here, in here about him, which I’m going to,

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I’m going to bring up. Um, but Crouch was noted for basically saying

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that, you know, Albert Murray was one of those unsung

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geniuses of the late 20th century,

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um, writing, such as it were, in a moment

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where culturally African

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Americans weren’t interested in hearing from a guy like that. Because

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he wasn’t captured by

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the sort of blunt instrument in the post-civil rights movement

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moment of how are we going to address inequities and what is

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affirmative action going to do? All those sort of blunt instrument arguments that we just

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keep circling around, as I said in my open there, over and over and over

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again. He was much more interested in nuance. He was much

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more interested in these are the things that

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fundamentally, yes, make African Americans African Americans, and yes, give

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the African American experience in America interest. But he

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was also interested in— and this is his primary thing— how does

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all of this mix together? Like, what are we getting? And that was the point

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of the Omni-Americans, right? Um, you know, they’re all just multicolored

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Americans. And you know what is interesting? I made this point

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a couple episodes ago when we talked about, uh, The End of Race

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Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes,

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which we’ve covered with Rollo Nixon, and then made

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it also in Conflict of Visions, where we covered the Thomas Sowell

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book with my good friend Ryan Stout.

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We as a country, but we also

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as African American racial group, have reached that

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strange spot that Murray thought we were going to reach. And I’m not the first

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person to say this. But we’ve reached a point where

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we will perceive among ourselves, I think over the next 25 to 30 years

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that we’re just Americans. And that’s going to be a real

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hard, that’s going to be a real hard, it’s

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been a real hard, what do you call it? Clearing at the end of the

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path to get to. We’re recording this probably about a

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week after Jesse Jackson died at the age of 84. And I think

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as more and more of those guys who were involved in, and were that generation

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that was deeply involved in the civil rights movement and just sort of kept that

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going, as they passed from this mortal coil, they’re going to be

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replaced by folks like myself, Coleman Hughes, who

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have a different vision. And it’s just a vision of just, we’re

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just Americans. Like, yeah, sure, there was racial strife,

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but you know, I went to a multicultural school. I live in a multicultural

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society. No one’s ever had a problem with me, at least on that

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level. And if they have, it’s been quickly

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culturally shut down as well as legally

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shut down. So what do we do next? And

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the author Glenn Lowry and the linguist John McWhorter talk a lot about this on

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Glenn Lowry’s show, quite a bit on his podcast. And one of

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the points he makes is, what are you going to do when you have to

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compete in a global environment? What’s going to be the tools that you have to

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compete? You have to use when you compete globally. And of course, AI is going

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to push this and a bunch of other things, but it’s already starting to happen.

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The rails are being laid.

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And Murray called it all the way back in the ’70s and ’80s. He said

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eventually we were going to wind up here. And so he comes off like a

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prophet very much, in my mind anyway, and uses

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blues, the blues idiom, as he would say, the blues idiom or

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the jazz idiom. And he didn’t like that word jazz. He liked the word blues

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more so than anything else. But he saw music as a way to

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sort of get us there. Essentially the equalizer, right?

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Like, yeah, that could be true about that. That could be true.

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Or it could be said about several different genres of music. Like, and I

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do— so one thing, back up a half second, because sure,

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one of the things that I found interesting in your opening

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line to today’s podcast episode,

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when you, when you said that, you know, the

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blues— and I’m quoting Hasan here from earlier in this episode—

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the blues, comma, or jazz as it’s more commonly

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known, that actually surprised me a little bit. I got to tell you, I got

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to be honest with you, because I have always viewed them as two separate things.

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Now, now, why? I, I don’t know. I can, I can tell

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you in my mind’s eye what the definition or differences are,

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but I never realized that those two genres of music

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were one. In the same. So to me,

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and again, just from a very basic standpoint, again, I’m not a musician, but I

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love music. I love listening to music, and I will listen to just about anything.

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The only thing I really don’t listen to on a regular basis,

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quite honestly, is country music. And that’s— I just—

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there’s something about that, that, that twang that just bothers my ears. And

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the twang in the voice, not the music, not the actual instruments, because

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I have no problem with the banjo, the fiddle. Like, I have no problem with

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the musical instruments that play country music.. But for some reason in the

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vocals, I can’t, I just can’t get past

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the vocal of it, which you don’t get like in

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jazz. And so back to my point where jazz and blues are the same

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thing. If I were to simplify it in my brain, the most simple definition,

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or to me, the most simple definition or the most

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simple difference between the definitions is, and you’re going to probably laugh

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at me here because you know me really well. Blues

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is internal and jazz is external. Meaning

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like jazz is the expression of external emotion,

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right? Jazz is about just laying it on the line. You ain’t got that thing

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unless you put the swing, right? Like it’s about the swing. It’s about movement. It’s

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about— blues to me was more about an internal reflection. It’s like a

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deeper soulful kind of point to it.

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To say that those are the same kind, like literally those two things are the

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same music, blew my mind when I read that before we got on. I was

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like, wait, no, that can’t possibly be. That’s not right. And of course I research

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and then you’re right. But, but like, but to me, to me,

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I do think there’s, even if the, even if the difference is subtle

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in my brain, it’s a little different. That it’s like, like

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I said, jazz is external, blues is internal to me. Right. I feel

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like that’s, and again, you could say the same thing about, uh,

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about metal or about rap or about whatever, like the difference

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between what a regular rap versus gangster rap, right? Like, well, they’re both rap.

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So they’re both rap. Yeah. They, but, but the, but the, the inter, the inflections

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and the meaning behind them are different. So I guess to me, the, the difference

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between blues and jazz, there is a difference, although subtle,

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although subtle. Well, and this is why I love talking to Tom about these kinds

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of topics and these kinds of areas. And I love sort of bringing him on

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is, and this is why I invited him on a few years ago. I was

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like, listen, you gotta come on. You gotta be like the everyman because otherwise I’m

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just gonna sound like this wandering intellect and everybody’s gonna be bored. Right?

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You can’t have that. You gotta have the everyman. And this is what, Tom,

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what you’re bringing up, this is exactly how most people

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perceive quote unquote blues and quote unquote jazz. As a matter of fact, Murray talks

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about it in his book and he lays out an argument

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that, to your point, blues is

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the external, he would say, the external

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manifestation of those internal emotions, right? And

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the point that he would make is this, he would go a step further. He

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would say all those emotions are not negative. Those

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emotions are, are the, are the, it’s the, it’s the

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emotive ability of, no, not even that.

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It’s the musical accompaniment. There we go. That’s what it would be. The

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musical accompaniment to emotive ability with

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disciplines, with discipline around it. Right. And he would say, and

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he writes several essays in this book, which is a collection of about,

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well, it’s a collection of essays. I’ll go into the structure of the book in

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a minute, but it’s a collection of essays. And in each one of his essays,

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he always makes the initial point somewhere or makes the point somewhere in the essay

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that blues as an idiom is an expression. That’s why I said as an idiom,

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it’s an expression. And it’s an expression that works both

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on Saturday night rocking at the Savoy, but it

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also can come as an expression on Sunday morning rocking in

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the church. And that’s a huge link, right,

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that he makes, a huge conceptual link. And he

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points out very obvious things, which is what most really

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good cultural critics do. One of the most notorious being

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that those who are swinging on Saturday or swinging on Friday and are looking

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for places to swing, they’re going to be the first people up in the pew

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on Sunday talking about how they love the Lord. And they will

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see no difference between the two, those two

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things. Now, what he would say about jazz, and the reason he rejected the word

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jazz, is because he would frame jazz as— and I would agree with him—

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he would frame jazz as a great marketing word

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for a blues idiom. Okay, it’s a

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marketing term. It’s because you can’t— how are you going to

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market Jelly Roll Morton, a genre that includes everybody from Jelly

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Roll Morton and Count Basie all the way

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to Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, who he thought went off the table there at

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the end. And so did Stanley Crouch, by the way. But like, how are you

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gonna include all of those artists in one box? He’s like, you can’t, you can’t

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do it. But you have to be able to market it. I would assert as

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an entrepreneur and a marketing guy, you have to be able to market it. And

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so jazz is the way to market it to an external audience.

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And so you wind up seeing in subsequent years, like over the last 50

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years, the explosion of like world-based world music

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coming in in the jazz genre, right? Because all of these other folks

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around the world are now beginning to pick up on that

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idiom and they’re beginning to put their own mark on that

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idiom. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s a distinction with a difference and it took me

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a long time to sort of buy it, but once I saw it, I was

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like, oh no, he’s right. He, it does make sense. It does

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make sense though, if you, because again, when we talk about You know, when, when

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you and I are off this podcast and we’re talking about sales and

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marketing and marketing more specifically about, you know, ideal

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client profiles and how you niche down the niches, this

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is a good way to do it, right? So you make— right, you basically take

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blues and you give it this word that attracts a certain kind of people and

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a certain type of listener. And that’s the whole— that’s what marketing is all

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about, to really identify who’s going to listen to this and go get them, right?

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Right? Go, go, go. So, so it does make sense. I’m not suggesting it doesn’t

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make sense. All I’m saying is when I first read it, I went,

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no, oh, come on. And then I read, and then I went and looked at

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it, and I was like, yeah, you’re right. Damn

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it, he read the book. I always read the book. It’s

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fine. Um, so yeah, speaking of Albert Murray, so we did his, we did his

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whole intro and his whole background, um, for episode 140 of The

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Omni Americans. I would encourage you to go listen to the first part of that

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if you want to find out more about the guy, or you could just, you

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know, go Google search him. Tons of stuff on

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Albert Murray. Speaking of Stanley Crouch, just this great quote

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about him. He had this to say, he said, and I

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quote, “When Murray wrote in quick succession South to a

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Varial Place, The Hero and the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, and Stomping

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the Blues, he might not have stepped out of Ralph Ellison’s

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shadow but he had created the most original body of work other than Ellison’s that

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I knew of, and that remains true even now. That’s

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from Stanley Crouch’s book Considering Genius. That’s in the prologue, Jazz

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Me the Blues, a term, by the way, that even he used, but he knew,

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he knew the distinction with the difference as

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well. Um, Albert Murray understood blues music at a deep level. He also understood the

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ways in which blues impacted not only the ears of the listening public in the

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mid-20th century But also he understood at a deep level, and this is why

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I’m a big fan of his, he understood at a deep level the way that

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it might point forward to clarifying and distilling

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larger cultural problems in America. He understood

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that music, regardless of what we may think

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about it, is the thing that binds us together. No human being

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on— there’s no group of human beings on the planet, heck, no group of individuals

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on the planet, but let’s say group of individuals, there’s no individuals but there’s

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no group of folks on the planet that doesn’t have some sort of

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musical thing that happens in some sort of rhythmic kind of way.

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There’s

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something— it touches us at a deeper emotive

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level than words can. There’s something communal about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Something

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you have to do together. You cannot do it by yourself. Oh, well, you don’t

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want to say you cannot. You can, but then How do you

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get other people to buy in? And that’s the great thing about any kind of

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musical idiom. You have to get other people to buy

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in. By the way, one note about country music, I too had a

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problem with the twang. And then I started— well, no, I did. And

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in a lot of modern— like anything from the ’80s

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and ’90s, I’m probably not going to listen to.

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But I got into Johnny Cash. And that was the door that sort

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of dropped me into the hole. Right? And so what I always say to my

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kids, who by the way, don’t— only one of my kids is kind of okay

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with country music, the others are like, please. What do I

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say to my kids is there’s country music for sure, just like

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you were saying. And then there’s Johnny Cash, and that’s a totally different thing over

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there. I don’t know what he was doing. He’s one of those sort

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of cultural iconoclastic folks that sort of stepped

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over the genre itself. Which you very rarely get. Duke

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Ellington in blues or jazz music was another

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one where he was just— he just stepped over the entire

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genre and did whatever the heck he wanted. And music allows people

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to do that. So when it comes to country artists, there are a

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couple that I can tolerate more than others, I will tell you. Like, and by

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the way, so I’m with you with the ’80s and

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’90s. I go a little further back. So the ’70s with the

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Johnny Cash was in the ’70s. Kenny Rogers was in

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the ’70s. Dolly Parton was in the ’70s. Those three artists, I actually don’t

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have a problem listening to even with a little bit of a twang from them.

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But for some reason, they’re— it

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almost sounds to me like country music meant something more to them than it

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does to the artists today. Yeah, right. So like when I listen

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to artists today, it sounds just like everybody else. There’s

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no, there’s no, there’s no emotion behind the, the,

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the— it’s, I mean, let’s face it, it’s all about money at this point. Like,

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they’re, they’re trying to figure out how do I make money, and if I can

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make money with the— they’ll just go do it. With Kenny Rogers, and by the

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way, Dolly Parton, um, probably one of the

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best songwriters of our entire generation. She’s

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written songs for just about every genre of music there is. Like, she’s

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made money off of other artists either. And there was times

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where she didn’t sell the song, she just thought somebody else sang it better than

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her and let them sing it, right? Except, you know, whatever, right? So

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like, so, and, and anyway, but the point is

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that, and to what you’re, you’re saying is, and by the way, I have out

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of my 5 kids, I probably have 3 of them that really like country music.

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I don’t know where the heck that came from because none of the adults in

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my life like country music. So none of

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my, my brothers, my sister my wife, none of us like country music.

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How I had a couple of kids that ended up liking it, I have no

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idea. But again, as I mentioned, the difference between

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rap and gangster, it’s the same idea, right? So whether you’re talking, and

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to your point, whether you’re talking about a country artist,

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like, I’m trying to think of one right now who he himself does

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not label himself a country artist, but he does have music that sounds a bit

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country, like Teddy Swims. Who crosses over very easily

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into the pop culture, like the pop music, right? Like, so,

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and guys like Jelly Roll— and I know you mentioned somebody from the

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blues type, but this, the new, the new artist Jelly Roll, same

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idea. Like, he rolls, he rolls over to the pop, to the pop

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00:24:14,320 –> 00:24:17,880
culture pretty easily, but he himself still classifies himself as a

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country singer. Like, he’s a country artist, right? Um, so I, you

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know, with those kinds of people, it’s easier to see a pathway

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into liking country music that

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I still do not walk down. Right. Well, I

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will— I— let me, let me be your Morpheus from The Matrix. And you

399
00:24:36,260 –> 00:24:39,940
could be— you can be the— you could be the one, you know, and

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let me— just because you see the path, and just because you know the path

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does not mean you have to walk the path. That is correct. There you

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go. There’s no rule, no law,

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whatever. And usually when I come to a fork in the road, there’s more than

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two pathways, by the way. Usually I’m like five, and I’m like, oh, what am

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I doing? Now I gotta decide between these 5

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00:25:00,360 –> 00:25:03,720
pathways. It’s never as simple as this way or that way for me.

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Never. One other thing I’ll say about this. So blues music

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is an idiom, right? Because the blues— and his very

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first essay in here, and we’re gonna probably pull some

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things from it— the blues as such, we’re gonna talk a little bit about this.

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But Well, when he frames the blues, right, when he talks about the

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blues, when he writes about the blues, he’s writing from

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a strong space of— and this is something I

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think— not only something, this is what you hit on when you’re talking about artists

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of the ’70s. He is writing from

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a space

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of cultural, not ethnic,

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but cultural pride. So there’s a

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certain level of just— and you know what, it’s interesting. So when we

420
00:25:57,860 –> 00:26:01,580
talk about—

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I hate to make this generational, but it’s the easiest way to sort of frame

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this. If you talk to baby boomers who have a certain level of

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self-awareness about their own generation and their own

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history, what they will say is Well, there was

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always garbage. There was garbage in the movies. There was garbage

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00:26:20,640 –> 00:26:24,360
on television. There was garbage Westerns. There was garbage

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00:26:24,920 –> 00:26:28,680
music. There was garbage magazines. There was garbage writing.

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You’re not the first couple of generations to discover that technology brings

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00:26:32,080 –> 00:26:34,040
you garbage. There was always

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garbage. And they will also then say in

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the exact same breath, But the Beatles were great, or

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00:26:44,850 –> 00:26:48,610
the Stones, or whoever, right? Okay, cool. That’s fine.

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And if you call the Beatles or the Stones garbage, and I’ve mentioned this on

434
00:26:51,530 –> 00:26:55,330
this show before, so please, it’s fine, send me your hate mail.

435
00:26:55,330 –> 00:26:58,650
But if you say that they were garbage, then

436
00:26:58,650 –> 00:27:02,330
the terror of, you know,

437
00:27:02,330 –> 00:27:05,370
fire and sulfur will come down upon you. Okay, fine,

438
00:27:05,930 –> 00:27:09,510
whatever. That’s so funny. Real, real, real quick. No, go ahead. My wife and I

439
00:27:09,510 –> 00:27:13,150
get into this conversation all the time because I think that

440
00:27:13,150 –> 00:27:16,990
the Beatles are one of the most overrated bands of all time. Not bad.

441
00:27:16,990 –> 00:27:19,790
I’m not saying they’re not good. I’m not saying they didn’t make an impact on

442
00:27:20,350 –> 00:27:24,069
music. I just think that they’re the most overrated band

443
00:27:24,069 –> 00:27:27,550
of all time. And she wants to—

444
00:27:27,550 –> 00:27:30,670
she vilifies me. Never mind the hate mail that you guys said we’re going to

445
00:27:30,670 –> 00:27:34,390
get now from your listeners, but I get it from my own

446
00:27:34,390 –> 00:27:37,600
wife. So bring it. That’s fine. That’s fine. I can handle it from anybody if

447
00:27:37,600 –> 00:27:41,200
I can handle it from her. So I almost got

448
00:27:41,920 –> 00:27:44,400
into, and I’m not going to say the name of the place where I worked

449
00:27:44,400 –> 00:27:47,400
or the person with whom I worked. I’m just going to give a very generic

450
00:27:47,400 –> 00:27:49,720
thing here because if I give too many identifying details, it’s going to be a

451
00:27:49,720 –> 00:27:53,320
real problem. I almost got into a fistfight with an old man in a town

452
00:27:53,320 –> 00:27:56,920
I worked in at a place that I worked at because in a lunchroom I

453
00:27:56,920 –> 00:28:00,560
happened to say, and I quote, the Beatles are the

454
00:28:00,560 –> 00:28:04,090
most overrated band of all time. Someone else would’ve come with that Love Love Me

455
00:28:04,090 –> 00:28:07,770
Do crap. I didn’t know he was a giant Beatles fan. We’d

456
00:28:07,770 –> 00:28:11,571
never actually talked about it. I was just pissed about something. It was something

457
00:28:11,571 –> 00:28:15,050
that had to do with, oh, because in the, in the place where I worked

458
00:28:16,010 –> 00:28:19,530
at, there was a, I had to be very careful. There was

459
00:28:19,530 –> 00:28:23,370
a compendium of Beatles

460
00:28:23,690 –> 00:28:27,490
albums, yet another one. And I had just had enough. I didn’t

461
00:28:27,650 –> 00:28:31,340
wanna see anymore. And so I said this in the lunchroom away

462
00:28:31,340 –> 00:28:34,980
from the customers that would potentially buy that thing.

463
00:28:34,980 –> 00:28:38,620
And he almost— I did. I almost got into a fistfight with an old man.

464
00:28:38,620 –> 00:28:42,100
And this is back when I was probably in my early 30s. And I was

465
00:28:42,100 –> 00:28:45,059
like, dude, you got to calm down. They were overrated. And I doubled

466
00:28:48,820 –> 00:28:50,980
down. Just read some of the lyrics, people.

467
00:28:53,220 –> 00:28:57,060
Like, this is not rocket science when you’re talking about music. Anyway,

468
00:28:57,060 –> 00:29:00,180
sorry, go ahead. But he did make a good point. He

469
00:29:00,900 –> 00:29:04,340
said, sure, according to your generation, they were

470
00:29:04,820 –> 00:29:08,620
overrated. Okay. Pache that. No, no, it’s fine. Pache

471
00:29:08,620 –> 00:29:12,459
that. I got to give credit where credit is due. But you

472
00:29:12,459 –> 00:29:16,260
have to understand that where I grew up and where most

473
00:29:16,260 –> 00:29:20,100
of us grew up in our generation, there was so much— to close

474
00:29:20,100 –> 00:29:23,670
the loop on what I said previously— there was so much garbage They

475
00:29:23,670 –> 00:29:26,990
looked good. And when I put it in

476
00:29:26,990 –> 00:29:28,230
that context, I

477
00:29:31,910 –> 00:29:35,350
thought, hmm. First off, I had that response. I like blew out all the air

478
00:29:35,350 –> 00:29:38,230
just like out of my mouth. And I said, okay,

479
00:29:38,950 –> 00:29:41,710
fine. I’ll let you have that. And I walked away because I wasn’t gonna like,

480
00:29:41,710 –> 00:29:45,030
what am I gonna do? Escalate? Yeah. And it gets to this idea

481
00:29:45,030 –> 00:29:48,750
of garbage, right? So the

482
00:29:48,750 –> 00:29:51,110
venture capital investor, and this is the last point I’ll make about this and I

483
00:29:51,110 –> 00:29:54,890
want to jump into the book, but the venture capital investor, Paul Paul

484
00:29:54,890 –> 00:29:58,090
Graham. He wrote a great essay called

485
00:29:58,090 –> 00:30:01,820
The Refragmentation. You can go find it on his website at

486
00:30:01,820 –> 00:30:05,450
paulgramm.com where he talks about being a kid growing up in rural

487
00:30:05,450 –> 00:30:09,250
Wisconsin or Michigan, one of those northern states,

488
00:30:09,490 –> 00:30:12,690
right? And there’s a line in there that goes directly to this. He

489
00:30:13,570 –> 00:30:17,370
said he got a copy of

490
00:30:17,370 –> 00:30:20,050
Harper’s Weekly one time when he was a kid, and he’s a baby boomer. When

491
00:30:20,050 –> 00:30:23,000
he was a kid, when he was like 10 or 12, not 10, like 12

492
00:30:23,000 –> 00:30:25,840
or 13. And he was just sort of beginning to wake up that the rest

493
00:30:25,840 –> 00:30:28,720
of the world is out there because he’s like, in the little town that he

494
00:30:28,720 –> 00:30:32,520
lived in, all you had was Time magazine. All

495
00:30:32,520 –> 00:30:36,200
you had was Life magazine and everything was like cigarette ads

496
00:30:36,200 –> 00:30:39,640
and whiskey ads and cars with big fins. And he said one time he

497
00:30:39,640 –> 00:30:42,720
got Harper’s Weekly and he read it and he was like, I never

498
00:30:43,280 –> 00:30:47,080
knew my 13-year-old brain didn’t realize, I’m paraphrasing, but my 13-year-old

499
00:30:47,080 –> 00:30:50,800
brain didn’t realize that there could be quality writing. Because I was surrounded by so

500
00:30:51,360 –> 00:30:55,200
much garbage. I think

501
00:30:55,200 –> 00:30:57,120
we underestimate in our own

502
00:30:59,600 –> 00:31:03,400
time, first, the power of gatekeepers, because the internet has ripped all of that away.

503
00:31:03,400 –> 00:31:07,200
The internet has ripped away all the gatekeepers, right? Or at least it

504
00:31:07,280 –> 00:31:11,080
has given— it has given the gatekeepers— ripped away power from the gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are

505
00:31:11,080 –> 00:31:14,800
still there. They’re trying to consolidate power. You see this in publishing houses

506
00:31:14,800 –> 00:31:18,000
now, but in a lot of other different places too, in music too. They’re trying

507
00:31:18,000 –> 00:31:21,740
to consolidate power. Because the, their head, the, the, the

508
00:31:21,740 –> 00:31:25,580
power, the, the level of, or the amount of territory they have is shrinking. And

509
00:31:25,580 –> 00:31:28,540
it’s been shrinking for the last 25 years in all spaces,

510
00:31:29,420 –> 00:31:33,100
right? So we underestimate the power of

511
00:31:33,580 –> 00:31:37,180
institutional, like, flattening that occurred for a good chunk of the

512
00:31:37,180 –> 00:31:40,900
20th century. The power of gatekeepers, number 2. But

513
00:31:40,900 –> 00:31:44,580
then the 3rd thing that we underestimate is the amount of work, and

514
00:31:44,580 –> 00:31:48,180
this gets into the Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash,

515
00:31:48,180 –> 00:31:51,860
Merle Haggard, or

516
00:31:51,860 –> 00:31:55,420
in the blues genre, right? Count Basie,

517
00:31:55,420 –> 00:31:59,180
Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, John

518
00:31:59,180 –> 00:32:02,940
Coltrane, Charlie Parker, right? The amount of work those guys had

519
00:32:02,940 –> 00:32:06,220
to do to be good, to fight through to be good,

520
00:32:06,220 –> 00:32:09,660
we underestimate that because in our

521
00:32:11,900 –> 00:32:15,600
time, very few people are fighting to be good. Most people

522
00:32:15,600 –> 00:32:19,320
that we see, particularly in the arts, are fighting to just be

523
00:32:19,800 –> 00:32:23,520
average. Yeah. Because average is good enough to be average

524
00:32:23,520 –> 00:32:27,280
according to now’s standards is good enough because mediocre

525
00:32:27,280 –> 00:32:31,120
according to now’s standards is so terrible. It’s just so terrible.

526
00:32:31,120 –> 00:32:34,680
And so if you grew up in a time where like

527
00:32:34,680 –> 00:32:37,320
people fought through that, had bands like the

528
00:32:38,360 –> 00:32:42,100
Beatles who actually had to struggle to get on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like they

529
00:32:42,100 –> 00:32:45,900
did, cuz Ed Sullivan was a gatekeeper. That cranky old man, he wasn’t

530
00:32:45,900 –> 00:32:48,220
letting anybody on. And then you had to do what he told you to do.

531
00:32:48,220 –> 00:32:51,340
You know, you know the story of him with the Doors, like, you know, and

532
00:32:51,340 –> 00:32:54,780
he was gonna tell Jim Morrison what to sing. And Jim Morrison was like, yeah,

533
00:32:54,780 –> 00:32:57,900
okay, go ahead, tell me what to sing. And then he went on live on

534
00:32:57,900 –> 00:33:01,340
television and blew literally the doors off

535
00:33:01,980 –> 00:33:05,700
of, um, off of the Ed Sullivan Show, said the thing he wasn’t supposed to

536
00:33:05,700 –> 00:33:08,300
say, got cut off. And Ed Sullivan was like, you’re never gonna come back on

537
00:33:08,300 –> 00:33:11,970
this show again. He’s like, yeah, I don’t care. Who are

538
00:33:11,970 –> 00:33:14,850
you, old man? And then just like walked away,

539
00:33:16,290 –> 00:33:20,010
right? You didn’t have that much rebellion like that back then

540
00:33:20,010 –> 00:33:23,130
because everybody, everybody, the culture was

541
00:33:23,130 –> 00:33:25,970
so flattening. And that’s what I think we

542
00:33:27,330 –> 00:33:30,410
underestimate. So on the negative side, we get a lot of slop in our time.

543
00:33:30,410 –> 00:33:32,450
And with AI, we’re going to, I mean, we’re going to get even more. It’s

544
00:33:32,450 –> 00:33:35,970
going to be ridiculous. But we also get, and that’s already

545
00:33:36,260 –> 00:33:39,980
happening. But we also get a lack of trying, a lack of effort

546
00:33:39,980 –> 00:33:43,740
being put in on our talents and skill. And I don’t know anything

547
00:33:43,740 –> 00:33:47,500
about Jelly Roll. I know nothing about, about that person. I’ve seen

548
00:33:47,500 –> 00:33:50,540
maybe a couple of things. I don’t listen to the music. I have no idea

549
00:33:50,540 –> 00:33:54,220
what’s happening there. Um, I presume

550
00:33:54,220 –> 00:33:57,540
that if he has that much of a profile, he has some talent. I like

551
00:33:57,540 –> 00:34:00,620
to give— I like to be a, be a good person right away before I

552
00:34:00,620 –> 00:34:04,350
do the judgment. But then I suspect that like if

553
00:34:04,350 –> 00:34:07,790
I transported him back in time, like 75

554
00:34:08,510 –> 00:34:12,310
years, he’d be playing a backup. He’d be a backup guitar guy if

555
00:34:12,310 –> 00:34:15,870
he were lucky to like some third string

556
00:34:15,870 –> 00:34:19,150
country western group going around the Midwest.

557
00:34:20,110 –> 00:34:23,910
Right. Because the gatekeepers were just so much more powerful then. So

558
00:34:23,910 –> 00:34:27,590
gatekeepers, institutional power, and just you had to try harder. You just had to

559
00:34:27,590 –> 00:34:31,179
try harder to, to, to to, to rise up. And I think we sort of

560
00:34:31,179 –> 00:34:34,699
underestimate that. So, but even in those people’s time, they still thought that everything was

561
00:34:34,699 –> 00:34:38,139
like, things were just garbage, which is kind of

562
00:34:39,019 –> 00:34:42,499
amazing. I don’t know what to do with that. It’s a dichotomy. I’m not sure

563
00:34:42,499 –> 00:34:46,179
what to do with that either, just because like, I, I think of, I think

564
00:34:46,179 –> 00:34:49,579
of like, again, when I, when I think of the Beatles and I think of

565
00:34:49,739 –> 00:34:52,779
that, that era, and I think of some of the

566
00:34:53,419 –> 00:34:55,339
other people that were around back

567
00:34:57,240 –> 00:35:00,760
then, Mm-hmm. All you’ll know all of their names as soon as I say them.

568
00:35:00,760 –> 00:35:04,600
So like, how different really were they and what were they rebelling against?

569
00:35:05,000 –> 00:35:07,600
Like, I don’t even understand. Like, you know what I mean? Like, if you think

570
00:35:07,600 –> 00:35:11,320
of guys like, like, you know, the Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee

571
00:35:11,320 –> 00:35:14,040
Lewis and like all these guys that were around or somewhere, like, you know, all

572
00:35:14,040 –> 00:35:17,840
those names too. Like, if you think about, like, think

573
00:35:17,840 –> 00:35:20,960
about what Chuck Berry did with the electric, like with the electric guitar that nobody

574
00:35:20,960 –> 00:35:24,710
was really doing until then. Right. Like he blew the— he like,

575
00:35:24,710 –> 00:35:28,230
he would blow— he blew amplifiers and people were like, oh my God, this

576
00:35:28,230 –> 00:35:31,030
is incredible. And by the way, I do think Chuck Berry is talented, so I’m

577
00:35:31,030 –> 00:35:34,070
not suggesting he’s not, but like, oh yeah. And I, and I, I would, I

578
00:35:34,070 –> 00:35:37,510
would listen to Chuck Berry before I would listen to the Beatles any day of

579
00:35:37,510 –> 00:35:40,590
the week and twice on Sunday. Okay. Okay. Okay. So let me, let me ask

580
00:35:40,590 –> 00:35:42,510
you this question cuz we do have to go back to the book, but here’s

581
00:35:42,510 –> 00:35:45,310
a, here’s an important question for you. I, I could hear the listeners asking this.

582
00:35:45,310 –> 00:35:48,750
Let me ask you this question. If you brought Chuck Berry to now, would he

583
00:35:48,750 –> 00:35:52,490
still blow the doors off of everything? I, I don’t think he would blow

584
00:35:52,490 –> 00:35:55,770
amps out of the water because amps are better today. I still think the

585
00:35:56,090 –> 00:35:59,730
sound that he produced with those— I think we would— I mean, he opened the

586
00:35:59,730 –> 00:36:03,370
door for guys like Jimi Hendrix and Santana, right? Like, he opened

587
00:36:03,370 –> 00:36:07,010
that door. Nobody was doing that stuff before him. So like, do

588
00:36:07,010 –> 00:36:10,770
I think— yes, I think, I think people like him would figure out

589
00:36:10,770 –> 00:36:14,610
a way to elevate themselves.

590
00:36:14,610 –> 00:36:18,050
To your— exactly to your point, If you take a guy like Chuck Berry, I

591
00:36:18,050 –> 00:36:21,010
think he would find a way to make himself so different today that he would

592
00:36:21,010 –> 00:36:24,770
elevate himself beyond everybody else. I think he would still accelerate. Now, what

593
00:36:24,770 –> 00:36:28,570
about Lennon, McCarthy, Harrison? No, they would be NSYNC

594
00:36:28,570 –> 00:36:32,410
or the Backstreet Boys or every other one of those godforsaken boy bands that

595
00:36:32,410 –> 00:36:35,690
nobody gives two rats patoots

596
00:36:37,530 –> 00:36:40,890
about. Sorry, sorry. I was trying to figure out a way to say that

597
00:36:41,440 –> 00:36:44,440
very, uh, without swearing. Without using foul

598
00:36:45,160 –> 00:36:48,680
language. But no, but I think that— I think that’s exactly what they are. They

599
00:36:48,680 –> 00:36:52,240
were the first boy band, right? Like, that— that they— they started that genre.

600
00:36:52,240 –> 00:36:55,160
And now, can you think of any boy band that broke the

601
00:36:55,800 –> 00:36:59,480
mold? No, no, all the boy bands are the same godforsaken

602
00:36:59,880 –> 00:37:03,440
thing. So the Beatles were the start of that horrendous genre

603
00:37:03,440 –> 00:37:05,080
of sub— that subgenre of

604
00:37:07,160 –> 00:37:10,810
music. I will say this. Worse than that, let me just say

605
00:37:10,810 –> 00:37:14,570
this, worse than that, the same did not apply to quote unquote the

606
00:37:14,570 –> 00:37:18,290
girl bands, right? Because you got people like, like, you know, um,

607
00:37:18,290 –> 00:37:21,970
the Pointer Sisters and stuff like that that you can’t— you can’t point to

608
00:37:21,970 –> 00:37:25,130
a modern-day group to me and tell me that they’re as good as the Pointer

609
00:37:26,090 –> 00:37:29,770
Sisters. Like Salt-N-Pepa. Salt-N-Pepa were pretty good.

610
00:37:29,770 –> 00:37:33,410
Yeah, but okay, but they— but, but their time has passed, to your

611
00:37:33,410 –> 00:37:36,470
point. Number one, number one, their time has passed, right? True. But number two, They

612
00:37:36,470 –> 00:37:40,070
weren’t singing the same style of music. Salt-N-Pepa were more closer related to rap than

613
00:37:40,070 –> 00:37:43,630
they were the, the, the, the diva

614
00:37:43,630 –> 00:37:46,910
style. Like I’m thinking like what my point was, I’m thinking people

615
00:37:47,070 –> 00:37:50,830
like Sister SWV, Sister Destiny’s Child. That’s

616
00:37:50,830 –> 00:37:54,350
his child. There you go. All of those, they’re the same. They’re, they’re not as

617
00:37:54,350 –> 00:37:58,070
good as the Pointer Sisters were. I’m just, I don’t know. I

618
00:37:58,070 –> 00:38:01,710
may, and by the way, by the way, guys, don’t let the

619
00:38:01,710 –> 00:38:05,350
gray fool you. All of the people we’re talking about are before my time. These

620
00:38:05,350 –> 00:38:09,030
are before I was not alive when these people were singing, and I still think

621
00:38:09,030 –> 00:38:11,870
they’re better. So there you

622
00:38:13,070 –> 00:38:15,550
go. We’re going to lay this to bed

623
00:38:16,790 –> 00:38:20,470
because my email, I can already hear my email pinging like right now. I

624
00:38:20,470 –> 00:38:23,390
can hear the DMs coming in. I’m going

625
00:38:24,270 –> 00:38:27,470
to forward you all the DMs as soon as I’m done with this because we’re

626
00:38:27,470 –> 00:38:30,710
going to be in a lot of trouble. All right, back to the book, back

627
00:38:30,710 –> 00:38:34,510
to Albert Murray. The focus of this show. Uh, we’re

628
00:38:34,630 –> 00:38:38,470
gonna look at chapter 5, or essay number 5, Blues Music as Such. I’m gonna

629
00:38:38,470 –> 00:38:41,350
pull a couple of ideas from here to set up what we’re going to talk

630
00:38:41,350 –> 00:38:45,150
about here. He opens with this: definitions of

631
00:38:45,150 –> 00:38:48,590
blues music in most standard American dictionaries confuse it with the

632
00:38:48,670 –> 00:38:52,350
blues as such. They also leave the impression that what

633
00:38:52,350 –> 00:38:56,030
it represents is the expression of sadness. No,

634
00:38:56,030 –> 00:38:59,850
not one characterizes it as good time music. This goes back to

635
00:38:59,850 –> 00:39:03,490
that idea of the Saturday night roller versus the Sunday morning

636
00:39:03,730 –> 00:39:06,850
churchgoer. Nor is there any reference whatsoever to its use as dance

637
00:39:08,130 –> 00:39:11,970
music. Moreover, primary emphasis is always placed on its vocal aspects,

638
00:39:11,970 –> 00:39:14,890
and no mention at all is made of the fact that over the years it

639
00:39:14,890 –> 00:39:18,690
has come to be dominated by dancehall-oriented instrumentalists to a

640
00:39:18,690 –> 00:39:22,490
far greater extent than singers.

641
00:39:22,490 –> 00:39:25,850
According to the 3rd edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, blues music

642
00:39:25,850 –> 00:39:29,410
is, quote, a song sung or composed in a style originating among

643
00:39:29,490 –> 00:39:33,150
American Negroes, characterized typically by use of a three-line—

644
00:39:33,150 –> 00:39:36,350
use of three-line stanzas in which the words of the second line repeat the

645
00:39:36,590 –> 00:39:40,350
first, expressing a mood of longing or melancholy and marked by a

646
00:39:40,350 –> 00:39:44,070
continual occurrence of blue notes in melody and harmony,

647
00:39:44,070 –> 00:39:47,910
close quote. Which not only suggests that musicians pray

648
00:39:47,910 –> 00:39:51,550
the blues instead of playing them, but it also limits the mood

649
00:39:51,550 –> 00:39:55,310
to melancholy and longing. And this is what

650
00:39:55,310 –> 00:39:58,910
Albert Murray— this was his thing., right? Like Dave

651
00:39:58,910 –> 00:40:01,310
Chappelle’s thing is making jokes,

652
00:40:02,910 –> 00:40:06,470
right? Or Michael Jackson’s thing was

653
00:40:06,470 –> 00:40:10,270
making popular music, or Michael Jordan’s thing was overachieving

654
00:40:10,270 –> 00:40:13,750
at basketball. This was Albert Murray’s thing, taking apart

655
00:40:13,750 –> 00:40:17,350
the common definition of blues music, taking

656
00:40:17,350 –> 00:40:20,950
apart the common idea of a blues idiom, and then reassembling

657
00:40:20,950 –> 00:40:24,640
it and repackaging it in a different kind of way. And so he

658
00:40:26,160 –> 00:40:29,640
goes through all of the different pieces of blues music and how blues

659
00:40:29,640 –> 00:40:33,480
music is identified and categorized. And then he says this, it is far more accurate

660
00:40:33,480 –> 00:40:36,720
to say that some of the most distinctive elements of blues music were derived from

661
00:40:36,720 –> 00:40:40,560
the music of some of the West African ancestors of

662
00:40:40,720 –> 00:40:44,360
US Negroes than it is to imply, however obliquely, that the

663
00:40:44,360 –> 00:40:47,200
blues idiom itself ever existed anywhere on the continent

664
00:40:48,240 –> 00:40:51,730
of Africa. Nor should it be forgotten that elements quite essential and

665
00:40:51,730 –> 00:40:55,250
no more dispensable were derived from the music of some of

666
00:40:55,490 –> 00:40:58,050
the European ancestors of the

667
00:40:59,170 –> 00:41:02,770
US Negroes. The point, however, is that the blues idiom, whatever the source or source

668
00:41:02,770 –> 00:41:06,290
of its components, is native to the United States. It

669
00:41:06,290 –> 00:41:10,090
is a synthesis of African and European elements,

670
00:41:10,090 –> 00:41:13,770
the product of an Afro-American sensibility in an

671
00:41:13,770 –> 00:41:17,530
American mainland situation. There is no evidence, for example,

672
00:41:17,530 –> 00:41:21,240
that an African musical sensibility interacting with an

673
00:41:21,240 –> 00:41:25,000
Italian, German, French, British, or Hungarian musical sensibility results in anything like

674
00:41:25,000 –> 00:41:28,400
the blues music. By the way, pause, this is where he would have a problem

675
00:41:28,400 –> 00:41:32,160
with world music now being defined as jazz. This is where Murray would

676
00:41:32,160 –> 00:41:35,680
get off the boat with all that. Um, back to the

677
00:41:35,680 –> 00:41:39,440
book. The synthesis of European and African musical elements in the West Indies, the

678
00:41:39,440 –> 00:41:43,160
Caribbean, and in continental Latin America produced

679
00:41:43,240 –> 00:41:47,020
calypso, rumba, the tango, the congo, mambo, and so on.

680
00:41:47,020 –> 00:41:50,780
But not the blues and not ragtime and not that

681
00:41:50,780 –> 00:41:54,540
extension, elaboration, refinement of blues break riffing and improvisation

682
00:41:54,540 –> 00:41:56,820
which came to be known

683
00:41:58,340 –> 00:42:01,380
as jazz. He defines the blues as such,

684
00:42:01,380 –> 00:42:05,060
as an antithesis, an idiom, right? A way

685
00:42:05,060 –> 00:42:08,660
of framing certain things. And by the way, a thing that is native to

686
00:42:08,820 –> 00:42:11,540
the United States, specific to

687
00:42:12,750 –> 00:42:16,350
us, right? And I think that’s its power. I think Murray would

688
00:42:16,350 –> 00:42:20,110
agree with that. I think that we

689
00:42:21,230 –> 00:42:24,590
have forgotten, and this is where this relates to what we were just talking

690
00:42:24,750 –> 00:42:28,270
about, Tom, we’ve forgotten in our flattening, right,

691
00:42:28,270 –> 00:42:31,950
of everything that’s happened because of the internet. The internet has done a great

692
00:42:32,030 –> 00:42:35,550
many things. Without the internet, I wouldn’t be doing this show with you. Without

693
00:42:35,790 –> 00:42:39,550
the internet, I wouldn’t be distributing this to listeners and getting

694
00:42:39,550 –> 00:42:43,370
their feedback via their pings and their emails. I

695
00:42:43,530 –> 00:42:47,250
wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t be able to go out on the street.

696
00:42:47,250 –> 00:42:51,050
Like, I think of something that happened to me in the early days of

697
00:42:51,210 –> 00:42:54,850
this show, where we were, we were really pushing distribution, right? And I

698
00:42:54,850 –> 00:42:58,250
was at a, I was somewhere where you would not

699
00:42:58,570 –> 00:43:02,130
expect people to know me, right, at all. And someone walked up to me and

700
00:43:02,130 –> 00:43:05,410
they go, I know your voice, I listened to your show. Shocked my wife. My

701
00:43:05,410 –> 00:43:08,970
wife was like, what is happening? And it was in this most random

702
00:43:09,050 –> 00:43:12,550
rural area ever. And the woman pulled out her— woman and her husband who

703
00:43:12,550 –> 00:43:16,190
were business owners pulled out her phone and showed me where she subscribed to the

704
00:43:16,190 –> 00:43:18,510
show. And she’s like, oh, I listened to this episode, this episode, this episode. And

705
00:43:18,510 –> 00:43:20,430
I got my husband to listen to this one and this one, this one. My

706
00:43:20,430 –> 00:43:24,030
wife was blown away by this. And I said, that’s the internet. That’s

707
00:43:24,030 –> 00:43:27,430
what the internet has done. But in all

708
00:43:28,230 –> 00:43:31,790
that flattening, I don’t know, sorry, in all that connecting, right? And all that

709
00:43:31,790 –> 00:43:35,350
ability to engage, we’ve also flattened things. We’ve

710
00:43:35,350 –> 00:43:39,030
flattened out idioms. We’ve flattened out cultural expressions, and

711
00:43:39,110 –> 00:43:42,830
it’s become so much harder, I think, to—

712
00:43:42,830 –> 00:43:45,990
well, it relates to our next question. It’s become so much harder

713
00:43:46,630 –> 00:43:49,950
for leaders, and not just leaders but everybody, to sort of

714
00:43:49,950 –> 00:43:53,710
hear the specific— and by hear, I mean hear emotionally and

715
00:43:53,710 –> 00:43:57,510
psychologically and spiritually, not

716
00:43:57,510 –> 00:44:01,230
in terms of like a spreadsheet or materially.

717
00:44:01,230 –> 00:44:04,950
It’s become harder and harder for us to hear the rhythms that are

718
00:44:04,950 –> 00:44:08,710
specific to our national voice. And I do believe every country has

719
00:44:08,710 –> 00:44:11,910
its own national voice. And I don’t know how we— I don’t know how we

720
00:44:11,910 –> 00:44:15,230
get back to that. It reminds me of the line. Do you remember

721
00:44:15,390 –> 00:44:19,230
the line in the original, the original White Men Can’t Jump

722
00:44:19,230 –> 00:44:22,710
with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, where they’re talking about Jimi

723
00:44:22,710 –> 00:44:26,470
Hendrix? And Wesley Snipes looks at Woody Harrelson and says, no, you

724
00:44:26,470 –> 00:44:30,110
listen to Jimi, but you can’t hear Jimi. Oh, yeah. So

725
00:44:30,420 –> 00:44:34,060
this is This is what you’re talking about, the difference between listening to something and

726
00:44:34,060 –> 00:44:37,820
actually hearing it. Because without the, the blues

727
00:44:37,820 –> 00:44:41,380
to me, and again, I go back to like, you’re right, I agree with you,

728
00:44:41,380 –> 00:44:45,140
by the way, that it’s an American sound, right? And you can’t get that sound

729
00:44:45,140 –> 00:44:48,820
without going through the trials and tribulations that America went through. You can’t

730
00:44:48,820 –> 00:44:52,540
get that sound without the heartache and the hurt and the heroism that America

731
00:44:52,540 –> 00:44:56,020
went through, that America has been through. Again, you can go back from

732
00:44:56,020 –> 00:44:59,810
the American Revolution to the Civil War to World War II. There’s just points

733
00:44:59,810 –> 00:45:02,770
in history where you can point to that no other country has been through what

734
00:45:02,770 –> 00:45:06,570
we’ve been through. Right. They just haven’t. They just haven’t.

735
00:45:06,570 –> 00:45:10,330
A lot of the other countries naturally— look, Canada was

736
00:45:10,330 –> 00:45:14,050
a territory of England for a long time. They naturally disengaged. Australia

737
00:45:14,449 –> 00:45:18,250
was a penal colony for England for a long time. They naturally

738
00:45:18,250 –> 00:45:21,810
disengaged. These were inevitabilities that happened throughout history.

739
00:45:21,810 –> 00:45:25,540
The United States did not have those inevitabilities. We went through

740
00:45:25,620 –> 00:45:29,100
it, people, like, and we went through it together, whether you were white, Black, Native,

741
00:45:29,100 –> 00:45:32,180
it didn’t matter. We went through it together. Now, we might have viewed it differently.

742
00:45:32,180 –> 00:45:35,940
We might have gone different pathways because of it, but we felt

743
00:45:35,940 –> 00:45:39,740
it and we went through it as a nation. So, to your point about being

744
00:45:39,740 –> 00:45:43,340
able to quote unquote “hear the sound,” I go back to the

745
00:45:43,340 –> 00:45:47,060
conversation with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes. We don’t just listen to it.

746
00:45:47,060 –> 00:45:50,760
We hear it. Like, there’s a different component to it when

747
00:45:50,760 –> 00:45:54,520
you have that unified

748
00:45:54,680 –> 00:45:58,440
historic value to the music that is representing the country. And to

749
00:45:58,440 –> 00:46:02,240
your point, do other countries have it? Sure. But it’s not the blues. It’s polka.

750
00:46:02,240 –> 00:46:05,320
It’s not the blues. Right. It’s polka.

751
00:46:06,199 –> 00:46:09,760
It’s whatever. It’s tango. It’s whatever. Yeah,

752
00:46:09,760 –> 00:46:13,000
exactly. It’s interesting that you mentioned Hungary because Hungary has

753
00:46:13,800 –> 00:46:17,560
zither music. Now, I’m not saying anything bad about the zither. We’re actually going to

754
00:46:17,560 –> 00:46:21,160
cover the book of the third man on this show. In a few

755
00:46:21,160 –> 00:46:24,840
months by Graham Greene, which was the basis for The Third

756
00:46:24,840 –> 00:46:28,440
Man, which starred Orson Welles, a great movie, and

757
00:46:28,440 –> 00:46:32,240
also a radio show called The Third Man. And the intro to

758
00:46:32,240 –> 00:46:35,879
that show was Hungarian zither music. That’s how zither

759
00:46:35,879 –> 00:46:39,560
music became popular in the United States for about 5

760
00:46:39,560 –> 00:46:43,080
minutes. But that’s my point, right? Like, so you can listen to whatever you want,

761
00:46:43,080 –> 00:46:46,390
but to actually hear the music— and you could say the same

762
00:46:47,150 –> 00:46:50,870
thing, I think, you know, another genre of music that is really unique to

763
00:46:50,870 –> 00:46:54,630
America is rap, right? Without America, rap music wouldn’t exist,

764
00:46:54,630 –> 00:46:58,390
right? That’s true. But again, the same idea, like you can say rap music belongs

765
00:46:58,390 –> 00:47:02,069
to a certain ethnicity, you know, but how do

766
00:47:02,069 –> 00:47:02,990
you explain

767
00:47:05,990 –> 00:47:09,710
Eminem, right? But it’s like, but you can, you can,

768
00:47:09,710 –> 00:47:12,910
you know, we get, there are other white artists in there, but none, none of

769
00:47:12,910 –> 00:47:16,470
them like Eminem. But again, Eminem’s the same thing. The same way you listen to

770
00:47:16,470 –> 00:47:19,790
him, you can listen, you can listen to Eminem all you, all you want, but

771
00:47:19,790 –> 00:47:23,350
to really hear him, you have to have grown up in that

772
00:47:23,350 –> 00:47:26,350
environment, that poor Detroit

773
00:47:26,830 –> 00:47:30,190
rundown. Like, I, you know, I get it. I, I

774
00:47:30,430 –> 00:47:34,190
mean, it’s— oh yeah, when I, I just think that, and

775
00:47:34,190 –> 00:47:37,670
again, whether you listen to, to Dr. Dre or— it doesn’t matter.

776
00:47:37,670 –> 00:47:41,190
When you listen to, when you listen to that, to the, to those artists And

777
00:47:41,190 –> 00:47:44,270
again, go back to the blues. When you listen to these artists,

778
00:47:44,670 –> 00:47:48,190
if you don’t have the, the intrinsic historic value

779
00:47:48,270 –> 00:47:51,870
to it, it doesn’t mean the same. It doesn’t hit the same. Well,

780
00:47:51,870 –> 00:47:55,630
and I’ll, I’ll even say you see this in other things that

781
00:47:55,790 –> 00:47:59,390
are specific, other areas that are specific to America, right? So case

782
00:48:00,590 –> 00:48:03,870
in point, I’m going to bring up an example from another area that Tom

783
00:48:04,110 –> 00:48:06,990
knows well, sports

784
00:48:08,370 –> 00:48:12,050
in America. And by the way, I thought this would happen. I thought

785
00:48:12,050 –> 00:48:15,170
a switchover would start to occur sooner than

786
00:48:15,810 –> 00:48:19,170
it has. I think it’s beginning to happen now.

787
00:48:19,170 –> 00:48:22,450
So in America, and 75 years from now, the switchover will

788
00:48:22,770 –> 00:48:26,450
be complete. So in America, when I was growing up, and I’m in my

789
00:48:26,770 –> 00:48:30,490
late forties, when I was growing up, soccer or football

790
00:48:30,490 –> 00:48:34,150
as they call it in Europe, was not a

791
00:48:34,150 –> 00:48:36,630
thing. We had 4 major

792
00:48:37,590 –> 00:48:41,430
sports: football, basketball, baseball, and occasionally, if

793
00:48:41,430 –> 00:48:43,830
you lived in the northern climates where it got cold

794
00:48:45,910 –> 00:48:48,790
enough, hockey. That’s it. You could play

795
00:48:49,510 –> 00:48:53,150
those 4. Everything else is also ran. Everything else is also ran. Everything else

796
00:48:53,150 –> 00:48:56,910
is in second place. Yes, we like the Olympics that comes around once every 4

797
00:48:56,910 –> 00:49:00,220
years, now once every 2, whatever, but That’s

798
00:49:01,580 –> 00:49:05,340
it. There’s nothing else. And by the way, everybody knew this. This wasn’t anything

799
00:49:05,340 –> 00:49:09,100
that anybody complained about. It was just the thing. Right now, through a whole

800
00:49:09,100 –> 00:49:12,900
series of cultural events, whole series of different things,

801
00:49:12,900 –> 00:49:16,260
whatever, that has now shifted. And

802
00:49:16,820 –> 00:49:20,580
so soccer has become, over the course of my adult lifetime, more and

803
00:49:20,580 –> 00:49:23,860
more popular. For God’s sakes, I’m my kid’s soccer coach.

804
00:49:25,390 –> 00:49:29,110
I know I know less than— well, I won’t say less than nothing. I know

805
00:49:29,110 –> 00:49:32,870
1% of something about that sport, which is enough to coach kids. It’s enough. You

806
00:49:32,870 –> 00:49:36,550
don’t need more than that. Agreed.

807
00:49:36,550 –> 00:49:40,230
I also played rugby. I know a lot about

808
00:49:40,230 –> 00:49:43,670
rugby, but again, it’s one of those things that— it’s one

809
00:49:43,670 –> 00:49:46,990
of those transitions that’s happened because of globalization

810
00:49:47,470 –> 00:49:50,670
and flattening that would not have happened when I was a kid, or didn’t— the

811
00:49:50,670 –> 00:49:54,450
beginnings of it hadn’t even started when I was a kid. Okay, now,

812
00:49:54,450 –> 00:49:56,370
let me fast forward to when we’re

813
00:49:58,050 –> 00:50:00,970
recording this. Just this weekend, I actually posted about it on my Facebook page, you

814
00:50:00,970 –> 00:50:04,690
can go and take a look at it if you want. But,

815
00:50:04,690 –> 00:50:08,290
um, the, the US men’s hockey team won the gold

816
00:50:08,450 –> 00:50:12,050
medal game against the Canadian, the Canadian

817
00:50:12,370 –> 00:50:16,010
hockey team in the US, in the US, in the Winter Olympics in

818
00:50:16,010 –> 00:50:19,760
like Milan or Italy or wherever they’re holding it now. I’ve paid

819
00:50:19,760 –> 00:50:23,120
literally zero attention to the Winter Olympics, only because I have other things going on

820
00:50:23,120 –> 00:50:26,760
in my life. I watched a few

821
00:50:26,760 –> 00:50:30,440
clips about this, saw a couple of things. Apparently this is like the 46th anniversary

822
00:50:30,440 –> 00:50:34,280
of the Miracle on Ice back in the 1980s, which everybody watched back then

823
00:50:34,280 –> 00:50:36,280
because there was no

824
00:50:39,320 –> 00:50:42,160
internet. And I know very little about hockey, even though I went to a hockey

825
00:50:42,160 –> 00:50:45,420
school. I mean, I know enough to know how difficult it is. It’s a real

826
00:50:45,420 –> 00:50:48,780
sport, folks. It’s a real

827
00:50:48,780 –> 00:50:52,380
sport. Um, but, um,

828
00:50:52,380 –> 00:50:56,020
but the Canadians had 45 shots on goal and we

829
00:50:56,020 –> 00:50:59,860
were in overtime and we still won. And

830
00:50:59,860 –> 00:51:03,580
the thing that I posted in the Facebook post was, it’s always this close

831
00:51:04,300 –> 00:51:08,140
in America. It’s always this close. That’s how we roll down here. We always

832
00:51:08,140 –> 00:51:11,820
roll just in the nick of time. We always do, whether

833
00:51:11,900 –> 00:51:15,220
it’s sports or culture or making a decision about getting involved

834
00:51:15,220 –> 00:51:17,660
in something internationally, we

835
00:51:19,060 –> 00:51:22,900
are the ultimate end result of arguments that have been occurring in the

836
00:51:22,900 –> 00:51:26,540
West for the last 1,000

837
00:51:27,100 –> 00:51:30,700
years now. And we always just in time that, pardon my use of the term,

838
00:51:30,700 –> 00:51:34,300
but we always just in time that shit.

839
00:51:34,380 –> 00:51:37,540
We always do. And Tom just cracked up because he knows exactly what I’m talking

840
00:51:37,540 –> 00:51:41,190
about. And everybody who’s an American If you’re listening someplace

841
00:51:41,190 –> 00:51:44,470
else, this is, this is the key to understanding. We’re always just

842
00:51:44,870 –> 00:51:47,750
in time and it always looks like we’re not going to make it. And it

843
00:51:47,750 –> 00:51:50,510
always looks like we’re going to be overwhelmed. And it always looks like, oh, this

844
00:51:50,510 –> 00:51:54,110
time we got the Americans. And by the way, it doesn’t matter that the Canadian

845
00:51:54,110 –> 00:51:57,350
men’s hockey team is 52 to 3 in gold medal games against the

846
00:51:57,910 –> 00:52:01,270
United States. No one cares. The only thing that matters is the

847
00:52:01,270 –> 00:52:04,870
last one. Bingo. That’s exactly what I said on my

848
00:52:05,030 –> 00:52:08,710
Instagram post. That’s right. No one cares that you’re 52 and 3.

849
00:52:08,710 –> 00:52:11,830
The only win that counts is the last win. That’s also very much

850
00:52:12,150 –> 00:52:15,790
an American idea that we have infested the rest of the world with.

851
00:52:15,790 –> 00:52:19,590
All that past history matters

852
00:52:20,310 –> 00:52:23,430
literally bupkis to what is happening right now or what just happened 5 minutes ago.

853
00:52:23,430 –> 00:52:25,510
And by the way, what just happened 5 minutes ago, a week from now, no

854
00:52:25,510 –> 00:52:27,510
one will care about that either. They’ll be like, oh, what do you got for

855
00:52:28,310 –> 00:52:32,150
me lately? Well, that’s been the crux of

856
00:52:32,310 –> 00:52:36,110
our political landscape over the last 12 or 14, 15 years. 15

857
00:52:36,110 –> 00:52:39,370
years now. What’s the next news cycle? You could do something, you could do something

858
00:52:39,370 –> 00:52:43,210
that is just so off the wall bad and it, it 5 minutes from now

859
00:52:43,210 –> 00:52:46,570
it’s not gonna matter cuz the next news cycle something else is worse and now

860
00:52:46,570 –> 00:52:50,290
you’re off scot-free, which is, it blows my mind how half

861
00:52:50,290 –> 00:52:53,529
of our politicians are still in office and I don’t care by the way, these

862
00:52:53,529 –> 00:52:56,410
people, I do not care if you’re Democrat or Republican. Does not matter. This is

863
00:52:56,410 –> 00:52:59,730
both of them. Does not matter. This is both of them. This is both of

864
00:52:59,730 –> 00:53:03,170
them. AOC went and blew herself out in Munich. It doesn’t matter cuz Donald Trump

865
00:53:03,170 –> 00:53:06,810
just did something 10 minutes ago. Doesn’t matter. Exactly. Exactly. It does not matter.

866
00:53:06,810 –> 00:53:10,650
It does not matter. Those two make my point more than any two

867
00:53:12,170 –> 00:53:15,930
on the— That’s right. You just literally brought up the two people that I

868
00:53:16,010 –> 00:53:19,530
probably say most often, oh, don’t worry about it because 5 minutes from now, nobody’s

869
00:53:19,530 –> 00:53:23,330
going to remember or no one’s going to remember. Nobody’s going to care. And that

870
00:53:23,330 –> 00:53:27,170
is at the core of the blues idiom, though. That’s it. Because what you

871
00:53:27,170 –> 00:53:30,930
did 5 minutes ago in the blues riff doesn’t matter. All that matters is

872
00:53:30,930 –> 00:53:34,720
what’s happening right now. In the improvisation. All that

873
00:53:34,960 –> 00:53:38,640
matters is how the, the trumpet just picked up what

874
00:53:38,640 –> 00:53:42,200
the guitarist was doing, or the guitarist just picked up what the pianist was doing,

875
00:53:42,200 –> 00:53:45,520
or the entire sax section is,

876
00:53:45,520 –> 00:53:48,640
is, is jumping, and you gotta jump, you gotta move, you

877
00:53:48,880 –> 00:53:52,360
gotta— to paraphrase from, from Albert Murray— you gotta stomp,

878
00:53:52,520 –> 00:53:56,160
you gotta go, because you can only stay in one mode for

879
00:53:56,560 –> 00:53:59,720
so long before that beat tells you, nope, you gotta improvise, gotta move, gotta move,

880
00:53:59,720 –> 00:54:01,950
gotta move, gotta move, gotta move.

881
00:54:04,190 –> 00:54:07,310
And that, that’s the blues. That’s, that’s

882
00:54:08,590 –> 00:54:12,270
the idiom. So the question of course is

883
00:54:12,270 –> 00:54:16,070
how can leaders get back to hearing that? How do we get back to hearing

884
00:54:16,070 –> 00:54:19,870
that in this country? Because I think we’ve, I like the white, I

885
00:54:19,870 –> 00:54:22,670
like the line from White Men Can’t Jump. I like that question. I think we’ve

886
00:54:22,670 –> 00:54:25,150
lost the ability to hear it. How do we retune

887
00:54:27,400 –> 00:54:31,160
our ears? Oh God, you know, this, this goes back— I don’t remember who I

888
00:54:31,160 –> 00:54:34,760
was having this conversation with, uh, a couple— this is probably a week or two

889
00:54:34,760 –> 00:54:38,600
ago, but I had a conversation on the same lines

890
00:54:38,600 –> 00:54:42,440
where I was saying

891
00:54:42,599 –> 00:54:46,360
the more— it’s almost like we overloaded our senses

892
00:54:46,760 –> 00:54:50,320
with data to the point where we cannot understand the data coming

893
00:54:50,320 –> 00:54:54,160
at us anymore because we’ve lost touch

894
00:54:54,160 –> 00:54:57,040
with which one of the data points are actually important

895
00:54:58,240 –> 00:55:01,840
to us, right? Like, so like, again, you’re running a company, you’ve got

896
00:55:01,920 –> 00:55:05,707
100 employees, whatever, and now all of a sudden you’ve got,

897
00:55:05,707 –> 00:55:08,960
uh, you think about your, your leadership levels. Maybe you

898
00:55:09,280 –> 00:55:12,840
have like 6 or 8 people in the C-level, you got a director level with

899
00:55:12,840 –> 00:55:16,600
8 or 10, whatever. So now you got these levels of management in front of

900
00:55:16,600 –> 00:55:20,400
you, and all of them are filtering up data up to the next line, etc.,

901
00:55:20,400 –> 00:55:24,210
etc. So now the CEO is getting you know, data

902
00:55:24,210 –> 00:55:27,970
from 20 different people, 20 different things, and now he or

903
00:55:27,970 –> 00:55:30,810
she has to decide which one of those data points am I

904
00:55:31,690 –> 00:55:35,370
acting on, right? Well, so to answer your

905
00:55:35,370 –> 00:55:39,130
question, and by the way, I’m not suggesting I know the answer, I’m just

906
00:55:39,130 –> 00:55:42,330
telling you from my standpoint, I think it goes

907
00:55:42,730 –> 00:55:46,370
back to, okay, we have a company, we have

908
00:55:46,370 –> 00:55:49,290
decided what kind of company we want to be. And by the way, I’m not

909
00:55:49,290 –> 00:55:53,080
talking about what product or service you’re selling. Talking about the

910
00:55:53,080 –> 00:55:56,760
moral compass of your company. What kind of company do you want to be? Do

911
00:55:56,760 –> 00:56:00,400
you want a company that gives back to the community, that worries more

912
00:56:00,880 –> 00:56:04,520
about the investor than the consumer, that you

913
00:56:04,520 –> 00:56:08,160
worry more about the employee than the investor? I

914
00:56:08,960 –> 00:56:12,720
don’t know. But when you start filtering up all these data points, the data

915
00:56:12,720 –> 00:56:16,440
needs to point you to that moral compass and say,

916
00:56:16,440 –> 00:56:19,290
we are a company that wants to be more

917
00:56:20,250 –> 00:56:23,930
about our— I don’t know, let’s just say Richard Branson. I know you and I

918
00:56:23,930 –> 00:56:27,690
have talked about Richard Branson in the past. Richard Branson had a philosophical belief

919
00:56:27,690 –> 00:56:31,450
that if he took care of his employees better than anything else,

920
00:56:31,450 –> 00:56:35,010
that everything else would filter, everything else would be fine. So, if you

921
00:56:35,010 –> 00:56:38,610
treat your employees as if they are the most important cog

922
00:56:38,610 –> 00:56:42,450
in your wheel, then they will treat the customers the way that

923
00:56:42,450 –> 00:56:45,050
the customers want to be treated because they’re being treated so well that they don’t

924
00:56:45,050 –> 00:56:48,490
want to lose their job., right? I want to stay here forever. I want to

925
00:56:48,490 –> 00:56:51,050
retire under Richard Branson. So now, I’m going to do everything in my power to

926
00:56:51,050 –> 00:56:54,770
be a good employee because I treat them so well. Well, all these data points

927
00:56:54,770 –> 00:56:58,330
that are coming to you, which ones point you in

928
00:56:58,330 –> 00:57:01,850
the direction of treating your employees to the best of your ability?

929
00:57:01,850 –> 00:57:05,410
Because the rest probably don’t matter because that’s the kind of company you’ve

930
00:57:05,650 –> 00:57:08,770
decided to be, right? So, again, I think to your point,

931
00:57:10,450 –> 00:57:13,450
I think it’s— and the same point, by the way, about the whole internet and

932
00:57:13,450 –> 00:57:16,860
all these, like, yes, because we’re getting inundated with all

933
00:57:17,100 –> 00:57:20,820
these data points that we’re not sure which ones actually matter. The reality of

934
00:57:20,820 –> 00:57:24,300
it is you’ve already decided which ones matter. You’ve just chosen not to listen

935
00:57:24,700 –> 00:57:28,460
to them anymore. You’ve chosen not to hear

936
00:57:28,940 –> 00:57:32,700
them. You’ve chosen because there’s so much other noise out there

937
00:57:32,700 –> 00:57:36,020
that you’ve chosen that you have to go sift through the noise before you actually

938
00:57:36,020 –> 00:57:39,740
come back and hear what has been right in front of you the whole

939
00:57:40,430 –> 00:57:43,510
time, which is We have a moral compass of a company. We have data that

940
00:57:43,510 –> 00:57:46,830
tells us how to do it better. But I need to sift through all this

941
00:57:46,830 –> 00:57:50,670
other BS before I get to the stuff that matters. It’s stupid. I don’t know

942
00:57:50,670 –> 00:57:53,470
why we do it, but we do it.

943
00:57:54,190 –> 00:57:57,070
And every, every, every person I know that owns a company

944
00:57:58,110 –> 00:58:01,630
of substantial size still does it. And by the

945
00:58:01,630 –> 00:58:05,310
way, you, beyond everybody I know, should see this more than anybody because you’re

946
00:58:05,310 –> 00:58:08,870
a leadership development guy. Mm-hmm. So, oh yeah,

947
00:58:08,870 –> 00:58:11,950
you’re— if you haven’t seen this, I would be surprised. I would be very, very

948
00:58:11,950 –> 00:58:15,670
surprised that you haven’t seen— oh no, if you haven’t seen it, I, I’m guessing

949
00:58:15,670 –> 00:58:19,110
you have. Oh yeah. But like, but so to your question about how do we,

950
00:58:19,110 –> 00:58:22,910
how do we hear the— it’s, it’s about, it’s

951
00:58:22,910 –> 00:58:26,430
about getting back to what matters. Like what if it doesn’t matter?

952
00:58:26,670 –> 00:58:30,430
It doesn’t matter. Let it go. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter that it’s

953
00:58:30,430 –> 00:58:34,240
a data point on a, on a graph. Who the hell

954
00:58:34,240 –> 00:58:38,000
cares? Anybody? And by the way, I tell people all the time,

955
00:58:38,000 –> 00:58:41,320
you can manipulate statistics to do whatever the hell you want it

956
00:58:41,640 –> 00:58:45,320
to do, right? We see this in research studies all the time.

957
00:58:45,320 –> 00:58:49,120
Oh yeah. Where we’re trying to get pharmaceuticals passed through the FDA. And if

958
00:58:49,120 –> 00:58:52,560
you guys have not been in the pharmaceutical industry, trust me when I tell

959
00:58:52,560 –> 00:58:56,400
you, you can manipulate that data to get whatever the hell you want

960
00:58:56,400 –> 00:58:59,730
passed. Yeah, it just, it just matters about If it

961
00:59:00,050 –> 00:59:03,690
needs to be below a certain threshold, well, then you just test more people

962
00:59:03,690 –> 00:59:07,490
and then the percentage is below the threshold. But

963
00:59:07,650 –> 00:59:09,810
again, but that— but to your point

964
00:59:10,930 –> 00:59:14,570
about leadership though, leadership needs to have such

965
00:59:14,570 –> 00:59:18,410
a, such a vision, such a straight vision of from what

966
00:59:18,410 –> 00:59:22,170
is point A to point B look like and where are we going. Like, we’re

967
00:59:22,170 –> 00:59:26,010
going— we are at point A, we want to be at at point B.

968
00:59:26,010 –> 00:59:29,810
If point B is clearly defined, your data points

969
00:59:29,810 –> 00:59:32,530
are going to be clear as to which ones you have to pay attention to

970
00:59:32,530 –> 00:59:36,330
and which ones you can let go of. It’s just— anyway,

971
00:59:36,330 –> 00:59:39,810
I was on this case. No, no, no. This is somebody that really

972
00:59:40,049 –> 00:59:43,010
frustrated me. So, no, no, this is the thing you’re

973
00:59:43,570 –> 00:59:47,250
on to because remember I was saying before, right? In

974
00:59:47,890 –> 00:59:51,010
the mid-20th century, everything was flattened by conformity in

975
00:59:52,140 –> 00:59:55,980
these big institutions. Now, in the last 25 years or the first 25 years of

976
00:59:56,060 –> 00:59:59,780
the 21st century, we’ve had flattening conformity by the

977
00:59:59,780 –> 01:00:03,580
tool of the internet used by institutional powers, but

978
01:00:03,820 –> 01:00:07,220
also weirdly enough, used by the guy sitting next to you to flatten you too.

979
01:00:07,220 –> 01:00:08,060
So it’s

980
01:00:10,700 –> 01:00:14,500
both the individual push or the more individualistic push and

981
01:00:14,500 –> 01:00:17,750
the more institutional push that are both flattening.

982
01:00:18,150 –> 01:00:21,590
And just as you had to be a talent to really push

983
01:00:21,830 –> 01:00:25,350
through the conformity of the mid-20th century, the enforced conformity of

984
01:00:25,510 –> 01:00:28,950
the mid-20th century, you have to be, you have to listen to

985
01:00:29,430 –> 01:00:32,950
your internal voice, your

986
01:00:32,950 –> 01:00:36,550
internal, your internal signal past all the external noise in

987
01:00:36,710 –> 01:00:40,430
the 21st century. At least that’s what I hear you

988
01:00:40,430 –> 01:00:44,190
say. Yeah, essentially. Yeah. It’s about that. And when

989
01:00:44,190 –> 01:00:47,720
you talk, so to me, that internal that internal voice

990
01:00:47,720 –> 01:00:51,440
is the moral compass, right? Like, that’s right. Yeah. Listen, moral— I

991
01:00:51,440 –> 01:00:54,040
don’t care if you’re religious or not. I don’t care if you go to church

992
01:00:54,040 –> 01:00:56,280
or not. I don’t care if you

993
01:00:58,520 –> 01:01:01,960
are— morals matter. Yeah, they do. Morals and

994
01:01:01,960 –> 01:01:05,680
ethics, morals and ethics exist outside of

995
01:01:05,680 –> 01:01:09,520
the structure of that, of that, of what we typically think of as what gives

996
01:01:09,520 –> 01:01:13,360
us the moral guidance is in our, in our faith, in our religious faith,

997
01:01:13,360 –> 01:01:17,050
etc., etc. Those are the things that give us our moral guidance or ethical

998
01:01:17,050 –> 01:01:20,770
guidance. Well, they exist without it, just so you know. So whether you’re

999
01:01:20,770 –> 01:01:24,490
in church or not, you still have to be a good person. Whether

1000
01:01:24,490 –> 01:01:28,250
you’re answering to— whether you’re answering to a reverend, a

1001
01:01:29,210 –> 01:01:33,010
priest, a rabbi, whether you’re having a one-to-one conversation with them

1002
01:01:33,010 –> 01:01:36,690
or not, you still have to be a good person. Like that. So why is

1003
01:01:36,690 –> 01:01:40,490
a company— why is a company’s moral compass different? That— well,

1004
01:01:40,490 –> 01:01:44,230
the company’s moral compass is usually driven by the owner. So if

1005
01:01:44,230 –> 01:01:47,950
the owner doesn’t care about being a good person and he’s not

1006
01:01:48,030 –> 01:01:51,870
worried about scruples and the company’s like a shyster company, well,

1007
01:01:51,870 –> 01:01:55,670
eventually it’ll catch up to you, I think. I hope. But if it doesn’t,

1008
01:01:55,670 –> 01:01:59,470
God bless you. But for the most

1009
01:02:00,110 –> 01:02:03,750
part, most really well-run companies are

1010
01:02:03,750 –> 01:02:07,270
supported by people who have— again, whether the moral compass is pointing

1011
01:02:07,270 –> 01:02:10,990
in the same direction as me or not, That’s it. Because you can

1012
01:02:10,990 –> 01:02:14,710
weigh the pros and cons of different variations of moral compass. I’m not

1013
01:02:14,710 –> 01:02:18,470
here to debate whether one is good or one is bad, but very typically, if

1014
01:02:18,470 –> 01:02:22,270
you have a very clear shot at a moral compass between the

1015
01:02:22,270 –> 01:02:25,270
owner and the company, and it’s, it’s, it’s clear, you, you’re going

1016
01:02:26,470 –> 01:02:29,710
to do okay. Albert Murray has something for you. So I want to, because there’s

1017
01:02:29,710 –> 01:02:31,990
a couple different points I want to make in all that you said, but Albert

1018
01:02:31,990 –> 01:02:35,670
Murray’s got something for you in Stopping the Blues. In his

1019
01:02:35,750 –> 01:02:39,460
chapter 3, or his third essay, The Blue Devils and the Holy

1020
01:02:39,460 –> 01:02:42,380
Ghost. I really liked this one. This is interesting. So let me pull a couple

1021
01:02:43,580 –> 01:02:47,340
of ideas here. He opens up with this line. I think you would appreciate this,

1022
01:02:47,340 –> 01:02:51,100
Tom. There are blue devils and there is also the

1023
01:02:51,100 –> 01:02:54,939
Holy Ghost. Thus, not everybody defines blues music and blues

1024
01:02:54,940 –> 01:02:58,540
idiom dance movements in the same terms. When

1025
01:02:58,540 –> 01:03:02,100
the dance hall seems always to have suggested to the ministers and elders

1026
01:03:02,340 –> 01:03:06,020
of most down-home churches, for instance, is the exact opposite of a

1027
01:03:06,020 –> 01:03:09,560
locale for a purification ritual. To

1028
01:03:09,560 –> 01:03:12,920
them, any secular dancing place is a house of sin and folly,

1029
01:03:12,920 –> 01:03:16,720
a den of iniquity, a writhing hellhole where the weaknesses of

1030
01:03:16,720 –> 01:03:20,400
the flesh are indulged to the ruination of the mind and the body

1031
01:03:20,400 –> 01:03:23,959
and the eternal damnation of the soul. Which is also to say

1032
01:03:23,959 –> 01:03:27,560
that all such places are also gateways to the downward path to everlasting

1033
01:03:27,560 –> 01:03:31,360
torment in the fire and brimstone that is the certain fate

1034
01:03:34,250 –> 01:03:37,970
of all sinners. The vitriolic prayers and sermons against ballroom dancers in

1035
01:03:37,970 –> 01:03:41,450
general and the denunciation of the old down-home Saturday night function in

1036
01:03:41,450 –> 01:03:44,730
particular express a preoccupation that

1037
01:03:46,010 –> 01:03:49,850
amounts to obsession. By contrast, the all but total absence of any

1038
01:03:49,850 –> 01:03:53,090
urgent concern about all the incontestably pagan fetishism that

1039
01:03:53,090 –> 01:03:56,650
is almost as explicit as implicit in the widespread involvement with good

1040
01:03:56,650 –> 01:04:00,210
luck charms, love potions, effigies, and all other magical trinkets and devices

1041
01:04:00,210 –> 01:04:03,530
that are so prevalent even among such regular churchgoers is

1042
01:04:03,530 –> 01:04:07,210
nothing short of

1043
01:04:07,210 –> 01:04:11,050
remarkable. Then he says this: The problem as defined from the pulpit is not the

1044
01:04:11,050 –> 01:04:14,210
purgation of the environment, which is inherently evil, but rather

1045
01:04:14,210 –> 01:04:17,410
the purification of yourself and

1046
01:04:18,370 –> 01:04:22,130
fortification against temptation. Because the only salvation of your soul is through conversion,

1047
01:04:22,290 –> 01:04:25,890
baptism, and devotion. Not that you will never feel dejected again, but not because

1048
01:04:26,450 –> 01:04:30,250
of the blues. When church members feel downcast, it is because they have somehow displeased

1049
01:04:30,250 –> 01:04:33,750
God, in whose sight mortal flesh must always feel itself unworthy,

1050
01:04:34,310 –> 01:04:37,710
even at best. In any case, the all but impossible way to grace is through

1051
01:04:37,710 –> 01:04:41,470
the denial of essential gratification, never through the

1052
01:04:41,470 –> 01:04:45,270
garden of earthly delights. He opens his chapter on Blue

1053
01:04:45,270 –> 01:04:48,550
Devils and the Holy Ghost like that. Then he goes on

1054
01:04:50,070 –> 01:04:53,590
to point out that blues idioms comes

1055
01:04:54,390 –> 01:04:57,670
out of and, um, and, and owes a lot of its, uh, a

1056
01:04:59,040 –> 01:05:02,480
lot of its, uh, power, right, the power of the idiom, to the

1057
01:05:02,560 –> 01:05:06,080
call and response, right, from church renditions that blues musicians were

1058
01:05:06,880 –> 01:05:10,720
trained in, right. And he points to Louis Armstrong, he points

1059
01:05:10,720 –> 01:05:14,440
to, he points to Count Basie. He even has pictures, I love this,

1060
01:05:14,440 –> 01:05:17,800
he has pictures of the people standing outside of the old down-home church, as it

1061
01:05:17,800 –> 01:05:21,200
was called back in the South back in the day. He

1062
01:05:21,440 –> 01:05:25,120
talks about how, and he makes this point, that a lot of the

1063
01:05:25,200 –> 01:05:28,720
ways in which blues music became popular as rock and roll,

1064
01:05:28,720 –> 01:05:32,380
particularly through Ray Charles, and

1065
01:05:32,380 –> 01:05:35,740
and Aretha Franklin and others, James Brown as well, he

1066
01:05:35,900 –> 01:05:39,620
throws in there, was not because they were doing a church thing, but

1067
01:05:39,620 –> 01:05:43,100
because they were saying something they should have taken to the Saturday night function and

1068
01:05:43,100 –> 01:05:46,739
they were instead taking that to the popular culture. And he objected to that

1069
01:05:46,739 –> 01:05:50,460
for a whole variety of reasons. And then he makes

1070
01:05:50,460 –> 01:05:53,500
this point.

1071
01:05:56,870 –> 01:06:00,710
He says that Conventional down-home Baptists and Methodists— by the way, there’s a ton of

1072
01:06:00,710 –> 01:06:04,470
Baptists where I live— Baptists and Methodists, as anybody with firsthand

1073
01:06:04,710 –> 01:06:08,070
experience will testify, have never been quite at ease about the appropriateness

1074
01:06:08,070 –> 01:06:11,910
of all that dithyrambic ebullience of the sanctified or

1075
01:06:12,309 –> 01:06:16,110
holy roller church. Not that they doubt the sincerity of the communicants whose deportment outside

1076
01:06:16,110 –> 01:06:19,950
the church is always very sanctified indeed, but what with all the

1077
01:06:19,950 –> 01:06:23,710
jam session-like call and response leapfrogging, all the upbeat drumming

1078
01:06:23,710 –> 01:06:27,390
and on-trap drums of all things, all the shimmy-shaking tambourines and

1079
01:06:27,390 –> 01:06:31,090
free-for-all caper cuttings, as if by numbers, the ragtime overtones of a shindig

1080
01:06:31,090 –> 01:06:34,450
have always been too much for the

1081
01:06:35,410 –> 01:06:39,050
most conventional witnesses. Making several points, I recently saw an Instagram

1082
01:06:39,050 –> 01:06:42,690
clip of Steve Harvey back in the day talking about Black church

1083
01:06:42,770 –> 01:06:46,290
versus other church versus white church. And other comedians have made this

1084
01:06:46,290 –> 01:06:50,130
point, particularly Black comedians. But, uh,

1085
01:06:50,130 –> 01:06:53,170
oh, uh, what’s his name? Uh, uh, I can’t remember. Oh, what’s his name? Um,

1086
01:06:53,170 –> 01:06:56,690
I can see his face. Bernie Mac. Bernie Mac did a whole bit on

1087
01:06:56,930 –> 01:06:59,890
this too. And Bernie Mac talks about how he grew up in the church, right?

1088
01:06:59,890 –> 01:07:00,690
And so

1089
01:07:03,650 –> 01:07:07,290
did Steve Harvey. The line— this is the thing that I want to talk about—

1090
01:07:07,290 –> 01:07:10,970
the line that defines blues music as an idiom, and this is the religious part

1091
01:07:10,970 –> 01:07:14,730
of it that we cannot get away from. The line that defines

1092
01:07:14,730 –> 01:07:18,530
blues music as an idiom is a line

1093
01:07:18,530 –> 01:07:21,830
that, to Tom’s deeper point here, goes directly to

1094
01:07:22,790 –> 01:07:26,550
meaning and significance. Here’s a quote for you, by the way, a statistic. A

1095
01:07:26,550 –> 01:07:30,190
recent Harvard study— by literally recent, I mean like within the last

1096
01:07:30,190 –> 01:07:33,750
year— concluded the following, and I quote: Overall, we found that among

1097
01:07:34,070 –> 01:07:37,750
these various studies, spiritual or religious participation was associated

1098
01:07:37,750 –> 01:07:41,110
with a 13% reduction over time in hazardous alcohol and

1099
01:07:41,670 –> 01:07:45,150
other drug use. The strength of the effects seemed relatively similar across

1100
01:07:45,150 –> 01:07:48,910
the different substances examined, namely alcohol, tobacco,

1101
01:07:48,910 –> 01:07:50,690
marijuana, and illicit

1102
01:07:53,010 –> 01:07:56,730
drugs. Close quote. What this means, of course, is that meaning, spirituality,

1103
01:07:56,730 –> 01:08:00,290
emotional acts, even weekly religious practices are all

1104
01:08:00,290 –> 01:08:04,090
wrapped up, but they’re almost always wrapped up in the practice of

1105
01:08:04,090 –> 01:08:07,250
the blues as an idiom, because where else do

1106
01:08:07,650 –> 01:08:11,250
you take those things?

1107
01:08:11,890 –> 01:08:15,540
This overlap, right, is clear if you can

1108
01:08:15,540 –> 01:08:19,100
see it. Now, of course, in the Saturday

1109
01:08:19,100 –> 01:08:22,460
night function, alcoholic spirits and other spirits

1110
01:08:22,780 –> 01:08:26,060
are thrown in. And so alcoholic spirits, sexual tension,

1111
01:08:26,460 –> 01:08:29,900
and rhythmic bodily motion should not be confused with

1112
01:08:31,099 –> 01:08:34,860
the Holy Spirit. And of course, the dichotomies and differentiations are blurred

1113
01:08:34,860 –> 01:08:38,620
in a modernist way in the space of the blues. This is why I

1114
01:08:38,620 –> 01:08:42,380
think at a, at a big level, I do not think that if we

1115
01:08:42,710 –> 01:08:45,790
want to rescue This is a larger thesis I’m working on, and I’m recording a

1116
01:08:45,790 –> 01:08:48,310
whole Shorts episode about it. So you should go listen to that before you listen

1117
01:08:48,630 –> 01:08:52,350
to this episode. But I don’t think that we can rescue— not rescue— I

1118
01:08:52,350 –> 01:08:55,990
don’t think we can restore the future or restore to the future

1119
01:08:55,990 –> 01:08:59,830
without going back to— going back past

1120
01:09:00,070 –> 01:09:02,710
modernism, past postmodernism to

1121
01:09:04,150 –> 01:09:07,990
modernism. Grab the spirit of our fathers, to speak in mythic terms, right, who

1122
01:09:08,150 –> 01:09:11,739
came before us, and bring that spirit

1123
01:09:14,539 –> 01:09:18,339
forward. And jazz, even the down-home church, even if you don’t

1124
01:09:18,339 –> 01:09:20,659
believe— and by the way, I know there’s plenty of people out there who don’t

1125
01:09:20,659 –> 01:09:23,459
believe. I know there’s plenty of people who hold their own counsel about what is

1126
01:09:23,459 –> 01:09:27,019
or what is not. I’ve said before on this show what I believe. Y’all know,

1127
01:09:27,019 –> 01:09:29,819
you can listen to episodes. Tom knows what

1128
01:09:32,219 –> 01:09:35,859
I believe. And meaning is the thing we’re missing. We talk a lot

1129
01:09:35,859 –> 01:09:39,370
about a meaning crisis in America, particularly among

1130
01:09:39,370 –> 01:09:43,050
young men. But increasingly, with the rates of anxiety

1131
01:09:43,050 –> 01:09:46,650
and depression being diagnosed among young women, we should probably talk

1132
01:09:46,650 –> 01:09:50,490
about a meaning crisis everywhere.

1133
01:09:50,490 –> 01:09:53,890
We have two generations of people that have no idea what the hell it

1134
01:09:54,450 –> 01:09:58,250
is they’re doing and are trying to figure it out. And

1135
01:09:58,250 –> 01:10:02,090
typically in myths, you go back to, or you reach back into,

1136
01:10:02,090 –> 01:10:05,850
like in Pinocchio going into the whale to rescue his father Geppetto, you go into

1137
01:10:05,850 –> 01:10:09,700
the whale to rescue the spirit of your father. And bring that father out.

1138
01:10:09,700 –> 01:10:12,460
But you can only go back and rescue the spirit of your father. You can’t

1139
01:10:12,460 –> 01:10:15,900
rescue the spirit of your grandfather, which is really interesting because it’s

1140
01:10:16,700 –> 01:10:20,500
too far away, it’s too far

1141
01:10:20,500 –> 01:10:24,340
back. Jazz allows us, blues allows us, the blues

1142
01:10:24,340 –> 01:10:27,580
idiom allows us to go and rescue the spirit of our fathers and to

1143
01:10:27,900 –> 01:10:31,700
bring it forward with meaning, I think. And

1144
01:10:31,700 –> 01:10:35,260
then we could talk about religious practices, we could talk about what container we

1145
01:10:37,600 –> 01:10:40,120
put around that, And we can also talk about our moral compass, I think, in

1146
01:10:40,120 –> 01:10:43,880
a different kind of way. Where I struggle with Tom and where I

1147
01:10:43,880 –> 01:10:47,440
may part with him is I wonder how much of

1148
01:10:50,560 –> 01:10:54,240
a moral compass by our business leaders

1149
01:10:54,320 –> 01:10:55,040
has been

1150
01:10:58,280 –> 01:11:01,880
flattened by the temptations of the internet, not the temptations

1151
01:11:01,880 –> 01:11:05,490
of the dance hall. Are the temptations of the internet, the

1152
01:11:07,410 –> 01:11:11,010
temptations to be whatever name you want to insert here,

1153
01:11:11,010 –> 01:11:14,290
right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that being pushed to us through

1154
01:11:14,290 –> 01:11:18,090
our social media platforms and through, through all the things.

1155
01:11:18,090 –> 01:11:21,810
Like, I’ll use this as a, for instance, if you go look at

1156
01:11:21,810 –> 01:11:25,370
my Instagram, there are plenty of, like, I, I

1157
01:11:25,370 –> 01:11:29,130
like, I like F1 racing, right? But the algorithm looks at the, the fact

1158
01:11:29,130 –> 01:11:32,370
that I like F1 racing and it sends me all kinds

1159
01:11:32,370 –> 01:11:36,030
of things about Maseratis and Bugattis and and Aston

1160
01:11:36,510 –> 01:11:40,190
Martins and Ferraris. And I’m— when I’m seeing

1161
01:11:40,990 –> 01:11:44,150
a— no joke—

1162
01:11:44,150 –> 01:11:44,910
a

1163
01:11:49,790 –> 01:11:51,470
25-year-old Maserati influencer driving

1164
01:11:52,430 –> 01:11:56,190
around in a $250,000

1165
01:11:56,190 –> 01:11:57,870
car and claiming that, like, you can

1166
01:12:00,120 –> 01:12:03,560
do this too, I gotta get off the boat. That’s when I get

1167
01:12:03,960 –> 01:12:07,800
off the boat. I’m with you. And, and because, again, to your point about

1168
01:12:07,800 –> 01:12:11,160
the internet and, and how information is, you know,

1169
01:12:11,400 –> 01:12:15,160
information is power, but it’s also information is dangerous, right? Because now you

1170
01:12:15,639 –> 01:12:19,440
got these 25-year-olds that are saying— I, I, I literally just, I just

1171
01:12:19,440 –> 01:12:23,240
had a conversation with this, actually, I don’t even think he’s 25 yet. I think

1172
01:12:23,240 –> 01:12:26,450
he turns 25 later this year. Oh my, he

1173
01:12:30,690 –> 01:12:34,250
is business consultant. How, how, how, how do you have the

1174
01:12:34,250 –> 01:12:38,010
experience to be consulting any business owner about anything

1175
01:12:38,010 –> 01:12:41,489
other than you should be posting on TikTok? And I don’t

1176
01:12:41,489 –> 01:12:44,930
mean that derogatorily. I’m saying it from— that’s what he knows from the— that’s

1177
01:12:45,010 –> 01:12:48,850
what he knows, right? That’s what he knows. I don’t understand how you can claim

1178
01:12:48,850 –> 01:12:52,700
to be a business consultant at 25. Because you have the

1179
01:12:52,700 –> 01:12:56,540
internet and you can go to ChatGPT and say, give you— ask it a couple

1180
01:12:56,540 –> 01:13:00,260
of questions and give me some— give me a couple of really— give me

1181
01:13:00,260 –> 01:13:03,780
a couple of things that are going to make me sound smart to

1182
01:13:04,180 –> 01:13:07,940
say. And ChatGPT will, of course, do that because guess what?

1183
01:13:07,940 –> 01:13:11,780
ChatGPT is asking everybody who came before you. All the information that is

1184
01:13:11,780 –> 01:13:15,460
out on the internet is at its disposal, which means it’s

1185
01:13:15,460 –> 01:13:18,410
at your disposal, which means you can now go go out and give people

1186
01:13:18,890 –> 01:13:22,410
advice based on everybody. Ah, it frustrates me, but they have

1187
01:13:22,490 –> 01:13:26,330
no practical experience. They have no, no way

1188
01:13:27,290 –> 01:13:31,050
of, of actually giving somebody a foundational decision

1189
01:13:31,050 –> 01:13:34,410
based on, based on experience. Well, that’s about

1190
01:13:34,650 –> 01:13:37,810
the two generations. Exactly, to your point about the two generations that don’t know what

1191
01:13:37,810 –> 01:13:40,370
they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing because they don’t need to learn. They

1192
01:13:40,370 –> 01:13:42,490
could just go Google it or

1193
01:13:44,620 –> 01:13:48,220
go chat something. It’s the ultimate period at the end of the sentence of

1194
01:13:48,220 –> 01:13:51,700
confusing information with wisdom or data points with wisdom. And

1195
01:13:51,700 –> 01:13:55,380
then also confusing aggregation with practicality.

1196
01:13:55,380 –> 01:13:59,139
Just because you can aggregate a bunch of things together doesn’t mean that’s

1197
01:13:59,139 –> 01:14:02,140
a practical thing for me. Because there’s

1198
01:14:03,020 –> 01:14:06,620
still— oh, and there’s a third thing in there. It’s also the

1199
01:14:08,870 –> 01:14:12,710
logical end of And I say this very gently to my 18 to

1200
01:14:12,710 –> 01:14:16,310
34 year old listeners, very gently. I have a lot of them. I want to

1201
01:14:16,310 –> 01:14:20,110
be very delicate. I know, I don’t know You, I don’t know

1202
01:14:20,110 –> 01:14:23,270
your pain. It was different for me. All

1203
01:14:23,830 –> 01:14:27,570
the caveats, sure, okay, I bought a $30,000 house and now

1204
01:14:27,690 –> 01:14:31,470
it’s worth $1.3 million. I have unearned privilege, blah, blah,

1205
01:14:31,470 –> 01:14:35,320
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I’ll stipulate all of that, Even

1206
01:14:35,320 –> 01:14:38,400
though none of it’s true, and no, I’m not a boomer and I’m not a

1207
01:14:38,400 –> 01:14:42,240
millennial, but I’ll stipulate all of that because it makes

1208
01:14:42,240 –> 01:14:45,760
you happy that I’ve stipulated all of that. So I’ll stipulate

1209
01:14:46,000 –> 01:14:49,760
all that. And inside of that stipulation, not

1210
01:14:53,760 –> 01:14:57,040
but, and, and the period at the end of the sentence that we

1211
01:14:57,200 –> 01:15:00,640
have now also

1212
01:15:00,720 –> 01:15:02,670
includes the confusion of

1213
01:15:05,390 –> 01:15:08,950
friction and experience and

1214
01:15:08,950 –> 01:15:12,750
discomfort with somehow

1215
01:15:12,750 –> 01:15:16,350
losing. Yeah. We had friction, we had discomfort,

1216
01:15:17,470 –> 01:15:20,190
we had inexperience. I was never confused

1217
01:15:21,470 –> 01:15:25,150
that somehow losing meant that I, that I was a

1218
01:15:25,150 –> 01:15:28,460
failure, or even that I, or even

1219
01:15:28,700 –> 01:15:31,500
that like, that somehow I had,

1220
01:15:32,380 –> 01:15:35,500
I don’t know, not somehow done something that I was

1221
01:15:36,420 –> 01:15:39,580
supposed to do. Losing was a learning

1222
01:15:40,380 –> 01:15:42,300
experience, right? Also, I didn’t come out of

1223
01:15:47,820 –> 01:15:50,340
a space where— and there’s a lot of leaning in on this, and I hate

1224
01:15:50,340 –> 01:15:54,140
to be one more person that leans in on it, and it’s true. I

1225
01:15:54,140 –> 01:15:57,990
did not come out of a space where just showing up

1226
01:15:57,990 –> 01:16:01,710
was enough to win something.

1227
01:16:01,870 –> 01:16:05,670
Just showing up’s not enough. You have to show

1228
01:16:06,230 –> 01:16:09,350
up, experience friction, improvise, go back and

1229
01:16:09,590 –> 01:16:13,310
show up more, improvise again. And the only way you get to do that, to

1230
01:16:13,310 –> 01:16:16,470
your point about the 25-year-old business consultant, the only way you get to do that

1231
01:16:16,470 –> 01:16:19,750
is over the course of 25 years. And it’s

1232
01:16:19,910 –> 01:16:23,680
a long, hard slog. That there’s no— and

1233
01:16:23,840 –> 01:16:27,600
there’s no prizes there. There’s no glory in

1234
01:16:27,600 –> 01:16:31,120
that. It’s not sexy on Instagram. It doesn’t show up well

1235
01:16:31,120 –> 01:16:34,840
on a TikTok reel. No one wants to see a highlight reel of you

1236
01:16:34,840 –> 01:16:38,400
slogging through failure after failure. No one wants to see that. It doesn’t— they don’t

1237
01:16:38,400 –> 01:16:42,200
make movies about that. They’re not going to make Instagram reels about that. So I

1238
01:16:42,200 –> 01:16:45,520
get it. We have an entire two generations of people now

1239
01:16:45,840 –> 01:16:49,360
verging on three that just live in this space of just seeing

1240
01:16:49,690 –> 01:16:53,530
the highlight reels. With no friction, confusing that all that

1241
01:16:53,690 –> 01:16:56,770
information with wisdom. And then, you know, oh, well, I can just aggregate it. So

1242
01:16:56,770 –> 01:16:59,410
it must be practical for you. And by the way, the AI is going to

1243
01:16:59,410 –> 01:17:01,530
do a lot more of that. The LLMs are going to do a lot more

1244
01:17:01,530 –> 01:17:03,450
of that in the future because I’m already starting

1245
01:17:05,050 –> 01:17:08,570
to see where people are spewing out advice that,

1246
01:17:08,650 –> 01:17:12,450
to your point, they got from an AI. And if you have any practical experience

1247
01:17:12,450 –> 01:17:15,660
on what any of that advice is, you look at that and you go, that’s

1248
01:17:15,660 –> 01:17:19,340
trash. That is absolute trash. If you do any of that in real

1249
01:17:19,340 –> 01:17:22,900
life, you’re dead. You’re dead on the side of the mountain to push the metaphor.

1250
01:17:22,900 –> 01:17:26,700
Or, or it’s not, or it’s not trash, but it’s only like halfway there.

1251
01:17:26,700 –> 01:17:30,500
It’s not like, right. It’s not the whole thing. Like, it’ll say, oh, if you

1252
01:17:30,580 –> 01:17:34,340
wanna do this from a marketing perspective, oh, you should be on social

1253
01:17:34,340 –> 01:17:36,620
media. Great. But it doesn’t tell you how to do it, where to do it,

1254
01:17:36,620 –> 01:17:40,340
how, like, what, like social media is just too broad of

1255
01:17:40,990 –> 01:17:43,390
a spectrum anyway. Well, and I always say, I always, I always say, I’ll say,

1256
01:17:43,390 –> 01:17:47,190
let’s look, look, look. Okay, sure. The, the AI technologists will tell us

1257
01:17:47,190 –> 01:17:49,710
that, oh, well, it’s gonna get better and better. And you’re right, in 10 years

1258
01:17:49,830 –> 01:17:53,310
it is gonna be better for sure. Just like everything else, it’s gonna be better.

1259
01:17:54,910 –> 01:17:58,230
And it’s still, it’s still not going to be good enough to reach

1260
01:17:58,230 –> 01:18:01,830
into somebody else’s pocket, literally pull the money out of it and put

1261
01:18:01,830 –> 01:18:05,150
it in mine. It’s not gonna be that good. No, it’s just not gonna be

1262
01:18:05,150 –> 01:18:08,450
that good. I have to convince a person to actually

1263
01:18:09,010 –> 01:18:12,770
take an action in real life against

1264
01:18:12,770 –> 01:18:16,570
friction to accomplish something. And the only way I do that is through improvisation.

1265
01:18:16,570 –> 01:18:18,930
And I’m convinced the only way we do that is through understanding

1266
01:18:21,970 –> 01:18:24,450
the blues idiom. How do we, well, I kind of asked you a variation of

1267
01:18:24,450 –> 01:18:27,010
this question already about how we incorporate all this

1268
01:18:28,530 –> 01:18:30,770
into leadership, but the actual act of playing

1269
01:18:32,940 –> 01:18:36,260
the blues, right? Blues can be played with a 4-person, you

1270
01:18:36,260 –> 01:18:39,980
know, sort of quintet. Um, it could be played, you know, by

1271
01:18:39,980 –> 01:18:43,767
one person on a

1272
01:18:43,767 –> 01:18:47,540
trumpet. Um, uh, you know, a lot of people— Louis Armstrong most

1273
01:18:47,540 –> 01:18:51,220
notoriously, um, really proved that.

1274
01:18:51,220 –> 01:18:54,820
Um, obviously, you know, you have big bands, right,

1275
01:18:54,820 –> 01:18:58,580
that expand the, expand the genre. Like Ellington did that, and Count Basie,

1276
01:18:58,580 –> 01:19:02,280
and a

1277
01:19:02,280 –> 01:19:06,000
few others. I think that—

1278
01:19:06,000 –> 01:19:09,680
and I think Murray would appreciate this— I think we have to,

1279
01:19:14,560 –> 01:19:18,320
we have to, we got to start bringing the people together

1280
01:19:18,320 –> 01:19:22,080
and bringing people together in the community and start, start riffing a little bit.

1281
01:19:22,080 –> 01:19:25,510
We got to start riffing a little bit. We got to stop fighting and

1282
01:19:26,470 –> 01:19:30,070
start riffing. And we’ve been fighting for quite some

1283
01:19:30,710 –> 01:19:34,510
time. We’ve been— I’m not a conspiracy— well, no, I am a conspiracy theorist,

1284
01:19:34,510 –> 01:19:38,110
but only conspiracies that I make up. And here’s the conspiracy that I’ve made

1285
01:19:38,110 –> 01:19:41,510
up. I think that all of the interactions on social media

1286
01:19:41,830 –> 01:19:45,670
were stoked by the, the algorithm run by various social

1287
01:19:45,670 –> 01:19:49,470
media companies in order to keep Americans from actually, from actually

1288
01:19:49,470 –> 01:19:53,040
fighting each other physically. Because I think it’s an off

1289
01:19:54,200 –> 01:19:57,600
switch or a way to blow off steam, right? I think that that’s just what

1290
01:19:57,600 –> 01:20:00,080
it is along with everything else, right? So it keeps

1291
01:20:01,280 –> 01:20:05,000
us from having physical material

1292
01:20:05,000 –> 01:20:08,400
interactions and keeps us from, well, quite frankly, starting a war with each

1293
01:20:08,400 –> 01:20:12,000
other on this continent because it would be very

1294
01:20:12,000 –> 01:20:15,120
easy for us with our sharpened political tensions

1295
01:20:17,210 –> 01:20:20,850
to do that. Um, but I think that as we move into

1296
01:20:20,850 –> 01:20:24,410
the next 25 years, the idea

1297
01:20:24,410 –> 01:20:28,090
behind jazz, that disparate people can come together to express their deepest

1298
01:20:28,090 –> 01:20:31,330
emotions through a cooperative act of organic

1299
01:20:31,330 –> 01:20:34,930
orchestration while also improvising, picking up each other from

1300
01:20:34,930 –> 01:20:38,570
the thread and grooving right along, is at its bottom the

1301
01:20:38,810 –> 01:20:41,450
entire American experience set to music. It’s the entire— it’s

1302
01:20:43,070 –> 01:20:46,790
the entire thing. Leaders, followers, audience members, and attention seekers alike

1303
01:20:46,790 –> 01:20:49,630
should adopt the footing of

1304
01:20:50,030 –> 01:20:53,750
jazz— improvisation, discipline, creativity, and storytelling through our experiences— to

1305
01:20:53,750 –> 01:20:57,390
create the next great projects. No matter the field where you think you

1306
01:20:58,350 –> 01:21:01,310
make your money, I don’t care if you’re running a fruit stand by the side

1307
01:21:01,630 –> 01:21:05,350
of the road or if you’re running a big giant organization, I

1308
01:21:05,350 –> 01:21:08,920
think there’s room for jazz everywhere. And so how

1309
01:21:09,240 –> 01:21:12,960
can we integrate the lessons from blues, or jazz

1310
01:21:12,960 –> 01:21:16,800
as it is marketed, um, from blues into, into the next

1311
01:21:16,800 –> 01:21:20,400
25 years? How do we, how do we project all this

1312
01:21:20,400 –> 01:21:24,040
forward? Give me some, give me some practical ideas, Tom.

1313
01:21:24,040 –> 01:21:26,680
I, I think something that you, you kind of leaned on a little while ago,

1314
01:21:26,680 –> 01:21:30,480
and I think something that we’re, we’re missing out on. So, okay, so we

1315
01:21:30,480 –> 01:21:34,300
talked a lot about the improvisation of, of blues,

1316
01:21:34,300 –> 01:21:37,980
right? But there’s a lot of lack thereof in business. Yes. And I think that,

1317
01:21:37,980 –> 01:21:41,740
I think that’s where the overlap needs to come back. Right.

1318
01:21:41,740 –> 01:21:44,740
So like, so again, in business, the lessons

1319
01:21:45,300 –> 01:21:48,700
we learn are there’s no such thing as a straight line. Like, like you’re going

1320
01:21:48,700 –> 01:21:52,540
to have to win some, lose some, take left turns, take right

1321
01:21:52,540 –> 01:21:56,260
turns, walk into a path that has not a fork in the road

1322
01:21:56,260 –> 01:21:59,630
where it could pick one way or the other. Maybe it has 3 or 4.

1323
01:21:59,630 –> 01:22:02,470
Maybe you walk down a pathway, realize you’re going the wrong way, come back the

1324
01:22:02,470 –> 01:22:05,990
other way. Like, you— I think that there is something to be

1325
01:22:05,990 –> 01:22:09,630
said about experiencing it, right? So again, as we just talked about the last

1326
01:22:09,630 –> 01:22:12,990
10 minutes or so, it’s— I think we

1327
01:22:14,030 –> 01:22:17,790
have to stop, stop— as much as it— as much as I love the

1328
01:22:17,790 –> 01:22:20,590
use of technology, and you and I have talked about this before too, and I,

1329
01:22:20,590 –> 01:22:24,430
I use technology all the time, and everybody does, we all use it, but, but

1330
01:22:25,080 –> 01:22:28,280
when you start when you start replacing experience

1331
01:22:28,840 –> 01:22:32,040
with the technology instead of using the technology as a tool

1332
01:22:33,080 –> 01:22:36,920
to experience things, that’s where the fault lies. And I think blues, you can’t do

1333
01:22:36,920 –> 01:22:40,680
that. You’re not using technology to experience the blues. And I think if we

1334
01:22:41,240 –> 01:22:45,080
go back to just the experience of things, then we’ll, we’ll

1335
01:22:45,080 –> 01:22:48,760
be able to be all right. So to me, that’s where blues comes in.

1336
01:22:48,760 –> 01:22:52,130
Blues can teach us to feel it. Blues can teach

1337
01:22:52,290 –> 01:22:55,810
us to experience it. Blues can teach us that we need to see it, touch

1338
01:22:55,810 –> 01:22:59,370
it, feel it in order for it to be real, instead

1339
01:23:00,130 –> 01:23:03,290
of just punching our keys on a key— punching our fingers on a keyboard and

1340
01:23:03,290 –> 01:23:07,010
popping up with the answers. And we don’t have to go experience the answers. We

1341
01:23:07,170 –> 01:23:10,970
just have to— like, I think that’s it. I think you said it

1342
01:23:10,970 –> 01:23:13,010
very well in that little, you

1343
01:23:15,090 –> 01:23:18,800
know, soliloquy there. My I think that’s,

1344
01:23:18,800 –> 01:23:22,600
I think that’s what it is. We have, we’ve, as

1345
01:23:23,400 –> 01:23:27,120
we have mentioned so many times, whether it’s on this podcast or conversations that you

1346
01:23:27,120 –> 01:23:30,880
and I have had offline or conversations you and I have had with several other

1347
01:23:30,880 –> 01:23:34,400
people involved in

1348
01:23:34,400 –> 01:23:37,640
our lives, to call what we see on

1349
01:23:37,880 –> 01:23:41,640
our computers social media is an oxymoron in and

1350
01:23:41,640 –> 01:23:45,370
of itself because as The more we have

1351
01:23:45,690 –> 01:23:49,530
connections, the more technology fingerprint we have out there, the less we

1352
01:23:49,530 –> 01:23:53,170
are actually connected to what’s important. And

1353
01:23:53,850 –> 01:23:57,530
I think that’s going to— that will come full circle sometime. I

1354
01:23:57,530 –> 01:24:00,570
don’t know when, but at some point we are going

1355
01:24:01,130 –> 01:24:04,410
to realize that all this technology is not what we

1356
01:24:04,730 –> 01:24:07,530
quote unquote need. It’s what we want. It’s what we have. It’s what we have

1357
01:24:07,530 –> 01:24:10,970
available. It’s what we can use. But it’s not what we need. What we need

1358
01:24:10,970 –> 01:24:14,770
is to get back to the human basics, and music is part of that. Music

1359
01:24:14,770 –> 01:24:18,530
is part of that human basic, basic

1360
01:24:18,530 –> 01:24:22,050
environment. So I think I could tell you exactly when it’s going to come by.

1361
01:24:22,690 –> 01:24:26,450
The US hockey— the United States men’s hockey team proves the point. It’s

1362
01:24:26,450 –> 01:24:30,290
going to come just in time. Always

1363
01:24:30,770 –> 01:24:33,530
just in time. And on that, we’re out. I— what else is there to say?

1364
01:24:33,530 –> 01:24:36,690
No, I’m just kidding. You can say that. No, you’re right.

1365
01:24:37,570 –> 01:24:38,320
With that, well, we’re out.