Two Big Ways to Win Big, Elizabeth-Style
By 
Hey friends. I had the fortunate luck of publishing a couple of things on the same day and wanted to share them here in one convenient location.
The good folks at the Atlantic let me go long on Neil Young, the Ditch Trilogy and the endless, spiraling, tragic death of the Hippie dream. Good times, great oldies, indeed.
Some are bound for happiness / Some are bound to glory / Some are bound to live with less / Who can tell your story?” The answer, implied but unstated, is that the chronicles of the working poor and the political outsider—once the heart of the folk movement—are destined to become marginalized to the point of disappearing. Distantly, and uneasily, there is revolution in the air.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times Magazine, I wrote about how the predatory outcomes of the streaming economy are being rewritten by the winners. Take a suck of this:
Time and again we are told by the industry that this arrangement represents a market-driven utopia. Why doesn’t it feel that way — and why does it feel as if we’ve been here before? The short answer may be that this is the basic approach to the consolidation of wealth and power in countless American industries over the past 50 years: Strip-mine labor, create unmovable obstacles to upward mobility, reify the supremacy of the 1 percent and then point to the unshared profits as a blanket justification. Musicians may have been uniquely vulnerable to these machinations, but you can rest assured that the devaluation of music will serve as a template for profit-driven tech overlords employing the same methods to degrade streaming television and other media.
On the one hand, there’s sadness, corporate irresponsibility and ecological catastrophe. On the other, there is sadness, corporate irresponsibility and ecological catastrophe. Please do check one or both out! Thanks as always for your enduring support.