Predictability

We received our first actual check from ASCAP this week. not for much, but a real honest to goodness check. For the last five years we usually just get a letter that says “no royalties were reported this quarter.” Between this and our selection at CMJ marathon and checks coming in from our distributors every month from CD sales, t-shirt sales, and iTunes download sales I am starting to see real progress with this endeavor. Granted, not enough to justify renting limos and staying at the waldorf, but we’re on our way. The dream life is starting to connect to the real life.

Thinking a lot about predictability patterns the last few days. someone falls, they immediately try to get up. reach out your hand to shake someone’s and they will automatically extend theirs in return. point up and most people will look up. touch someone's left shoulder they will look to their left. If you want to appear famous or important, wear sunglasses indoors. If you want people not to look at you, roll up in a wheelchair. Most people are either day showerers or night showerers. Most people have a set time frame that they are most comfortable going to sleep and waking up. Some people are night owls, and other people are what they call early risers. If you want to create controversy about something, simply tell others that it is ‘rather controversial at the moment’ whether it is or not, it will soon become so.

Pop culture has its patterns. Every generation is repulsed by the decade that preceded it. I assume from how it makes us feel old or worn out or yesterdays news. And then in turn, each generation is obsessed with the generation twenty to twenty five years before it. In the seventies, America was obsessed with the fifties (happy days and lavern and Shirley). In the eighties obsessed with the sixties (the height of the grateful dead mania and the brief return of the Woodstock hippie culture). In the nineties mainstream culture became obsessed with the seventies. All of a sudden disco was in again and the bee gees were cool again. In the two thousands we are just starting to see the resurgence of eighties culture returning to favor, whereas in the last fifteen years you couldn’t get a job if you had anything to do with New Wave or hair bands. Now new wave is making a grand return in bands such as Interpol and franze Ferdinand and modest mouse. Its cool again to sound like that. The Cure just hit the top ten at college radio again. And its going to keep going like this. Already 80’s clubs are becoming all the rage all over America. This will continue through till the late two-thousands when the nineties become the new flavor of the decade in the early twenty-teens.