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Steve Faktor Profile picture
@ideafaktory
Jun 27, 2021 • 13 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
MUSIC & INFLUENCE

Ever wonder how strange it is that most music that shapes our lives was written by 20-somethings?

An age that's decades before creatives truly develop a distinctive voice & depth of experience.

So why is this the case?

A hypothesis in 4 parts...
4 reasons most impactful music is created by 20-somethings

1) Selection
2) Genius
3) Universality
4) Consumption age

1) Selection: the arts are brutal careers, esp. music. Odds of success, tiny. If you don't make it by your late 20's, you age out of young fans who control cool.
2) Genius: The people who do succeed are likely to be standouts, if not geniuses. If not as songwriters, then performers or determined success-seekers. They have an unstoppable quality that will break through quickly.
3) Universality: there's a simplicity & purity to the experiences of a young person. Everyone's had that first love, heartbreak, infatuation, and weird cyberstalking incident. Ok, maybe not that last one. But these simple thoughts grip us instantly, with the right melody.
4) Age of consumption: it's not only the musicians who are young, but often so are we. Whether it's Led Zeppelin, Friends, or Twinkies, if we discover them at a formative age, they'll retain their power over us, unlike anything (or those same things) discovered later.
Related thread:
👆👆👆Related thread:
Spectacular conversation between Jewel & Joe.

She's lived & triumphed through so much adversity.

Made me think what a shame it is that our age of music discovery ends before artists truly find their voice & self-actualize. 👆👆👆

open.spotify.com/episode/2TRBNG…
This piece argues our obsession w/the Beatles keeps music from innovating. Nonsense.
ALL innovation eventually stalls intra-genre as it gets saturated, moves on to new genres (rap, DJs), then to new mediums (games, TV, tech). Innovators seek new frontiers.
ft.com/content/6ddafa…
True originality is rare. It gets harder with time, as creative categories & mediums get flooded w/participants trying every permutation of rock, painting or sitcom.

One of the biggest obstacles to originality is finding your voice. At first, even Picasso paints fruit.

But...
Experience can turn Zeppelin-y riffs into an interesting stew, some very successfully, but never quite transcend their influences.

Oasis (Britpop)
Lenny Kravitz (Hendrix/70's R&B)
Bruno Mars (Police, Prince, Misc 80's)
Enuff Z'Nuff (Beatles)

Again, Transcendence is HARD!

...
It's some blend of truly divergent thinking, experimentation, diligence & fearlessness that turns ability+influences into a singular voice. (That only sometimes maps to commercial success.)

Recently, comic Andrew Schulz cited Larry David as an example.
Why music can transcend & other art forms can only hope to immerse.

Image

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More from @ideafaktory

Steve Faktor Profile picture
Apr 2, 2023
Interesting thread breaking down Twitter's algorithm.
The Twitter Homogenization

Knowing what Twitter's algorithm likes & doesn't will make users please/game it, the way students do teachers for grades, TV execs select programming, & how SEO & clickbait work.

Algorithmic speech is not free speech, even when transparent.
Liv ur life, peepz. If hiphoptimizing the Twitterz be that impotent to you, you did it wrongsies.

Read 4 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Feb 28, 2023
The Productivity Paradox

Much of "productivity" is *theft of productivity* from others.

Productive legislators, content creators, game developers, lawyers, influencers, marketers, athletes, divert time & attention from others' productivity to casual consumption or admin.
The question is what are we optimizing for?

If it's jobs, then loss of productivity creates a need for more workers.

If it's personal satisfaction, you'd want as much focus as possible.

If it's economic strength, productivity must focus on exportable categories/activities.
The productivity paradox would be moot if it were purely market driven & benign. It's neither.

We're making conscious choices to regulate, incentivize, or ignore countless addictions, powerful technologies & rapacious partisans, who don't have our best interests at heart.
Read 5 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Feb 16, 2023
The Great Replacement?

I thought this would go away. It hasn't. A quick thread on what I think is really happening, from an Economics POV.

Start w/this post. Like most scoring systems, it's highly subjective & suggests a misguided interpretation of what's happening today.
1/
The Great Replacement Theory came to light in the US in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted "The Jews will not replace us" & other variants.

What they were alluding to is a conspiracy that Jews (who they think run everything) want to replace whites w/minorities.
2/
These white nationalists are mis/re-interpreting:
—the US constitution, which despite our failures to live up to its ideas—was never about "blood & soil", like many European ethnostates
—the prescriptiveness of French philosopher Camus's Great Replacement theory
3/
Read 22 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Feb 4, 2023
I'm reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Have to admit, it's taking a toll on me.

If even ½ is true (based on history, I'd bet it is), it's hard not to feel powerless & cynical in the shadow of immense soulless forces behind global exploitation & our simplistic narratives. Image
The more I think about Confessions of an Economic Hitman, the more naive cryptocurrency becomes.

In a world where we use dollar-debt to control third world nations, thinking we'd just surrender that power because libertarian tech bros want to get rich is so preposterous.
How the west controls the third world.

Good summation of the core premise of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman". amzn.to/3Ygcl4n
The details only make it darker.

As the CEO of Blackrock explains, the last thing markets want is democracy:
Read 4 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Jan 8, 2023
The re-education of Jordan Peterson by Canada, like that of Jack Ma by China is a state taming forces that threaten its power.

The civic variant of forced apologies by employees whose cultural transgressions threaten revenues.

Compliance is the great societal stabilizer.
There is no due process here. Only the thinnest veil of fairness. Decisions have been made in closed rooms. Capitulation & compliance are non-negotiable.

Ironically, it's far kinder than more brutal regimes, where oligarchs rain down from the sky.
Funny thing about state control in "democracies" is it's stealthy...until it isn't.

And when it does assert its power, every failsafe falls silent.

Assange disappears for a decade

Congress become $100+ millionaires

Pfizer buys media

Blank checks for foreign wars

Not a peep.
Read 5 tweets
Steve Faktor Profile picture
Jan 5, 2023
How I'd save Bed, Bath & Beyond🧵

First, a reality check:

1) There is no market for selling commodities inside of buildings. This has been true for small businesses killed by giant chains. It's now true for chains. Experience is inferior, data-poor, too expensive vs. online.
2) There is no middle. The population is bifurcating -> upper middle class & sub-middle class. Like Macy's, malls, or The Gap, the middle is dwindling. Especially, when it's non-specialized, undifferentiated. The numbers back that:

3) To succeed, three realities must be embraced: passionate niches, experiences & impermanence. I'll bucket my ideas this way.

A. Passionate niches
BB&B has several great assets: brand recognition, national physical footprint, supply chain, product categories that can be complex
Read 10 tweets

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