Music

 It's really weird how much money we laud on some musicians. There are probably a zillion musicians who are just as musically talented as the guy who scores the hit, but their song, for some unfathomable reason, did not resonate with the upper class  kids, the ones who are crazy enough and and have enough play dough that they can just buy a copy of a tune whenever it suits them.

But the rest of us seem to accept these hits as valid. I mean, I bought maybe a dozen records (back when records were a thing). When I got old I did break down and bought a few CD's. Now I get my music off of YouTube for which I pay something like $16 a month. I suppose YouTube watches what I play, keeps track and doles out some of that subscription proportionally. Well, I hope they do that, but who knows what the great god Google has decided.

Anyway, it's weird how much money we laud on musicians when they don't produce any material goods like food, shelter or clothing. Or maybe it's weird that we aren't starving, dressed in rags and living in cardboard shantys so we can spend more money on music.

P.S. Back when I lived in Ohio, Matt and I went to visit a friend of his, a black kid I think, who had a room full of records. As I recall he had two shelves of records, 12" LP's, that ran the length of his room, eight feet long at least, maybe more. They shelves had vertical dividers every foot or so they weren't all leaning on each other. Figure 6 LP's to the inch times 12 inches to the foot times 8 feet and times two times $5 per LP we're talking  (6*12*8*2*5) almost $6,000 dollars, and this is back in 1970 when gasoline was a quarter. Multiply that by 20 to get where we are now and that's over $100,000. Heck of a lot of money for a high school kid. But at the time the value never occured to me. As best I can recall my initial reaction (unspoken of course) was 'why do you have so many records'? I mean I had been getting by on half a dozen records of my parents at home and the FM radio in the car. Why would anyone want all those records? Just weird, man.