The Revolution Will Not Be Brought To You by Live Nation and White Claw

Reflections on Oceans Calling, Industry Maturation, Brain Hemispheres, Music as Revolution, and Our Declining Civilization

We stood in a driving rainstorm, wind blowing our poncho hoods off, our feet sinking into the sand.?

"Let's give them until 10:00," said one of our friends.

We wondered if Blink-182 would even play. They were supposed to take the stage at 9:30, but roadies had covered the lights.

"Why aren't they making an announcement?" All of us asked some form of this question.

Every so often, someone would appear on stage and the crowd would gasp or even roar, but each time it turned out to be someone rolling a squeegee where the band was scheduled to perform. Huge video boards advertised Free Narcan and HoopTea tents. No word about the delay.

At 10:15, we called it. There was a noise ordinance, so the festival would be over at 11:00. Truth be told, I'm not a huge Blink-182 fan. None of us really were. The only thing keeping us there was the sunk-cost fallacy. "We waited this long…"

We trudged through the sand and made our way to the boardwalk. Predictably, a few steps onto the boardwalk, the crowd roared as the band took the stage. We paused to consider turning back, listened for a few minutes to the muffled sound, and then decided to call it a night.

The walk back to our hotel had seemed so much shorter nine hours earlier.

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That was day one of a three-day music festival (Oceans Calling) in Ocean City, MD. Organizers couldn't control the weather, but they controlled almost everything else. Exceptional musicians playing tight 59, 74 or 89-minute sets with enthusiastic crowds singing along. The hardcore fans knew every song, while most people sang and danced when they recognized the opening chords from the Oceans Calling Spotify playlist they'd been playing for the last month or so.

The bands sounded note-perfect, and the festival operated with Swiss-clock efficiency. You tapped a wrist band to get in, to buy an IPA, and to pick up veggie lo mein or a slice of pizza. There were rarely lines for a bathroom or to have your ID checked. Fifty-thousand-or-so people migrated from stage to stage, either veterans of music festivals or mavens who'd spent hours on the festival threads and Facebook groups.

We carried water bottles, blankets, ponchos and LiquidIV in clear plastic backpacks. All best practices had been disseminated.

In the end, Oceans Calling met every expectation. Exactly. No more and no less. An optimal, or perhaps better said, fully optimized experience.

I guess we still call the musicians artists, but it felt like what happens when a market shapes an offering to deliver the biggest return for key stakeholders.

That sounds cynical, but it's not all bad. The reviews will be five-stars and the festival probably out-performed its share-of-wallet merchandise expectations. Fans of The Killers drove home streaming songs from Young the Giant and The Hives. More streams means more fans means more concert shirts.

Customers left happy. Artists got paid. Ocean City had a banner weekend a month after labor day, and festival organizers likely beat their profit expectations. Set up was expensive, but they can amortize that over another week as they have Country Calling rolling in the following weekend.

Everyone wins.

Or do they?

I left with this weird taste in my mouth about the state of art and what it says about where we are as a society. I left thinking about some Scottish guy I had listened to on a podcast a year ago.

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Ian McGilchrist a prominent British psychiatrist studies brain hemispheres.

“The right hemisphere gives sustained, broad, open, vigilant alertness, whereas the left hemisphere gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail." McGilcrhist recognizes the danger of our binary, pop-psychology view of left-brain and right-brain people, instead suggesting that we need to strike a healthy balance between the hemispheres.

In his book, The Master and His Emissary, he posits that individuals and societies thrive when the right hemisphere serves as master, affording us broad perspective and important context, while the left hemisphere ensures we actually get shit done.

McGilcrhist takes the title of his book from a quote he attributes to Albert Einstein. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”?

Oceans Calling was a highly organized, highly rational experience. Left hemisphere for sure. We live in a world of optimization-- a world where that left hemisphere gets a lot of run. How can we take friction out of a process? How can we segment buyers and better understand their needs? How can we deliver on those needs better, faster, and cheaper?The market rewards optimization and those who own the optimizing machines get the spoils. After all, they put the Capital in Capitalism.

But, as McGilchrist and Einstein warn, we've flipped our left and right hemisphere relationship. Better, faster, cheaper has become our master.

Again, that's not all bad. People left satisfied. Organizers likely turned a profit. There's a great chance that Ocean Calling is already organizing its 2025 lineup. It just feels like a fundamental shift in the nature of music and art.

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If you listen to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris is "killing our country." She is a socialist who threatens all that has historically "made America Great." And if you listen to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, Donald Trump represents an "existential threat to democracy." He's a wanna-be strongman more interested in power than people.

Every election cycle brings out charged rhetoric, but we seem to be living in particularly precarious times. We often refer to our democracy as an "experiment." If you listen to the candidates or the pundits who talk about the candidates, our 250-year-old experiment faces life-threatening sickness.

As such, I expected to see a lot of people at Oceans Calling advocating for their candidate or maybe a policy position, be it about guns or abortion or speech. I didn't. I saw one red MAGA hat and one Harris-Walz t-shirt. That was it.

Part of me considers that a great thing. People didn't want to cloud their experience with politics. Or maybe they hate how divided we are and didn't want to subject themselves to rancor from the other side. Or maybe the reality is, despite what our always-on news would suggest, the vast majority of people aren't really all that tuned into politics. They'd much rather pop a gummy and dance to Pigeons Playing Ping Pong after filling their water bottle at the hydration station.

But the apolitical nature wasn't just about the festival goers. Thirty-plus hours of music and I couldn't tell you who any of the musicians might vote for. Outside of a few singers encouraging people to register to vote, you wouldn't have known it was an election year.

Talk about a far cry from Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Talk about a radical departure from Woodstock or the Newport Folk Festival. Hell, it's a long way from Michael Stipe at an REM concert warning about climate change.?

Had all of these musicians decided Michael Jordan had it right when he stayed away from endorsing a North Carolina politician because "Republicans buy sneakers too?" Did they look at their fan demographics and realize that they didn't skew strongly in any political direction? I wondered if they'd done voice-of-the-customer research to determine how to play it. Such is the way of mature industries. Rational. Optimized. Data-driven.

Or was their silence a less individual choice? Did festival organizers ban all political statements, threatening to withhold payment if musicians stepped out of line? If so, could you blame the musicians? Or the corporate sponsors? If Allianz, Josh wines, and White Claw are paying a lot of money to sponsor the festival, they can mitigate the risk of some right or left wing group organizing a boycott. Wasn't that the Parable of Bud Light?

And I can understand musicians rationalizing that they have plenty of other platforms to express their political views. Exposing fifty-thousand people to their music will drive more engagement which means their causes will get more attention. Besides, they only get 60 minutes. It's about the music. Any time spent expressing a viewpoint is time away from the music. At least that's what I suppose they would think.

Would Bob Dylan or Joan Baez or John Lennon have looked at it that way?

Maybe. After all, we're living in a post-Dixie-Chicks, post Sinead-O'Connor-ripping-up-the-Pope era. We're living in a time when artists no longer make their money selling albums; they need festival and concert income to pay the bills.

More likely there's a selection bias. Overtly political artists aren't invited to Oceans Calling. Bob Dylan's revolutionary descendants wouldn't have made the cut.

And it's not like there's no protest music anymore. Childish Gambino's This Is America and Beyonce's Black Parade don't shy away from controversial political topics. Neither does Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town. Jason Isbell sang at the DNC while Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood sang at the RNC.

But those examples seem more the exception than the rule. When I was a kid, music was the soundtrack of revolution. The Beatles stopped singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand and started singing You Say You Wanna Revolution. Four student protesters were shot in May of 1970 on the campus of Kent State. Neil Young wrote Ohio and CSNY recorded it that same month.

By 1971, Gil Scott Heron told us the revolution would just arrive. It was time.

"The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised?

Will not be televised, will not be televised?

The revolution will be no re-run, brothers?

The revolution will be live"

Almost fifty years later, despite bands named Rebelution and Of A Revolution (O.A.R.), it appears that the revolution has been cancelled.

People opposed to the revolution buy festival tickets too.

With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, you can still catch the revolution re-runs via YouTube if you're willing to allow google to gather data and sell your eyeballs to makers of Ben Gay and Metamucil.

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Market forces have re-shaped the soul of music and effectively cancelled the revolution. Those market forces have inspired an iterative effort to optimize, a constant left-hemisphere approach to ensure that Oceans Calling meets the most important (aka most profitable) expectations across a range of competing stakeholders.

Products that meet expectation deliver a solid return. They satisfy and maybe even delight once in a while. But it's hard to delight when you have leaned out your process so that you squarely, repeatedly, and predictably meet expectations.

To delight, you need to surprise. You need spontaneity and variability. Debating whether Counting Crows should have closed with Mr. Jones and risked missing some of the audience who had left for Dave Matthews or played it early (which they did) doesn't exactly count.

Highly optimized industries and resulting experiences want repeatable, predictable processes and outcomes. They don't want surprises. They don't want Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire or playing what some might deem to be a less-than-patriotic version of the Star Spangled Banner. They don't want Dylan going electric or playing a show that leaves even his most hardcore fans scratching their heads. They don't want Axl Rose showing up two hours late or the Beatles getting shut down on a rooftop by the police.

They want the bracelets to work, the sets to end a minute early, and people to post a video on Facebook of their favorite band's most streamed song.

What was my favorite set of the festival? When O.A.R. brought out Dee Snider to sing some Twisted Sister songs, and an old friend from Bob Marley's band to sing Stir It Up. They called out Arrested Development to sing Everyday People, and Lisa Loeb joined them to sing Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. None of this was on the schedule. It was billed as O.A.R. and Friends.

Here's the thing; if Dee Snider were playing fifteen minutes from my house, I'm probably not paying to see him. I chose to eat lunch on the boardwalk rather than go see Lisa Loeb's early-in-the-day set. But I loved every second of this collaboration. I was surprised. Delighted. Okay, it's a far cry from Hendrix shredding Francis Scott Key's anthem, but I guess I'm craving something less optimized.

You might think, who cares? Or, hey dumbass, what did you expect when you went to a LiveNation/ TicketMaster production featuring that lineup? But my point isn't really about music.

McGilchrist applies his hemispheric analysis to the rise and fall of civilizations. When we think about peak moments-- ancient Greece or Florence during the Renaissance or more recent times where we struck a healthy balance between individual liberty and the greater good-- there's a thriving business community and a thriving arts scene. There's a functioning government and a broader conversation about why we're here. We are constructing rather than deconstructing.

The hemispheres work in concert.

McGilchrist suggests that the balance doesn't last. As civilizations mature, they over-index on the get-it-done-now left hemisphere. They optimize to a point where they've become brittle. Society tells us that education must lead to an ROI. Universities cultivate donors who attach their name to STEM buildings and business schools. Art and humanities lose their patrons. They go mainstream and commercial.

McGilchrist warns that when the left hemisphere is in charge, we think we have it figured out. "Because it knows less, it thinks it knows everything."

That's when people and companies and societies fall. Hubris.

I'm sure there's boundary-pushing art all around. But industries that historically challenged the norms have matured. The golden age of cinema has given way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You'd better be able to cross-promote the fanchise.

Book publishers have consolidated; they care more about "platform" and predictable audience than the quality of the writing. Not sure William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf would find a publisher today. Such is the way of late-stage, left-hemisphere-dominated civilizations.

But they know how to optimize an experience and maximize a return. The bracelet system is remarkably efficient.

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Oceans Calling felt like "art" for an aging, dare I say it, declining civilization.

Still, I had a great time. We're just a few years removed from COVID lockdowns. What a gift to get to wander the beach with 50,000 people listening to live music. And what a gift to get to do it with lifelong friends.

For years, we'll joke about Dave Matthews rambling encore bit and whether we actually saw The Beach Boys or a cover band with Mike Love kind of singing along. We'll debate whether we should have gone to Cage the Elephant or The Revivalists, and we'll laugh about that long walk home in the driving rain when we gave up on Blink-182.?

We kept wondering whether the festival organizers had decided they shouldn't go on or if Blink-182 refused to play in the rain. Upon reflection, I suspect neither of those is actually what happened. In the left-hemisphere world, I picture punk-band Blink's lawyers and Oceans Calling's lawyers were building competing risk models to guide the decision. Maybe even pulling out a contract and debating the indemnification language.

Is there anything more rock-and-roll than lawyers arguing over liability while their fans stand in the rain?

We've optimized our way into frictionless, cost-effective experiences. We've traded in spontaneity for predictability. I don't think that's a fair trade. Maybe the Revolution has been brought to us by Live Nation after all.