CHET GULLAND

The reason why I would do that is if we became the network of Facebook or the network of Google, we’d achieve that dream of mine overnight of being the next CNN and the next ESPN and the next MTV with the largest audience in the world. And it would be hard to say no to that not because of the money but because of the f***ing cultural impact you would have. At this point I don’t give a shit about money. Once you have a certain amount of money, it ceases to be an issue. I’d rather put my cultural imprint on the fabric of life. After money, all you want is immortality.

I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something
that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or
it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative
interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be
shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common
interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.

At any given moment, there are 850,000 Americans inside a Walmart store. Something weird is bound to happen.

Grunge retrospection is the music media’s and record industry’s own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture.

Sunday night’s Video Music Awards, though, were something different — not theatrics as a way of communicating some new vision of pop, but the reduction of pop to playfully dressing up in other people’s visions. It was less like a collision or symbiosis between theater and music, and more like a warning: The dress-up and drama could swallow that balance whole. To the point where pop stars, instead of inventing styles and aesthetics and bravely showing them to the world on TV, are just putting strange things on their heads and doing the kind of variety-show theatrics that audiences have to build back together into something meaningful.