The Importance of the Opening Line: Part 2 of 4

Marcus and Patrick dive a little deeper into the treatment of intellectual property. Patrick catches up with his experience seeing Elton John with the family. The conversation then shifts to music genres and Marcus really wants to see AOR return. Patrick then rips up a poem featuring our favorite pop culture provider.  We do get a little phone interference towards the end of the segment.

Things and people that get mentioned:

LOTR Rings of Power Youtube (for the comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8UAUAuKNcU

https://www.taylorswift.com

https://disneyland.disney.go.com

About Author Patrick Hare

A performance poet for more than twenty years, Patrick Hare has always redefined the ability of poetry to be a weapon of humor, using a sardonic scalpel in his language and theme choices to un-apologetically reveal the areas of our lives we’d all rather not see.

Patrick has performed nationally, including several National Poetry Slams. Learn more at https://brickcaveclick.com/f6lvdvq

About Author Marcus Campbell

Marcus Sterling Campbell is a poet and film enthusiast from Phoenix, Arizona. Graduating from Mesa Community College, he received a high distinction in Creative Writing, along with degrees in Journalism and General Studies. He is a Vortex Award winner and has placed in several writing contests within the Mesa community. Marcus sweats when he writes and while growing his Magic collection. His work can be found scattered across the web or @marcus_s_campbell on social media. Learn more at: http://www.marcusscampbell.com/about.html

About Brick Cave Media®

The Brick Cave Podcast is ©2024 Brick Cave Media LLC., all rights reserved. for more information on Brick Cave Media, visit the organization's website at https://brickcave.media. The Brick Cave Membership Community is called the BC Book Club, and you can join at http://bcbookclub.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
I don't know the the the the actual name or the theme of
the the sort of the idea of, you know,
using the past to inform your work.
And so and then there
was the idea of, what was it, ownership or property or something like that, which
I didn't quite understand what was meant by property.

(00:23):
So, I mean, I I think part of it is like, okay. Are you referring
to other people's artistic properties or work? But then
it's also, you know, making references to things that have been
written in the past or, you know, going back to,
whether it's a historical type thing or whether it's, somebody
else's writing in the past that you're kind of aping. Oh,

(00:45):
so, like, the what's the Jane Austen is
the where the someone did, like, a A pride and prejudice and zombies. Yeah.
Like, that kind of stuff? Is it kind of hitting it like that kind of
thing? Like, how do we treat intellectual property in that way? Was that what it
was trying to do? From the discussion, it was hard to be sure
because, I mean, you get the the audience questions, and sometimes you really go off
the rails. Yeah. I had the same thing in a diversity panel.

(01:09):
Literally, from the first question that we took, it went way off rails, and it
just ended up being a bunch of, like, me me one liners from the Internet.
I just had to respond to, like, basically the YouTube comment section.
It did not go well. It is not constructive.
If you wanna know how that panel went for, me and everybody else in the
room, go to the announcement for Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power.

(01:31):
Go to the comment section. Read through that back and forth down there, that's
pretty much how it went. Oh my gosh.
Nowhere. We got nowhere.
But aside from that, all the other panels, I think, were great. I found myself
constantly talking about Hellraiser, which was a problem, just
kept coming up, which I think made me look really creepy. Like, of all the

(01:54):
horror movies to reference in, like, that kind of setting,
the the weird, sadomasochistic,
sexy torture movie is probably not the one to keep bringing
up over and over and over again.
It was like 4 or 5 times that I brought the movie Hellraiser. Like, I'm
really glad people didn't follow me from panel room to panel room or it would

(02:16):
have been really weird. So I'm gonna have to work on my references next time,
not bring up Hellraiser so often.
Rough. Yeah. It was a fun weekend. And see, in the middle, I
was, I saw Elton John. So it's like, okay. Tucson. One day of
Elton John. Then back. So it was,
I I hope to do similar thing again except, you know, all 3 days

(02:39):
or Yeah. You were telling me you brought the kids to Elton John. Right? Yeah.
Because they're big fans? Yes. Yeah. My kids know a lot of classic
rock, because, you know, they were always driving
them back and forth in the car. And it's it's not just classic rock. They
know the eighties, and they know, a wide variety of musical styles.
But it's just funny that even the small children, they you catch

(02:59):
them singing along with songs like, where did you even hear that?
Like, I'm glad you like it because it's playing on the radio. Yeah.
So, yeah, with Elton John, they knew a lot of the songs.
Fascinating. Which is good because those were expensive tickets and there were nosebleed seats.
Yeah. Loud. Loud. It was it was crazy. I mean, I'm glad
I brought earplugs for everybody because, yeah, you can still hear it with earplugs in,

(03:22):
but you could you could feel it. You're getting shaken by the sound. Yeah.
I like it that way. I Well, it was Bank 1
Buffalo. It's Chase Field. That's what it's called nowadays. And so
just and we were up, like I said, nosebleeds. So you're just,
you know, like a mountain goat climbing up into the stands there, and there's a
bunch of drunk people. And so many people had feather boas. There are, like,

(03:45):
pieces of feather cheap feather boa all over the place.
I love that detail. That's gonna end up in a poem at some point. The
cheap feather boas from the Elton John concert. That's, like, that's an image. I
don't know what it means yet, but it's just waiting to be
connected to something to mean something else. So I like that
image. It's like a red wheelbarrow, but more magnificent.

(04:10):
Well, I was just thinking, boy, these things are falling apart. They're in the air.
It's, like, if you got mesothelioma from cheap Yeah. You
take it to compensation. If a
stage falls on you, if you're at a Travis Scott show in Texas, no.
But not really, though. He sucks for that. But I wanna Megan
has this interesting thing where, like, any rock music before the eighties,

(04:33):
she'll refer to it as classic rock.
So this brings up an interesting sub conversation.
What genre was Elton John upon release?
Because he wasn't classic rock upon release. So what genre was
Elton John upon release? I'd say it was pop music at that
point. Right. That's what I was thinking because a lot of what we refer to

(04:56):
as classic rock now was probably classified as pop at the
time. Most of it. I mean, unless it was what they would call album oriented
rock where it's not like the top 40 stuff, but
tons of it, though, that's classic rock. I mean, it was on the top 40.
Yeah. So Interesting. Album oriented
if we're gonna shift to music for a second. Album oriented stuff.

(05:18):
I'm very ADHD, guys, so hang out with me. Album or
album oriented stuff is something that I would really like to see return.
Because, like, with the shift towards, like, music streaming and albums being
more streaming based, it's like when music was more tuned for the
radio, but worse, where, like, every single song is
basically a single. Like, there would be 6 or 7 singles for an

(05:40):
album. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I saw, like, Taylor Swift had, you
know, 11 positions or or the 11 top positions of
Billboard. It's like, well, that's because you have to stream every single one of them.
That's not Billboard is not what it used to be where it
was how many songs are getting sold and how many songs are getting played on
the radio. Mhmm. And so it was an achievement to have, you know, 5 songs

(06:01):
in the top 10. But now it's like the if they're all in top 10
and it's all based on pod or streaming and Bob Dylan gets
number 1 with a 17 minute song, then it's just, okay, how
many people are streaming it today? That's that's a I think
it taken the meaning out of number 1 on the Billboard charts.
I agree. And it definitely shifted it because it it affected the

(06:24):
trend in that if you release like Taylor Swift, if we just stick on that
one, if you release a really strong album, you can dominate the
entire top songs chart. Like, it's a real problem. It happens anytime a Kendrick
album comes out. It'll just, like, break out the top ten. It happens
with Taylor Swift. It happened with Katy Perry in the beginning. I remember it happening.
It's happened a few times. And then it it's created these weird trends in, like,

(06:45):
record keeping where Lil Pump is,
like, gonna be in the history books for music. And that's an
unfortunate piece of history that we just have to deal with because there was a
blip in the record keeping where, like, Lil Pump was allowed to just rise to
popularity because the same person played the song 12,000 times at a
party. You know, it it's very interesting.

(07:06):
I think it's fascinating. Wow. You're gonna find more of those loopholes. Yeah. We
do. Well, loopholes in music and just getting
really weird. So Taylor Swift just set that record for album sales. 1 of my
coworkers, who's a Taylor Swift fan, was telling me that one of the ways that
they did that and why it's kind of like a little fudge, a little
little cheeky cheeky with the numbers a little, is in order to

(07:28):
complete the image of the clock tower on the back of the album, you have
to buy 4 different versions of it. Oh, wow. So all the super
fans bought 4 different bought the album 4 times,
which is genius. I immediately thought of, like,
extracting, like, video game companies, how they identify whales and identify,
like, the core items that they want in each game and just extract

(07:51):
the money from them. And they're doing the same thing in music now. Producers
gonna interject, that that's not a new trend. Kiss did that
when they all went solo. Oh, yeah. They released a solo album. So you had
to buy each each member's solo album to
kinda get the complete set. Yeah. And you got, like, one album's worth of music
out of that. Right. Yeah. See? That's a good album too. But it

(08:12):
worked. That's a good idea too. That's a good idea.
I think it's cheeky. I think it's
cheeky and fun. Well, in talking about monetization,
I do have a piece that's like that. So, we'll roll into
this. Okay. Try to
hold it as far as we can move it. You're interfering a little bit there.

(08:35):
Okay. Is this good? Yeah. You're okay. Okay.
Hey, Mickey. I don't wanna pay for the lightning lane. I already coughed up
a couple $100 to get into this mousetrap, and now I'm bound in the
shallows and miseries of the standby line. $20
per ticket per person per day might be fine for the bougie crowd

(08:56):
streaming by, but over here it's building an undercurrent of resentment that's certain
to build a battalion of mini Marxists.
Congratulations. You managed to monetize the magic right out of this
kingdom. Their money cost me more time. My
slow crawl to the ride gets stalled by the Uppercrust blitz, hopping
on here, hopping off there, and hi hoing through Fantasyland on the

(09:18):
way to their next available rabbit hole. It's bad enough that
Disney heretically transformed popular religions like Chronicles of
Star Wars or the Stan Lee saga or the Pixar
fables, but now they've stuck a long and winding line in between the
cart and the gate. Once upon a time in the Disney
Pantheon pilgrimage, there was a Fastpass, and it was

(09:40):
good. You got your designated time to enjoy at least one of your
favorite rides, and there was no extra charge.
The attraction at the end of the lightning lane is a fast pass exciting thrill
ride with sharp drops, bumps, and strobe lights, which you are never going
to get to experience because the line always breaks down or the ride always
breaks down before you come and folk get to it. And

(10:03):
now the whole world's gone lightning. On your way out of Anaheim, you can
pay $16 to take the faster section of the used to be freeway.
Taxes paid for it, but it costs more if you wanna enjoy it. You can't
get a sandwich at the subs sub shop because there's a 30 minute backup from
people who ordered on the app. And if you don't sign up for an online
TV network, you're never gonna get 2 way 2 day free shipping.

(10:25):
It's high time for a rise of the resistance that brings back the fast pass.
If we ground and discharge this lightning lunacy right now, at least we'll
have a chance to top you the happiest jerks on earth, and then we can
all get amped up on the over sugared churros.