You ever try to buy concert tickets lately?

It’s like applying for a mortgage… but with less honesty and more fees.

Back in the day, music was about heartbreak, rebellion, and doing drugs in a field. Now it’s about premium VIP ultra-platinum verified resale access to see a man who used to sleep in his car sing songs about how he used to sleep in his car.

We let greed turn poetry into product. Art into algorithm. Expression into marketing.

And then we called it progress.

Hollywood? Please. That place hasn’t made anything honest since they figured out you could weaponize narrative.

Operation Mockingbird didn’t end, it just got a wardrobe change and a Netflix deal.

Once upon a time, artists made stories that questioned power.

Now they pitch them to power first, then edit out the risk, the truth, and the parts that might make a senator sweat.

Wanna make a living in music? Good luck.

Unless your dad owns a label or you went viral for being hot in overalls while singing derivative Americana, you’re gonna spend 10 years playing to drunk strangers at dive bars while L.A. execs sniff coke off the back of artists they didn’t write checks for.

And don’t even get me started on “synchronization rights.”

These weasels figured out they could take a breakup anthem and turn it into a car commercial if they slowed it down and put some slow-motion shots of a truck driving through the desert.

He lost his girl, his dog, and his dignity… but hey, this Ram 2500 hauls more than trauma, it hauls freedom.

Meanwhile, a kid with something real to say can’t afford a guitar, a mic, or a night off work.

And we wonder why everything sounds the same. Why every script is safe. Why poetry is a hashtag now and not a revolution.

Because the gatekeepers killed the prophets.

Because rent is due.

Because truth doesn’t test well with shareholders.

And still, somehow, somewhere, some 17-year-old is bleeding into a notebook by lamplight, making something no label could ever own.

God help us if they stay hungry long enough to finish it.