Taylor (it's ok I call her by her first name?) is a brilliant businesswoman and ninja promoter. Her music sucks! It's boring, self-indulgent elevator programming. Every song is about some hollow dude who wronged her...so she's marrying this Kelce idiot who's a complete douchebag. Fodder for her next 3 albums.
Is she Elvis, the Beatles the Stones....are any one a hundred more memorable artists? Not even close. You disagree with me. You're a moron. Sorry, the truth hurts.
Bob Lefsetz, the Man Who Was ‘So Mean’ to Taylor Swift
His newsletter isn’t always nice, but it’s chewed over by everyone who matters in the music industry.
By Matthew Hennessey, WSJ
Dec. 27, 2024 3:30 pm ET
If you subscribe to the Lefsetz Letter—the email bulletin from music business guru Bob Lefsetz—you will find yourself waiting impatiently, as I do, for its irregular arrival in your inbox. The newsletter has no publication schedule. It simply shows up, often late at night. Sometimes you get nothing for a week. Sometimes three emails come in a single day. Keep up with it and you’ll know everything worth knowing about the multibillion-dollar record and concert industry. Every edition is chewed over by the people who matter in the dream factories of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard and Nashville’s Music Row.
Mr. Lefsetz, 71, isn’t the only writer interested in the sweet spot where art and business meet, but few bring such curmudgeonly glee to the task. It’s fair to say he isn’t for everyone. He’s loud. He’s the kind of guy who orders the most expensive thing on the menu when someone else is paying. Prickliness is his calling card. His stream-of-consciousness writing style cribs from the “new journalism” popularized by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and the celebrated rock writers of the 1960s and ’70s. His unedited epistles arrive full of jaggedy insights and contrarian riffs.
That style of journalism isn’t so new anymore, and Mr. Lefsetz doesn’t have the raw talent of Lester Bangs or the literary aspirations of Nick Tosches, but he’s got several things that every writer needs to be successful: a genuine love of his subject, the energy to crank out a seeming infinity of words, and an eager readership. He also has the instincts of an entrepreneur. “I was at a hamburger joint on Pico Boulevard in L.A., and I’m reading Billboard. It was bad. I’m reading and I go, ‘This is terrible. I could do a better job than this.’ This is May of ’86.” The Lefsetz Letter was born.
Mr. Lefsetz won’t say exactly how many subscribers his newsletter has, only that he’s “reaching six figures every time I hit send.” As I learn when we meet for lunch at a ritzy hotel in Beverly Hills, he talks like he writes, in short bursts of trenchant analysis held loosely together with digressions on history, culture, politics, Spotify, electric cars and his obsession with coffee-flavored yogurt. What was meant to be a two-hour conversation turned into a four-hour monologue about everything from Morgan Wallen (“the biggest act in America today—far bigger than Taylor Swift”) to my colleague columnist Holman Jenkins (“I’ve got to ask, what’s he like in real life?”). Mr. Lefsetz pauses only to swallow his Wagyu beef or to pop a cough drop.
The subject of Ms. Swift, he volunteers between bites, is “dangerous” for him. The pop superstar essentially admitted to “60 Minutes” in 2012 that she wrote her smash hit “Mean”—the refrain asks, “Why you gotta be so mean?”—about Mr. Lefsetz. He’d called her wobbly performance at the 2010 Grammys “dreadful” and worried that she was “too young and dumb” to realize how badly it would damage her career: “In one fell swoop, Taylor Swift consigned herself to the dustbin of teen phenoms who we expect to burn brightly and then fade away.”
Ms. Swift was only 21 at the time, an industry naïf trying to make the leap from country radio to mainstream pop. Then as now Mr. Lefsetz was an industry giant who spoke directly to executives, songwriters, producers and taste-makers. His criticism landed on the young artist—hard. “The things that were said about me by this dude, just floored me and like leveled me,” Ms. Swift confessed to CBS’s Lesley Stahl.
Some might say subsequent history has proved this dude wrong, but he won’t cop to it. “If you read the newspaper, if you read the news, Taylor Swift is the biggest act that ever happened,” he says. “I guarantee you, if we went through this restaurant, I’d be stunned if we could find one person who could name two songs from the new album.” We don’t canvass the dining room, but I follow the current music scene more closely than most people in their early 50s. I also have three daughters. Yet try as I might, I can’t come up with the name of a single song off Ms. Swift’s new album, never mind two. Honestly, I can’t even summon the name of the album. (It’s “The Tortured Poets Department.” Oh yeah. Right.)
Mr. Lefsetz’s point is that the music business isn’t what it used to be. The glory days are gone. The internet has dismantled the common culture. Streaming has dispersed the audience—and the revenue: “Anyone who tells you that the business is the same as it ever was? Hundred percent false.” Everything is segmented, disconnected, smaller. “When I was growing up, you had Top 40 radio.” The ubiquity of that format instituted a common musical vocabulary. “I can sing every lick of ‘Hello Dolly.’ I can sing every lick of ‘Strangers in the Night.’ ” Kids had to listen to that stuff even when they were “waiting for the Beatles” to come on. These days, “no one has to listen to anything they don’t want to. So what is Taylor Swift selling?”
Not since Adele’s 2011 breakthrough “Rolling in the Deep,” he says, has an artist been able to “reach everybody” with a song. “Is that because we live in a tower of Babel society or is that because we don’t have the right record?” Both. “We lived through a renaissance in the ’60s and ’70s. They had one Renaissance in painting and sculpture. They’ve been painting and sculpting a lot of great s— since then, but there was only one Renaissance. We never had another Bob Dylan.”
The search hasn’t necessarily been called off. The financial allure of a new renaissance in popular music remains strong. “What we have now is a business akin to the late ’50s and early ’60s, when you had Bobby Rydell and Fabian”—prepackaged label creations that kept the teenyboppers buying records but brought little that was new or interesting in the way of artistry. Fabian didn’t move the needle like the Beatles or Mr. Dylan would do a few years later. “Can something come from left field? Absolutely,” Mr. Lefsetz says. “But it hasn’t happened yet.”
Read More Weekend Interviews
Benjamin Netanyahu: The Inside Story of Israel’s VictoryDecember 20, 2024
How Israel Turned the Mideast AroundDecember 13, 2024
For the needle to move, “you have to find someone talented, believable, who takes a different path. We’ve been looking for that in all walks of life. OK, so what do we have now? We have Elon Musk. One thing we know about Elon Musk, he’s doing it however the f— he wants. Good, bad or otherwise. That’s what the musicians used to do. Musicians don’t do that anymore.”
Mr. Lefsetz obviously holds Ms. Swift’s talents as a songwriter and record maker in low regard. That’s his right. She isn’t for everyone, just as the Lefsetz Letter could be considered an acquired taste. Yet the recording studio isn’t the only place for talent to prove its mettle or profitability. Mr. Lefsetz allows that Ms. Swift’s instincts as a performer and a businesswoman are top-notch. Her recently completed 21-month “Eras” tour grossed more than $2 billion. “You’ve got to give her credit” for that, he says, looking like he really means it. “She went out with the greatest-hit show” and said to her fans “I’m going to give you everything you want. And it worked.” Boy did it ever.
The swirl of money that Ms. Swift stirs up on tour impresses Mr. Lefsetz, but he isn’t driven to make money himself. The bits of biographical information that he drops during our conversation suggest that he’s never been great at holding down a job in what he calls “the straight world.” He earned a law degree in the 1980s but never figured out how to put it to use. “The ’90s were an unbelievable disaster,” he says. “I remember having $17 in my checking account and writing a bad check for the rent.” Before the advent of email, he mailed hard copies of his newsletter to movers and shakers. It was years before it took off. The lean times made an impression on him: “If you don’t have any money, that’s all you can think about.”
With his popped collar and worn jeans, Mr. Lefsetz gives the impression of an aging ski bum. It seems likely he could make a fortune off his newsletter, but he doesn’t charge for it. I ask him point blank why he does all this. Why start all these fights? Why mix it up so personally with brand-name artists and powerful executives? If it isn’t for the money, then what’s the motivation?
“Power and influence,” he offers bluntly. OK, does he have that? “Look,” Mr. Lefsetz says, “if you’re doing it for the money, there’s always going to be some money. Whereas, if I write about anybody in the world, they read it. I know they’re going to read it. That’s two-thirds of it. The other third is just the raw resonance of writing something.”
He does it for love of the game. How rock ’n’ roll is that? We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969, or not much of it anyway.
“Let me tell you a story,” he says. “I was at the House of Blues in L.A. the night it opened in 1994. I’m upstairs with Steven Tyler”—lead singer of Aerosmith. “I’m talking to him. The security guy comes up, says, ‘Hey, you got to break it up. You got to move on. Other people want to talk to Steven.’ Tyler turns to the security guard. He goes, ‘This is the most important person here. I’m going to talk to him as long as I want.’ And it’s like, that won’t pay you a dollar, OK. But what f— more can you ask for?”
Mr. Lefsetz is just like the crazy, temperamental artists he writes about. He understands the business they’re in because he speaks their language, knows their desperation. He’s possessed of the same irrational drive for creative control. The punk-rock spirit that drives Elon Musk drives him too. He’s constantly searching for the sweet spot where artistic freedom connects with an audience out on the open road. He’s a little rough around the edges. Ms. Swift is probably right; he doesn’t have to be so mean. He could have taken a different path. Maybe he’d have made a little more money if he were nicer, like Fabian or Bobby Rydell. But then someone else would have gotten all the power and influence. What fun would that have been?
Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor.
Comments