Cultish Creative Weekly Recap (1/18/2025)

My “the internet disrupted music riff” got more attention than I imagined it would. If you missed it, read it here, but more importantly, watch Roger Mitchell of Albachiara and Jason Buck of Munity Fund connect music, to media, to sports, and beyond - all through the language of following the money. The conversation may sound a little narrow at first, but the lessons are HUGE.

Over on Excess Returns, Jack Forehand and I did a deep dive into how we understand and use a bunch of Warren Buffett’s ideas. This was fun to put together. And, like anything with Buffett, the breadth and value of such simple ideas is brilliant.

Notes that went into the Personal Archive this week:

It’s not even played well, but it’s still such an infectious song: Too Short and Erick Sermon doing “Buy You Some.” Plus, I share some of the backstory about how they took the high road on the East/West beef with the track, and along the way changed the course of music (more than either ever seems to get credit for).

More Erick Sermon stuff - this time even deeper into how he shifted attitudes about how long a producer had to wait for a song to sit on the shelf before it was viewed as fair game to be sampled. It only seems obvious now. In the mid-90s this was a revelation.

Necessity is the mother of invention, even in the story of how Superman came to be plagued by Kryptonite. I cannot promise you won’t have a Spin Doctors song stuck in your head after you read this, FYI.

Gatekeepers are critics. They say what’s cool and what’s not. You think they matter, and to a degree they do, but never as much as you think. The people you want to care are actually the Goalkeepers. Holy crap Marc Ecko where have you been all my life with this metaphor.

Your good idea is never enough. You need a great story to pair it with, including some prior references(!). Wonderful wisdom from Marc Ecko.