Everybody Get Up And Dance

It's only real if you feel it...

I love Madonna. Back in the ‘80s, a whole movement grew into what (ironically, of course) became commercialized Alternative Music. The world revolted against the pre-packaged pop star. I was on the front lines, charging forward like a good soldier for REAL artists, for REAL music, REAL talent… and then by 2000, our culture revolted again and demanded a Britney, a Christina, and three or four manufactured boy bands to boot! And my dirty little secret the whole time was that I loved Madonna.

I have never thought Madonna was a good singer, or a good dancer, and she has never been a good actress, to be sure! And yet, she did something with each of those things that shaped our very culture. And that is art. But it’s not the art you expected. You may say in review that none of it was her talent, but there she sits at the epicenter of it all. So I argue there is real talent there, a real art. But we don’t respect it because the medium is us.

Madonna is not a Leonardo DaVinci, she’s no Ginger Rogers, she’s not even a Lady Gaga. It’s tempting to say she has no talent at all because we’re uncomfortable with the truth. She shaped us. She threw a party and invited anyone who wanted to come, and we all came. She used the tools of the music industry to paint on the canvas of civilization itself. And lest you doubt it’s real, she’s still doing it. She just had a number-one dance album at 67.

I’ve started this series by telling you, “You can do it, too.” I’ve said, “You’re already doing it.” Now I am arguing to you why it’s okay for you to do it, using Madonna as an example. Forty years ago, everyone said we can’t have this! We can’t have manufactured pop stars when real artists are suffering and nobody is buying their music. I would submit we are all Madonna now: our job is to understand the industries and skills available to us, pick them up as if they were paintbrushes, and use them to make an art nobody understands, but which everybody loves.

If you can do that, you have mastered AI.

Madonna took the intelligence of a marketing team, she took the intelligences of the likes of a Jellybean Benitez to a William Orbit, she took the intelligences of distribution masters like Sire Records all the way to Ticketmaster, and she used it all like they were just tools in a kit. She had enough intelligence of her own that, even though she was not a master of these other intelligences, she could use them effectively because she knew what she wanted. My point here is that now you have access to nearly any intelligence you need. All that is required is that you have the minimum intelligence to invoke it, just like Madonna did forty years ago.

The big companies have packaged it and commoditized it for you. You could argue they “stole” our collective knowledge, but packaging it fits better, if we’re honest. Because all cumulative knowledge and art is stolen from those before us. What we’re paying for is the packaging and access.

And my overall argument with this series is to convince you of the opportunity in front of you. I want to help you take it. The Wily Chronicle is not for that 20-year-old dude on YouTube telling you how to make $1k a minute in 6 easy steps. I wouldn’t even promise you could make $20k a year. But the truth is that you may be Madonna. You may have just enough intelligence of your own and the skills to see and use all the intelligences available to you now and push that into something real—whether that means coding a custom desktop trading dashboard, launching an open-source community directory, or engineering a local automation system that keeps you entirely off the corporate cloud. Or you may just run a small business, too, and be able to use intelligence to slowly eke out improvements in that business in a way that was not available to you before.

So as always, I don’t want to be that guy that says, “It’s inevitable, stop resisting!” Rather, I hope to show you that this is nothing new, not really. But it is a moment, and it won’t last forever. You can leverage this opportunity, but not if you reject it. It is your very unique situation that brings value to the moment, too. Take Madonna out of the equation and all you get is Stacey Q. Maybe you are only Stacey Q. But whoever you are, whatever you are, you may have just the insight needed to pull from this massive intelligence some nugget of gold that nobody else can pull from it. You have not lost value, you have gained value. You have gained opportunity, but only if you take it. You’re not stealing, you’re not fake, and you’re no less than any other success if you can pull it off. Because that is the talent—it’s just not what you think it should be.