Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 38
Cash App, a wild bobcat in the suburbs, John Madden stories, the dirty business of hit songwriting, Jake Paul, Dispos of the week, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
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Home Security Cam Video of the Week
If you do one thing today, please click on the tweet below and experience the rollercoaster of emotion in this clip.
The first 15 seconds are just mundane dad moments, including the timeless musing, “I need to wash my car.” Then, business really picks up as we hear a terrifying screech. Our suburban hero then runs around the back of his SUV to save his wife from a fucking bobcat. He lifts it in the air and then throws it like a sack of hammers. The highlight of the video is at the end when Dad declares “I’m gonna shoot that fucker.”
Seriously. Stop what you’re doing right now, put on your headphones and watch this video with sound. You’re welcome.
Cash App
This is a fascinating business story about Cash App’s recent purchase of Jay Z’s music streaming service, Tidal. If that sentence means nothing to you, here’s a quick primer: Cash App is basically Venmo, but cooler.
Cash App was founded in October 2013, and is owned by the Jack Dorsey-led financial services company Square, which invented those iPhone card swipe attachments used by every coffee shop and recently acquired majority ownership in Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service for mysterious reasons that might just relate to Cash App. Square’s card readers bring a sleek genericness to any kind of transaction, but they never permeated the zeitgeist like Cash App has.
Cash App is huge. The purchase of Tidal is the headline, but the more interesting part is the app’s growth story. Check the animation on the tweet below.
“Cash App’s explosion actually came out of Atlanta, which makes perfect sense,” says Web Smith, founder of 2PM Inc. and an ecommerce analyst. “You can see a graph of this boom occurring from Atlanta and along what I call the SEC South. It’s Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, which is incredibly odd for a technology company. It shows that outside of Silicon Valley, outside of the west coast and New York City, the real adoption was occurring because of Black culture in the south.”
Very often, what becomes mainstream pop culture starts off in the Black community, and both Guapdad and multi-platinum Portland rap star Aminé have noticed that Cash App is used significantly more than any other money transfer app by the people around them.
These are all good reasons for the popularity of Cash App in rap, but the biggest may be something simpler: it has been actively courting the association. Square has made partnering with rappers a priority–they gave away $100,000 as part of a promo with the genre’s preeminent brand-man Travis Scott, and Megan Thee Stallion also partnered with Cash App twice last year, including once with Cardi B around the release of “WAP.” Cash App has also created its own social media phenomenon with Cash App Fridays, during which the company gives away money to people who tweet at it.
“Cash App’s Twitter presence is ridiculous, and a lot of Black Twitter participates in the giveaways and shit that they do. That’s something that makes the brand cool and relevant,” Guapdad says. “If I was to do a giveaway, I’m Cash App-ing people.”
This leads us to:
Quotes of the Week
“This isn’t even just rap, this is just Black culture in general. Venmo is people in your business, and we don’t like people in our business,” Aminé explains. “I have a Venmo, but I don’t really use it anymore...It’s made for white culture. ‘Drinks with Sarah.’ The plug [emoji] for the electricity bill. Black people are not spending their time typing in what they’re paying for.”
“I used to think the public activity page on Venmo was so stupid, because it’s like a fake Blockchain ledger. It updates with all the transactions of people using the app, but not to make anything actually verifiable or to encrypt anything,” Guapdad adds. “It’s just so you can see it. I don’t give a fuck that someone in Mississippi bought a pizza.“
Me neither.
Podcast Promo of the Week
This week on Mind of Micah, we have a three-part look at the story of the legendary football coach, announcer, and video game icon John Madden.
Subscribe to Mind of Micah and get new episodes sent to your device as soon as they are published.
Inside the Dirty Business of Hit Songwriting
This piece from Variety dives deep into the world of pop music songwriting. Spoiler alert: songwriters are getting screwed.
As songwriters have seen their leverage eroded by streaming — which pays a larger royalty for recorded music than publishing — artists, managers, producers and even executives have amped up their demands for credit and/or a percentage of the songwriters’ publishing in exchange for the artist cutting the song, or even simply for bringing the song to the artist.
Multiple industry sources tell Variety that the practice involves some of the biggest stars in music and their teams; one major manager has even called the practice a “tax” for his artist recording a song. Pact co-founder Emily Warren (who has written hits for Dua Lipa and the Chainsmokers) and her manager, Zach Gurka, tell Variety that a standard ask ranges from 1% to as high as 20%, with an average of 15%; other sources speak of requests for 30% or even 50%. Songwriters often go along, on the premise that a smaller percentage of a hit song by a major artist is better than a large percentage of the same song when it isn’t a hit — and by that same logic, the writer’s publisher or manager may advise them that the tradeoff is better for their career than saying no.
The article details how a group of top songwriters has created a pact to not give away credit for their creations. But most interesting to me is the story at the start of the piece about Elvis and Dolly.
Sixty-four years ago, as Elvis Presley’s career reached its supernova stage, the 21-year-old singer’s team hit on a strategy that enabled him to profit from songwriting without actually writing songs. His management and music publisher had added Presley’s name to the credits on a couple of his early hits, but the singer wasn’t comfortable with the practice and frequently told interviewers that he had “never written a song in my life.” Instead, as recounted in Peter Guralnick’s authoritative biography “Last Train to Memphis,” his team set up an arrangement whereby the King skipped the credit but received one-third of the songwriting royalties for each song he released, no matter who wrote it. (This arrangement was confirmed to Variety by an industry source familiar with the catalog.)
According to Dolly Parton, the policy not only was still in practice nearly two decades later, but the King’s ransom had gotten even bigger. Presley was going to record Parton’s 1974 hit “I Will Always Love You,” which is now one of the top-selling and most-performed songs of all time, largely thanks to Whitney Houston’s epochal 1992 cover.
“I was so excited, Elvis wanted to meet me and all that,” she recalled in a September 2020 interview on the “Living & Learning With Reba McEntire” podcast. “And the night before the session, Colonel Tom [Parker, Presley’s longtime manager] called me and said, ‘You know, we don’t record anything with Elvis unless we have at least half the publishing.’ I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ And he said, ‘Well, then we can’t do it.’ And I cried all night, ‘cause I’d just pictured Elvis singing it. I know it wasn’t [his decision], but it’s true. I said ‘no.’”
Jake Paul is a clown
Like many, I watched (ok, illegally streamed) the Jake Paul-Ben Askren fight Saturday night. A few takeaways:
This guy is a dope. I really don’t understand the appeal. He’s not funny or clever. Based on his actions and the words he speaks, he’s just not very smart. The clip in the tweet below is perfect.
Some boxing notes: Jake Paul has some power. He was dominant throughout and showed some devastating power with his right hand.
He also wasn't touched. And it wasn’t because he showed a ton of defensive prowess. He still hasn’t faced a boxer, and until someone actually hits him, there’s no evidence that he’s legit at all.
Consider me surprised that Askren was so pathetic. To be fair, he’s been retired, just got a new hip, and perhaps most importantly, never been a striker. Dude was a wrestler first, second, and third. I thought he’d show a little more athleticism, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
I don’t understand anything about Triller. This event was a goodamn disaster in the best way. Technical mishaps, TERRIBLE lip-sync performances, bizarre attempts at comedy, and unnecessary and awful announcing.
I’d be happy to never pay attention to Paul or Triller ever again. But, I’m sure I’ll find a way to watch the next one too.
Dispos of the Week
We’re still on our Dispo kick at MROTW. Here are a few from the past week, including a promised update of the banana pudding cheesecake from last week’s read. I made it myself. And it was outstanding. Although be warned, it makes enough cheesecake to last for weeks.
Where else can I find Micah content?
Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip
Twitter: @micahwiener & @producermicah (Why two twitters? It’s a long story)
Instagram: @micahwiener
LinkedIn: @micahwiener
Peloton: #badboysofpelly@micahwiener
Dispo: @micahwiener
Clubhouse: @micahwiener
Email: micahwiener@me.com