Playing With Networking (Weekly Recap July 5, 2025)
July 5, 2025·0 comments·zg
Sunday Music: How Sly Stone Evolved, At The Beginning
Sly Stone's transformation between his first and second albums reveals the essential tension every creator faces: how to maintain sophistication while achieving accessibility. His debut "A Whole New Thing" was brilliant but too cerebral - packed with Dylan references and Otis Redding answers that impressed jazz musicians but confused record buyers. The breakthrough came when manager Dave Kapralik delivered hard truth: "You have to make it for everyone, to get people dancing to your music." This led to "Dance to the Music" - still smart, but reorganized for both Miles Davis and your neighbor down the road. Sly cracked the code of doing both simultaneously, changing music history in the process.
The New Phonebook's Here: On Writing the Foreword to Jared Dillian's "Rule 62"
The experience of writing my first foreword became a meditation on "sonder" - that profound realization that everyone else's life is as complicated and emotionally chaotic as your own. Jared Dillian's willingness to be vulnerable and weird in finance (where that's "socially illegal") creates authentic connection rather than professional posturing. The collaboration emerged naturally because we both document the human experience without pretense. Writing someone else's introduction forced me to articulate what makes creative partnerships work: mutual respect for the mess and complexity of being human, plus the courage to show that mess publicly.
The Creative Economy's Structural Problem Has a Potential Solution
Yancey Strickler's Artist Corporation concept addresses a fundamental mismatch between how creative people actually work and how our business structures accommodate them. The core problem: you can't mix S-Corp and C-Corp tax treatments without losing benefits, forcing creatives to choose between optimizing for today's cash flow or tomorrow's sale value. A working musician might need S-Corp treatment for touring income, C-Corp structure for publishing catalog value, nonprofit status for grant work, and collaborative frameworks that don't fit any existing model. While I remain skeptical about the mechanics, the vision addresses real structural disadvantages that make creative careers unnecessarily difficult to sustain financially.
Read more at cultishcreative.com
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