“And ICE is gonna come, bust down your door
Try to build a house no one builds no more
But I got a telephone
Kids are all scared and all alone
The Boss stopped bumping, the rock stopped rolling
The middle finger’s rising and it won’t stop showing
I got some bad news
The fading of the red, white and blue”
Have you heard about the South Carolina judge whose house exploded?
By time you read this, they may have more news, but as of now…there’s no knowledge of the cause. Then again, how often do houses explode, especially those of people who have been subjected to death threats?
And I’m just about through with my web roundup, my three sets of tab groups in Safari, and Drudge (a font of great links) sends me to this:
“‘ICE Is Gonna Come Bust Down Your Door’” – Zach Bryan Teases Politicallly-Charged New Song, ‘Bad News’”
http://bit.ly/3ILslJY
Subsequent research says the song is entitled “The Fading of the Red, White and Blue,” but who knows for sure, BECAUSE IT’S NOT OUT YET!
It’s only a snippet, and you can see Zach playing the guitar and singing here, and you should:
This is the difference between a pro and an amateur, someone doing it from the heart as opposed to someone trying to cash in. With this one snippet, Zach Bryan has eclipsed all of Jesse Welles’s clips… This is not a lark, this is dead serious, from one of the biggest acts in the land.
But no one e-mailed me about it. Doing research, I find that “Billboard” did cover it…but that magazine doesn’t know whether it’s consumer or industry-facing and it’s no longer a must-read. As for hitsdailydouble…I didn’t see it there, then again…Bryan wasn’t paying them for promotion, so…
My point here is news bubbles up from the underground. There’s a lot of discussion of this new song on reddit. But as of now, the general public can miss it.
Have you been following the rollout of Taylor Swift’s new album?
I think she’s review-proof, but there’s a lot of fodder here for her to react to on her next album.
First I read Amanda Petrusich’s erudite take in “The New Yorker”:
“‘Why Does Taylor Swift Think She’s Cursed? – ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ the artist’s new album, is full of cringey sexual innuendo, millennial perfectionism, and an obsession with haters that wears thin.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/13/why-does-taylor-swift-think-shes-cursed
Now wait just a minute, weren’t essentially all of the initial reviews positive?
Then again, I point you to this clip from marketing guru Rory Sutherland, wherein he claims you get more independent thinking from working class people than those further up the economic food chain. He says:
“The upper middle class in the U.K. is reputationally paranoid. Is incapable of expressing opinions that might get them disinvited from dinner parties.”
@mindset.to.mills Rory Sutherland argues the middle class are more constrained by social pressure than the working class or aristocrats, calling it “reputational paranoia” and likening it to “mental nudism.” #rorysutherland #class #independentthinking #Psychology #socialpressure
Watch this clip, really.
And my point here is all the initial reviewers who were positive, were they afraid to be on the wrong side of the fence, wary of being denigrated not only by the Swifties, but their compatriots in the field?
Because days later you get this:
“Finally, everyone can say bad things about Taylor Swift”
https://www.celebrity.land.com/2025/10/06/entertainment/being-mean-to-taylor-swift
Once again, Swift is review-proof. The legs of the album will depend upon hit singles. There’s no middle ground in the Swift camp, you’re either in or you’re out, and it doesn’t matter what anybody has to say about her and her work. But the casual listener/fan can be exposed to a hit track and listen some more.
Then again, we’re talking here about pop music, hit music, Spotify Top 50 music. That’s what the business cares about, that’s what you read about on hitsdailydouble.com
Then again, Zach Bryan is signed to Warner, and has had arguably two hits, but that doesn’t mean you sell the most tickets ever to a gig, 112,408 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.
Are the hoi polloi aware of this date?
I’d say many more are aware of Taylor Swift’s new album, but…where is the heart of today’s music world, is it pop or…
Or to quote Don Henley, “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.” But if Zach Bryan throws it all down, not some ancient classic rocker, does that signify a renaissance, a changing of the guard from the pop dross of the past decades?
And Zach Bryan isn’t easily claimed by one political tribe or the other, after all, he served in the Marines. But here, he’s definitely taking a swing at ICE… Which has more press than any act, it’s number one with a bullet in the news right now. If you heard Governor Pritzker’s speech today…
But this is just a snippet, that’s all. But Zach’s audience is hungry for everything he does.
But isn’t he worried about BACKLASH?
God, you can’t get a musician with traction to stand up to Trump. Tons of nobodies, but they’re just doing it for attention, and when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Are Trumpsters going to burn Zach Bryan records like they did with the Beatles?
Well, there are no records. Sure, there are some physical souvenirs, but everything is available to everyone online, it’s just a click away.
So we’ve got ICE…
And the phone… You can be informed and broadcast right from your palm.
And the reference to Springsteen and maybe rock being dead, who knows, lyrics are up to the eye of the beholder.
But one thing is for sure, Zach Bryan is disillusioned with America.
And one other thing… We’re never going to have an overarching protest song like we had in the sixties. That’s not how it works anymore. Everything is niche, including Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift.
But this kerfuffle, and it is one online, was all started by just a clip, Zach Bryan and his guitar. There were no co-writers, no remixers, none of the b.s. dominating the Spotify Top 50. Zach didn’t need Max Martin to gain the public’s attention, he could do it all by his lonesome, which hearkens back to those “Hotel California” days.
Does the entire song come out and become a national discussion point? Or is it released to a thud and instantly forgotten.
One never knows anymore.
But those who take chances end up the victors. Those evidencing unrestrained humanity, their voice to our ears with no intermediaries, are the winners.
More like this please!
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source lefsetz.com ’
