People speak very confidently about music and music history having only been exposed to reading advertisements about it

I think there is something instructive about this though, that there is an under explored market for truth. If you look past promo language and hagiographies the history of 20th century music, and the story of the present for that matter, is fascinating.

over the past few years I've become a collector of stories about songwriters - learning who actually wrote the hits of the 20th century paints such a wildly different and informative picture of pop cultural history

the distance between how things were made, and by whom, and the official lore is so profound as to be paradigm shattering.

Basically at some point as a society we stopped admiring the composer and started admiring the person best equipped to sell what the composer has made. It is no coincidence our most famous inventors haven’t invented anything. Our most famous fashion designers don’t design etc

Also as a product of this lunacy we now have immeasurably powerful people who are only really very talented at pretending to have a clue