I’ve spent a lot of time in Ubers the past few days, jetsetting back and forth across my home town of Zagreb, Croatia.
A part of that experience has been listening to the local pop radio stations, which seem to be the music of choice for Uber drivers here.
(Bear with me for a minute. I promise to give you a good payoff to this story.)
During an Uber today, an awful pop song came on the radio. A woman was singing a childish tune over a reggae rhythm played by synthesizers. The chorus kept repeating (translated from Croatian):
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When you’re alone, you need to go to the sea
When you’re alone, you need a friend
When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need a nice girl
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“What is this horror,” I asked myself after the chorus repeated for the 45th time. Then on the 46th repeat, the final line changed:
“When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need Severina”
“Oh ok that makes sense,” I said.
In case you don’t know — and if you do, I have questions for you — Severina is the most nationally and internationally famous singer from Croatia.
Starting in the early 90s, for a decade and more, Severina recorded dutiful and horrible songs like the one I heard today. Her career wasn’t going anywhere.
And then, in June 2004, a sex tape involving Severina leaked out. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the tape was quickly viewed more times than the moon landing.
As you can probably guess, Severina’s sex tape transformed Severina’s music career.
It opened up huge new audiences both locally and internationally. It helped her change her image to a kind of sex vixen.
It got a lot of musicians, including some respectable ones, interested in working with her. And it has kept her music, awful though it is, playing on the radio, even today, 20 years later.
But I promised you a good payoff to today’s story, and a sex tape ain’t it.
Along with listening to Severina, I am also reading a book titled Veeck As In Wreck. It’s the autobiography of Bill Veeck, who was one of the most innovative and influential owners of a major league baseball team in the history of the sport.
At different times, Veeck owned the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians.
But he started out by working for the Chicago Cubs, back when the Cubs were a horrifically losing team. Of course, no fans wanted to go see the Cubs since they were so bad, and the Cubs’ stadium, Wrigley Field, sat empty.
Veeck managed to turn all this around. Well, not the Cubs’ losing record, but the attendance problems.
Veeck managed to sell out game after game by introducing creative giveaways (live lobsters, a horse), spectacles (fireworks, before any other baseball teams had ’em), and schemes (a dwarf playing as designated hitter). As Veeck put it in in his autobiography:
“A team that isn’t winning a pennant has to sell something in addition to its won-and-lost record.”
And now I’d like to point out something crazy that might have slipped your attention:
Both the Chicago Cubs and early-stage Severina were in the entertainment business — sports and music. I mean, what sells easier and better than sports and music?
Except, of course, for the Cubs and Severina, being “entertaining” wasn’t enough. They both kind of sucked at that, and so they had to tack on a second degree of entertainment — a circus environment, a sex tape — in order for fans to care or at least stomach their first degree of entertainment.
And that’s the point I wanted to get across to you.
If you’re selling something important and dutiful, you can sell more of it by trying to be entertaining. You probably already know that – it’s the “infotainment” idea that people like Sean D’Souza have been championing for two decades.
The thing is, you might not be much of an entertainer. Or you might be decent, but you might simply be in a marketplace where everybody else is also entertaining, and maybe as well as you.
In that case, you can still lap the pack if you offer a second-degree of entertainment — entertainment of a different kind, preferably in an entirely different format.
And with that, I’d like to announce I’m launching a new project, an OnlyFans channel, Bejako After Dark — no, you wish.
But I am thinking about this topic of second-degree entertainment seriously. In time, some good idea will land on me. Maybe it will be OnlyFans.
In any case, until that happens, let me just turn you on to something I’ve already created — an entertainment of a different kind, in an entirely different format, in which I bare myself quite naked: