Publisher's Synopsis
I hope by the time you reach the last chapter in this book called "MY FINAL THOUGHTS" you will have shared a journey with me through what we know today as the entertainment business. A journey that will show you what the business is, what it does, and who is affected by its agenda. The allure of the entertainment business has always been its ability to show you fantasy and then make that fantasy come to real life, in other words make you believe it. If you've ever listened to music, it got you, if you've ever watched television or a movie, it got you, if you've ever been involved in any form of entertainment or any form of communication, it got you. It's gotten us all. I remember back in 1974 watching a documentary film in high school called Subliminal Seduction. A guy named Wilson Bryan Key shared the process of subliminal advertising. He talked about the way they use film to arouse our desires to get us to do things and buy things we don't even want. Never in a million years could you have convinced me I would have the entertainment experience I've had and I'd be writing this book and that the foundation of the book would be about what came from that one moment in time. To this day, I've never forgotten that documentary and the things it talked about, it seemed so farfetched back then, but here we are today dealing with the same thing and it's as real as ever. They actually had a term back then they used to describe what subliminal seduction was. Even back then it should have alarmed us all, it was called "media rape" a term that infers someone is forceful in their attempt to get you to watch or participate in something that you may not be in agreement with. Things are no different now than back then. It's very easy to fool people, because we are so caught up in our own personal lives we haven't the time to pay any attention to what inevitably will happen to us all if we don't monitor the way we view entertainment. This isn't a forecast of the future nor is it prophecy, it's just good old fashioned truth that we're obligated to give some attention to. It has and will continue to affect all of us. I'm just beginning to understand how it's been affecting me my entire life. My first memory of music was back in the 8th grade, I remember having what was called a portable transistor radio. You could get about 4 or 5 stations clear and the other stations you have to listen to with static because they wouldn't come in that clear. I lived in a town where they had no R&B radio station, so R&B songs were a premium to us. R&B songs would play on the radio once or twice every hour during a DJs format. I would go to bed at night with a flashlight and my radio waiting for my favorite R&B songs to play. I knew all the songs and the time they were going to play because songs back then on radio would play around the same time every night for a least a few weeks. Because we weren't in what they called back then a soul or black music market we only heard the top R&B singers in music people like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, The Spinner's, Diana Ross, AL Green, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder and of course Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five.
