Politics & Power Quote by Sean Booth

America, in Sean Booth's telling, isn't a nation so much as a misfiled mixtape. His line lands because it captures a familiar tension in music culture: lived geography versus corporate geography. On the ground, the U.S. is a patchwork of scenes with their own tempos, tastes, and gatekeepers - radio ecosystems, club networks, local press, regional slang, even different ideas of what "underground" means. From the perspective of a touring musician, those differences are not trivia; they're the conditions of whether a show connects or dies on arrival.

Booth aims his critique at the record industry's lazy convenience: the U.S. treated as "one territory", a single marketable blob to be serviced with the same rollout, the same promotional beats, the same assumptions about audiences. The subtext is frustration with how culture gets flattened when distribution and marketing dictate the story. It's not just that New York isn't Houston; it's that the industry's incentives reward pretending they are, because segmentation is expensive and nuance doesn't scale.

The choice of "handle it" is telling. It's managerial language, the kind used for inventory, not communities. Booth isn't romanticizing localism; he's pointing out a structural blind spot. When labels plan America as a unified territory, they also quietly decide which cities count as "America" in the first place - usually the ones already wired into power. For an artist operating outside mainstream pipelines, that misreading isn't abstract. It's the difference between being heard and being "released" into silence.