Politics & Power Quote by Brian Setzer

There’s grief in Setzer’s line, but also a pointed accusation: the pipeline that once turned hungry regional musicians into national names has narrowed to a drip. Coming from a guy who helped revive rockabilly for a mass audience, the complaint isn’t just nostalgia for a golden age; it’s a warning about what happens when a culture stops minting shared icons and settles for endlessly refreshed content.

“Veteran performers are dying off” lands with blunt mortality, stripping away the usual mythmaking around legacy artists. He’s not romanticizing them as immortal legends; he’s reminding you their absence will be literal, and soon. The second clause twists the knife: it’s not that the old guard is leaving, it’s that nothing is replacing them at the same scale. “New acts” implies not just individual songs going viral, but durable performers with repertoires, stagecraft, and a relationship to audiences built over years. “National scene” is the key phrase, a relic and a rebuke. In the streaming era, attention is fragmented, geographically unmoored, and algorithmically sorted; fame can be huge and still feel niche.

Subtext: the industry’s incentives now reward speed, branding, and playlist compatibility over band cohesion, touring miles, and risk-taking. Setzer is also defending the idea of performance as a craft, not a byproduct of metrics. His worry isn’t simply that tastes changed; it’s that the cultural infrastructure that once made careers - radio, TV bookings, label development, a commons where everyone heard the same songs - has been quietly dismantled.