Smartening up
When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available:
- You can dumb down your message and your expectations, and meet your audience where they stand. You can coarsen your lyrics, offer simpler solutions, ask for less effort, demand less work, promise bigger results…
- Or you can smarten it up, and lead despite your goal of mass, not chase it.
The very fact that "dumb down" is an expression and "smarten up" isn't should give any optimist pause.
Culture is a gravitational force, and it resists your efforts to make things work better.
So what? Persist.