A Stone Temple Pilots documentary came on YouTube the other morning. I'm sitting there with my coffee and they pull up this Rolling Stone review from 1992 calling STP a Pearl Jam ripoff. Derivative. Unoriginal. Not worth your time.

Core sold eight million copies.

I laughed out loud. Not because it's funny — well, it is funny — but because I've seen this exact movie play out my whole life. Different actors. Same script.

The Critics Always Miss the RoomThe Critics Always Miss the Room

I grew up in Bangor. My stepdad Darren had Sabbath and Ozzy blasting constantly. My mom was Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty. My sister Carrie was Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails before any of that was cool to admit. We had a scene — Heavy's, the Sound House, the Outback, the Cave — Sam Black Church, Hatebreed, bands that made you feel like the walls were gonna come down.

Rolling Stone wasn't covering any of that. Rolling Stone was busy writing think pieces about whether STP was authentic enough.

Here's the thing about authenticity critics: they're always measuring the wrong thing. They want to know if something fits their framework. Does it come from the right city? Does it reference the right influences? Does it make the right people uncomfortable?

STP made millions of people feel something real. The critics called it derivative. Beavis and Butt-Head — cartoon characters — called it Pearl Jam. The magazine agreed with the cartoon.

Scott Weiland is dead and Plush still hits like a truck. Rolling Stone moved on. The music didn't need their permission.

Zeppelin Gets the Same TreatmentZeppelin Gets the Same Treatment

1969. Rolling Stone reviews Led Zeppelin's debut. The critic calls Jimmy Page "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs."

Page was so pissed he stopped talking to the magazine for years. Which, honestly, respect.

That album is now considered one of the greatest ever made. The band became the biggest in the world. Rolling Stone later published a list called "10 Classic Albums We Originally Panned." They know. They just keep doing it anyway.

The Pattern Is The PointThe Pattern Is The Point

Here's what I started noticing: they didn't get these bands wrong randomly. They got specific bands wrong, consistently.

Too loud. Too working-class. Wrong city. Too physical. Too emotional. Too much for people who didn't read music magazines to care about.

Zeppelin was too bluesy. Kiss was too theatrical. STP was too Southern California. Metal was too blue-collar. Hip hop — Rolling Stone treated hip hop like a curiosity for most of the 80s while it was literally reshaping American culture.

The pattern isn't bad taste. It's class. The gatekeepers consistently dismissed music made for people like us. Arena bands. Small town kids. The music you didn't need a critic to explain.

And then — every time — those bands sold out shows for decades, built loyal audiences, proved the point without ever needing to make it.

You Know Where This Is GoingYou Know Where This Is Going

Bitcoin hit the internet around 2009. The gatekeepers came out swinging.

Warren Buffett called it rat poison. Jamie Dimon called it a fraud. Nobel laureates wrote op-eds. CNBC ran the "is Bitcoin dead?" chyron so many times they should've trademarked it. Rolling Stoneof finance — all of them. Measuring the wrong thing. Missing the room.

Meanwhile the plebs were stacking. The weirdo Bitcoiners in forums, the cypherpunks, the people who'd read the whitepaper, the folks who just felt something when they understood what it was — they didn't need permission. They just kept going.

Fast forward to April 17, 2026.

Goldman Sachs — Goldman Sachs — filed with the SEC today for a Bitcoin Income ETF. A covered-call yield product. Built on the asset they spent years dismissing.

Let that sit for a second.

The same institutions that called it a scam, a tulip, a criminal tool, a speculative bubble with no intrinsic value — they're now selling you financial products built on it. Packaged up nice. Fees attached. Available through your broker.

That's Rolling Stone covering the Kiss Hall of Fame induction like they'd been fans all along. That's the Led Zeppelin retrospective. That's the STP revisionism.

Wrong about it. Dismissive of it. Late to it. And then right there at the front of the room once it was safe.

What This Actually MeansWhat This Actually Means

I'm not writing this to be smug. I took some chips off the table in early 2025 — funded something real with it — and I'm watching all of this unfold from Maine with my coffee, figuring out my next move.

I'm writing it because the gatekeepers haven't changed. They're doing it right now to something else. Some band. Some technology. Some idea that feels too weird, too working-class, too loud for them to take seriously.

And somewhere there's a kid who gets it — really gets it — who doesn't need their approval. Who's just gonna keep going.

That's always been the move.

The critics catch up eventually. They always do. But by then the music's already written.

— Jon Rich | TheRuralDegen
Orono, Maine

ETF flows data: $471M spot Bitcoin ETF inflows this week — best since February 25. Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Income ETF filing: April 17, 2026