Industrial Earplugs-Style

Anyone out there ever listen to the radio? Plenty of people do, I know. The car I’m borrowing this morning only happens to get two stations, Fly 92.3 or The River. I have to decide. Nickelback or Lionel Richie? Listening to Fly 92 at least offers me the chance of hearing the Kanye West song, and so I decide to chance it, on the 90% chance that I’m going to hear something bad. And I mean terrible. I know from past experience that this particular station has a play list of the same four or five songs, periodically interrupted by the radio DJ coming on to announce the latest in celebrity affairs. “Can you believe,” she intones, “Brad Pitt and Angelina?” At which point she segues back in (you’ve got to love the segue, like they do it on the nightly news. They will segue anything if you give them the chance), “Well at least these two won’t have to worry about what Kanye is singing about here.” She plays the prenup song and I’m getting all into it. Getdowngirlgoheadgetdown. People are taking sidelong glances at me from their cars. I try and wrap my brain around just what it is it about a skinny white kid brandishing freaky dance moves to a song about conjugal arrangements while seated in a rusty Buick that elicits all out derision from passers by, but people are totally spazzing out. It’s like they just cannot believe. Kind of a weird part of town, I decide. What can I do?

I listen some more. “Nickleback,” I say derisively underneath my breath. All dancing has come to a halt. I cannot believe this kind of subservience. It’s terrible: the equivalent experience of looking at the place where you live, the junk-strewn living room and declaring, this is just not working here. We’ve got to do something about this. The weird thing about most pop-cultural stuff, though, is that people never make those kind of deductions, they don’t really care. It’s just kind of there, like the weather, and you just kind of deal with it. And this is a point which extends well beyond music to a myriad of subject matters which I contemplate on a daily basis. Walking around the grocery store the other day. Is there anything in here which won’t kill me? Something which doesn’t extend the package life of a particular product to beyond infinity, which won’t give me a heart attack at some later point. Listening to Fly 92, actually, is the musical equivalent of the various toxins in most of the foods at your local grocery mart. I try and be discerning but what can you do. You find yourself in a borrowed car and all there is to eat is some candy bar that you find in the dash. It’s a heart attack all the same.

There’s this guy at some venue of “entertainment” that I sometimes go to, and I notice he wears what appears to be headphones. On closer inspection, though, I realize that they are not actually headphones, but in fact industrial-sized earplugs, like the kind they give to construction workers who have to deal with insidious noise all day. “Hey, why do you wear those for?” I ask him one time. “Oh, I just can’t handle this radio station in here,” he tells me. It seems totally insane, but then, I understand, too. You have to keep your guard up. And I kind of feel like, optimistically, we’re all just drowning out the din, industrial earplugs-style, like that guy. In fact, I like to think of it as a conceptual steel-plated suit, like a medieval warrior. You can almost imagine. So next time you see me, don’t ask me why I’m dressed so weird.