The Car Radio

To the best of my knowledge, no car radio stations provide the type of music I really like to hear: Celtic Punk! Without the passion of the punk, Celtic music degenerates into the insipid and maudlin. I was in a pub in Ireland where a fellow audience member was singing tearfully along with the band, "I'm drunk today, and I'm seldom sober," and much as I can understand that some people may have a sentimental attachment either to their drunkenness or their sobriety, it didn't quite work for me. On the other hand, without the ornamentation and playfulness of Celtic instruments, punk becomes the mindless rage of "Oi!" or "brroorgghh!!!" or whatever the singer feels like grunting. Celtic and punk go together like love and marriage, uniting passion and playfulness. Without the passion of the punk as background music, a graduate student would lack the energy to attack his dissertation, but without the ornamentation of the Celtic, he would be unable to type words like "postcolonial."

Anyway, radio stations do not typically offer me this artistic ideal, so I have tried to come up with alternatives when I'm driving. For a while, I listened to the "Oldies," because they were more enjoyable to modern music. After a couple of years of listening, I noticed a certain pattern: there were never new oldies! Apparently, people had stopped writing them! So, as I had to listen to the same songs over again, I learned the truth of the adage, "familiarity breeds contempt." I dreaded hearing again that the only way to know that he loves you so is in his kiss. In order to distract myself from my inner being crying out, "Please, I can take no more!" I started to analyze the problematic features of the song. I mean, as we know from Kant, it's pretty hard to distinguish between das Ding an sich, the kiss as it is in and of itself, and das Ding an mich, the kiss as it appears to the person. How could this song offer such triumphant certainty and lack of critical analysis! Such superficial empirical claims may have worked in a bygone era, but ours is an era of non-bygoneness! I digress. The point is, the more you have to hear the same songs over again, the more struck you are with just how much they are not Shakespeare, and you become constitutionally incapable of appreciating them for what they are: vapid and meaningless.

After going through a "classic rock" car radio phase, the same problem about no new songs arose. Happily, there was not the same goofiness about kissing--however, there were some moments when the pretentious profundity got on my nerves, as in this Rush song: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill." I will choose not to listen to this song and read John Stuart Mill instead. And really, what's up with that Styx ballad "Come Sail away," where the guy thinks he's seen angels, and then he realizes they're aliens?

Right now, I am in my talk radio phase. The perk of talk radio is that it can keep me marginally informed about current events, and it lets me entertain myself by detecting logical fallacies in arguments. The drawback in listening to a talk radio station, whether you be conservative, moderate, or liberal, is that you're inevitably subjected to some rather boring topics. I am a graduate student with no money, so listening to NPR's "money matters" and stock analysis is less exciting than, say, crashing my car. I'm also not a big fan of sports (which they offer on conservative talk radio), so I really don't want to have daily updates on high school football students deliberating, "That school has offered me all this money, and that school over there has offered me all this money, so what do I do?" I wish I could say that I listen to both NPR and conservative talk radio to keep informed of different perspectives, but really, it's that I need a backup radio station for when the other is being boring or playing commercials!

Anyway, I heard a comment made by Bill O'Reilly that caused me to re-assess my relationship to our cats. However, that is the topic for the next post ...

TO BE CONTINUED! What will happen to our heroic protagonist? Does Bill O'Reilly cause our hero to get rid of his cats as potential terrorist agents? Tune in next time!