On Pop Stars and Biscuits
Recently a young woman of the American persuasion induced me through blatant coquettery to listen to her favorite song in her ipod rotation. Her bright eyes and supple form notwithstanding, the designated sonic gem left me underwhelmed, as I so often am by the secretions of the popular music consortium.
If memory serves, the exemplar in question was one of Justin Timberlake’s latest odes to youthful sexuality, and it sat on my eardrums like an overly moist lump of warm… well, shall we say bread dough? Yes, bread dough, as it had the potential for nourishment unlike other lumps of organic matter. Simple bread dough made from a standardized flour milled by standardized machinery fed with genetically standardized grain grown in standardized factory farms and pumped full of standardized petrochemicals. But bread dough nonetheless, capable once it has been baked in the finishing ovens of life experience, of becoming if not a nourishing loaf, then at least an appetite-abating biscuit. If one focuses all the acuity of one’s taste buds on the song/biscuit one can detect, beneath the monotony of standardization, hints of the sunshine, rainwater, soil and climate that feed all life on this feckless planet.
Of course I smiled blandly at the would-be muse, mustering enough enthusiasm to mumble one of those superficially affirmative catch-phrases that glue together American speech patterns. I watched hapless as she popped the earbuds back in and bobbed her head emphatically to Le Timberlake. The music plucked the strings of her vivacious soul, resulting in sympathetic vibrations throughout her nubile frame.
Were she my protege I could show her such vistas… If a lump of uncooked or at best half-baked dough could inspire such vibrations, it would be a wonder indeed to see the effects of my inspiration upon her… But life is full of “ifs” and “coulds” and so I merely sat back in my cafe chair, sipped my Americano, and let an unheard sigh escape my lips.
Great stuff!